Tapsa Kuusniemi

Yeah, the trade off with the other guitars is that they're not Kontakt Player licensed, hence the lower price. Renegade is very capable and I use it very often.

6 hours ago, Blades said:

People keep saying "they are only tools".  I don't really agree.  Just a tool could apply to a hammer or nailgun - does that mean "just pick one and learn it and you'll get the same results"?.  I think not.  I believe that there are other factors about them:

They are only tools in the same sense that the hammer or the nailgun as neither of these will make you a better crafter. They just make the job different from the other. A carpenters skill is the thing that matters not the tool. Sure learning the tool will make things easier or smoother or faster but if you're a bad carpenter then whether you use a nailgun or a hammer doesn't really matter.

Also why I prefer to call them tools is simply this: you rarely attach emotion to tools. And DAWs tend to get people's emotions riled up. In the end you can use any DAW to create fantastic things. Hell there are still people using such advanced things as a pen and sheet paper to create music (those troglodytes, sheesh).

There have been a good number of assesments in this thread about good and bad things in different DAWs and that is great.

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1. The plugins that are native to each and only available there.  This isn't something you can just swap around and it changes the usage, the enjoyment, and the end result, all significantly.  Each can do their thing, but there is a difference.

Again, these make very little difference to me. In the end a compressor is a compressor and if you don't know how to use one it doesn't really matter which one you use. And if you know how to use one then it makes very little difference what you use. Most of the plugins that are unique are not stock plugins (for the exception of Logic's Alchemy) and these you need to acquire separately. The ProChannel is native and unique to Sonar/CbB but alot of those plugins are available as VST as well. Personally I've never quite liked the ProChannel, but that is my personal preference.

What's different about most DAWs is the usability and that is a matter of personal preference. Again I can not understand how people think ProTools is in anyway a usable software but that only means that is does not suite me. It doesn't make it worse or better.

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2. The look, feel, and interaction can definitely assist or interfere with the recording, mixing, mastering, and even playing when they have an effect on your MOOD.  Music is SO tied to mood, it's hard to believe that "just a tool" would have an effect. 

But those are personal preferences. Sort of like do you prefer a yellow or a black hammer. It makes you feel better but it does not make you better, you just prefer the yellow hammer. It's still the same tool. What the GUI looks like is just a coat of paint on the cover. You're still dealing with the same things underneath. I'm not saying this doesn't matter, of course it does. I still loathe how Ableton looks like with it's grey minimalist washout look. But some like it. I've heard people loathe Sonar/CbB for how it looks and avoid it because of that. It still doesn't mean that their preferred tool is better when the music is out.

What the music sounds like is and should be a reflection of your skill as an artist and not your skill at using a computer program. And that's why DAWs are tools.

Orange Tree Samples stuff is worth every buck. There's quite nothing like them.

But if they are too expensive for you then maybe check out some of Indiginus's guitars, especially Renegade: http://indiginus.com/renegade.html

Ilya Efimov has some great sounding guitars as well: http://www.ilyaefimov.com/products/electric-guitars.html

But those are not match for Orange Tree.

44 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

That's the thing. This is my viewpoint: "horses for courses," and everything else is really a matter of personal preference. Track in CbB, mix in Mixbus, master in Pro Tools, whatever. I'm told that REAPER rules for live work due to all the routing options, and I don't doubt that at all.

I have a best buddy of 30 years and his son staying at my place for the holidays, and his kid (22 y.o. college student) is in the midst of composing/assembling a dubstep piece using Ableton (never call it "Live," 😊) his preferred platform. His dad, who used to own a studio in SF is a Pro Tools man through and through, his current rig is a Mac Pro tower with a couple of UAD cards in it. He considers anything else "hobby" grade, but has done some good work in my studio with Mixcraft and Cakewalk.

I, of course, am a Mixcraft veteran who is now in the process of learning Cakewalk, which I consider a great-sounding DAW with great-sounding plug-ins and some quirks I'm getting used to. I like it better than the demos of other DAW's I tried a few years back.

Dad is using my instruments to record a pop song, and jumped right in with Cakewalk, but would of course much rather be using PT. He was just going to record drum tracks, but the project snowballed, and he wound up staying up 'til dawn a couple of nights in a row and now has an almost finished mix with guitar, bass, and vocals. It sounds freaking killer and he took to CbB pretty easily. Unfortunately, I'm having troubles with my CbB installation because I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 a few days ago upon learning that BL were emphasizing 10 as the preferred platform. 😡 The playback engine keeps quitting, and it takes about 3 seconds to start when you hit the spacebar. Separate thread.

Anyway, after looking over kid's shoulder and chatting with him, enjoying watching him work, watching his song come together, I am certain that each of us could do what the other does using our preferred DAW, but it would be clunkier and take longer.

Trevor would probably flail using Ableton to record and comp 20 tracks of audio, including the simultaneous 4 tracks for the drum kit. I'm not sure Ableton can even do  comping.

