I'm mostly a non musician these days, but I've been pondering doing a little bit of electronic / retro game music production.
I'm intending entirely with synths at the moment.
I have a Macbook Pro and a Reaper license, but I'm thinking I won't use that as Reaper is fairly sucky for MIDI stuff.
I've had a little play around with Garageband and that seems like it would probably do 90% of what I need, but I'm also pondering Ableton Lite as I've heard good things about it.
Be interested in any tips from anyone who dabbles in the above.
I imagine I'll get pretty tired of piano roll editing so I may end up investing in a little mini controller. The Novation Launchkey looks interesting and includes Ableton Lite which I've heard good things about. If I went the Garage band route the Akai MPK Mini MKII
also looks cool.
Comments
But I have found I prefer Ableton Live, seems somehow more understandable and you can play around endlessly in it. I got an Akai APC Mini in the Maplin closing down sale for just £37 and it's interesting to play around with, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm not actually creating music with it, just remixing something that someone else has created. Maybe this is because of a lack of application, effort and understanding. I also have an Akai MPK25 keyboard which is fun to make sound with, but I'm not really a keyboard player and once again I can't shake the feeling that there's a limit to my exploits. Not a feeling I get when fiddling around on my guitar.
For a retro 16-bit thing, there's a lot of SNES soundfont resources at this site - http://www.williamkage.com/snes_soundfonts/#sm
You can just drop the soundfont files into ableton iirc, don't know about other DAWs.
Or Logic.
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If you've ever used trackers in the past, have a look at Renoise.
If you want to try Ableton Live Lite, jump over to the KVR sales page. You can easily pick up a copy of Live Lite for peanuts. Like this for example...
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=503178&p=7086945&hilit=ableton+lite#p7086945
Personally I prefer Reaper to Ableton for MIDI editing but it's really horses for courses.
And for a starter plugin, try Chipsounds by Plogue.
https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsounds.html
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