Choosing Your Audio Software

I've been getting a lot of questions about what software I recommend for audio manipulation, so I've decided to write up a guide to choosing your software, or DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) as it is called.

Computer Music's Pro Remixing Tips Discussion Part 1

Computer Music, the UK-based magazine about computer music, has released a comprehensive article on how remixes are done. I don't receive CM at my current address so I haven't been able to read the full article yet, but luckily MusicRadar has digested the essentials for us.

Where to find your free music software

Short on money? Luckily, there are many excellent free plug-ins available, either made by small, amateur developers, or bigger ones that think it's good advertisement to release some stuff for free. All in all, you can now have a huge top-quality plug-in collection for free, without any of the guilt associated with piracy.

Native Instruments Komplete 7

What was the last time €500 was worth €3000? Native Instruments Komplete offers you 24 essential production tools for the price of a microphone.

LennarDigital Sylenth1

If you ask most pro's about LennarDigital's Sylenth1 they'll tell you that it has less features than almost any other soft synth available. They'll tell you that it's terribly difficult to program. They'll tell you that it has no very few distinguishing qualities.
Sylenth1 has little that other synths don't. You could say it's only merit is the ease with which you can make oscillators sing in unison. And you'd be dead wrong.

2C-Audio Aether

Finding a good reverb plugin can be very tough. They range in prices from free to a £2500, and in quality from horrifying to great. Aether is at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of price, costing a good £350. You might think this is still a lot for an unknown developer with yet another reverb plugin, but once you listen to it you'll realise you're getting awesome value for your money.

Essential Plug-In Rundown

I will spend the next couple of days covering some plug-ins that I think are essential for any electronic music producer. By covering, I don't mean reviewing, I mean describing what they do, telling you why I consider them essential and why you're gonna want to take a look at them.

Thoughts on the Cockos Reaper demo

If you follow the world of computer music and audio, it's hard not to have noticed the stir Cockos Reaper has been causing. Where software DAW's (Digital Audio Workstation, your piece of music creation software of choice) are almost exclusively bulky, bloated applications, that have one useful feature for every 100 that you never use (but you do see reflected in the price!), there now is Cockos Reaper. The creators and fans of Cockos seem to have conspired to make sure everybody hears about how their new DAW can do anything the big ones can, while being smaller, more stable and, best of all, cheaper.

More Sampling in Ableton

If you want some inspiration regarding sampling, check out these two amazing videos that show recreations of two classic Prodigy songs in Ableton Live:

Smack My Bitch Up (Youtube)

Voodoo People (Youtube)

Ableton Live Tutorial: Sampling a Drum Beat

This will be my first tutorial on using Ableton Live. What I am going to teach is how to sample the world famous drum break from the song Amen Brother by The Winstons. It will cover the basics of warping and sampling.