Back in the good ol’ days when I used a PC to make music, Cubase was my tool of choice. When I got my G5, I tried running the Mac version, but for me at least, Cubase on the Macintosh is just too frustrating. Crashes, incompatibilities, the need to have a USB dongle, bah! The last time I rebuilt my hard drive, I didn’t re-install Cubase, and I don’t miss it.
In fact, I have been using Reason 3.0 for most of the music I’ve made lately. As an all-in-one software studio, it’s almost everything you need. Even though it doesn’t support software plug-ins, what’s there really is quite inspiring. The Combinator, in particular, has made a huge difference in the scope of things you can do with it. Unfortunately, if you want to mix in recorded sound (like a cello ;-)) Reason just won’t cut it. There’s just no way to reasonably (sic) get digital audio tracks into it.
So the obvious thing to do on a Mac is to try Garage Band. As I found, GB actually works quite well. It’s surprisingly powerful, for an essentially free piece of software, with features like commercial-grade software instruments, multi-track recording, the ability to freeze tracks — they call it “locking” –, and pitch correction. It also has an easy to use GUI, with “Mac-like” simplicity at first clance, but lots of flexibility/capability when you need it. I’m sure I could use Garage Band as my main DAW, but it’s missing a few features (like, score creation) that I occasionally need.
In the Macintosh world, the next step up from Garage Band is Logic Express. I had some cash to blow on tech toys (since I just sold my old PowerBook) so I picked up a copy. After playing with it for a day, I can say that it seems like it is what I was looking for, but man what an arcane GUI.
Now, I’m sure there are Logic-heads out there who will tell me that it’s the “one GUI to rule them all”, but it’s obvious that the Apple GUI designers lost the battle when they tried to bring that we-bought-the-company app into the fold. I’m heading out for dinner, so I don’t have time to do a full rant about it, but the capsule summary is “This one makes Cubase look easy to use.” ’nuff said.
And then there’s Ableton Live. And check out this twist on the piano roll – http://withoutane.com/rants/2006/09/the-turcanator
I know Kevin McG. is a big fan of Ableton, and I did consider trying out their new version, but given that I come from the “old school” DAWs like Cubase, it seemed like Logic would be a better idea. It also helps that Logic is from Apple, which means it will continue to get love from them.
The Turcanator seems like a fairly slight mod of the traditional piano roll notations, with note duration switched from “length of bar” to color. I find that an odd choice actually; what does it mean when you have a “long colored” note followed in the next tick by another note?