Sample management and the handling of the built-in FX rack in PT and Cakewalk is nowhere near what it is in Ableton, and neither CbB nor PT have integrated phrase samplers, so Geoff and I would be like "eeble-beeble-beeble" first trying to learn how to use a 3rd-party phrase sampler (which I have already done due to Cakewalk not having its own). Trevor would have his dubstep piece circulating amongst the hot DJ's while Geoff was still trying to find a phrase sampler compatible with AAX, and it would probably cost a fortune.

Even with the excellence of the FX that come with CbB and the ones I have acquired, I can't touch what Geoff has with his UAD cards and Ocean Way and Abbey Road whatevers and the way that he can freakin' fly over the keyboard doing comps due to his years using the Industry Standard DAW with its really slick management of lanes and takes.

Neither of them can deny the fact that the cost-to-performance ratio of my home studio flattens EITHER of their setups. VST support is excellent and mature in CbB, and that gives me a cornucopia of other great inexpensive and freeware FX to choose from. PT is AAX only, which limits what PT users have access to. We've all seen LarryC's deals, it's like trying to drink from a firehose. The EDM synths I use, Hybrid 3 and Vacuum Pro, cost me $1 each, at the same time snagging free licenses for iZotope Neutron Elements and Ozone Elements. Okay, so those all have AAX versions, but still, there are plenty I use that don't due to Avid charging (WTF?) developers to distribute in that format.

Mr. Pro Tools/UAD thinks that the ProChannel with its console and tape and compressor emulations is hot schnit, BTW.

Our direct access to Noel and Jon and Meng is amazing given how Digidesign and now Avid (who are somewhat better) treat Pro Tools users, and given the magnitude of really nasty bugs that have persisted over so many major revisions of Pro Tools. Geoff related how there was one known bug where the PT transport would just refuse to go into playback! And even the support people at Digi knew about it. It persisted across at least two MAJOR product releases. I've watched the current dev team beat the snot out of bugs in CbB. The progress is tangible. As a veteran of a couple of prominent software companies, this really matters to me. If I were on a platform that was getting whiz-bang features while bugs like that persisted, it would bring me down. I'm also fascinated by BandLab's vision for integrating CbB with their collaborative platform. It's cool to be around for that.

We all have our reasons for liking and using this DAW or that DAW. It's probably more to be celebrated that we have so much choice than to be argued over, but it's in our nature to argue over it. Fords suck and Chevys rule or vice versa, when they are both excellent American automobiles. Or Mercedes suck and Ferrari rule when they are both excellent European Formula One racing teams. A baseball pitcher is evil incarnate when he is playing for the Dodgers, but a hero after he is traded to the Giants.

I only WISH CbB had Pro Tools slick handling of takes and lanes and Ableton's handling of phrase samples and FX rack. Oh, also the playback engine that doesn't fall down on my 'puter. 😖

What I always say is that the tools don't really matter, only what you do with them.

I mean if the music is good who cares what it is made with. And if it's shit, then who cares about it.

Is there anywhere an actual list of instruments included?

I'm going to toot up Audio Damage's Quanta. Sure granular synthesis is not a new thing by now means, but what Quanta brings to the table is a million times more musical than anythin before it. It changed the way I saw granular things and made me try out new things on other granular plugins as well. There is something very casual about how Quanta treats granularity giving it an ease that is not present in other granular devices.

I use Studio One 4 for making music and Bitwig for sound design work. Sadly I was compelled to leave Sonar on a backburner with the Gibson debacle as I could not rely my professional work on a software that may not work on a new computer.

12 hours ago, Toddskins said:

I tried the free Bitwig version that came with a MIDI controller I bought, and cannot imagine anybody thinking it is good.  Horrible software, totally unintuitive, failed to recognize settings after being set, registration problems that could not get corrected.  And UGLY.  

Much of what you say here falls under personal preference. There are alot of people who say the same about the GUI of Sonar/CbB and I say about Ableton and ProTools. But those are my personal preferences and do not reflect on the software. 

Bitwig does not work for you, but saying that there is nothing good without knowledge of the software is rather, well, dumb.

There's a ton of stuff that Sonar/CbB does worse than Bitwig. There's also stuff that Sonar/CbB does better.

As for intuitiveness, that's usually a case of learning how something works. Like I said Bitwig is though up differently and if you were to jump from Bitwig to Sonar/CbB then the latter would feel very cluncky and unintuitive.

But both DAWs have their merits and strong points. Just as Cubase is different and has it's strong point. And just like Reaper, Studio One, Logic, Ableton, ProTools, Samplitude, Tracktion, FL Studio...

I'll add my assesments to this thread. After the Gibson debacle I went for Studio One and Bitwig. Previously already had Reaper but that one is too much for the tweakers to suit me (basically you can turn it into anything you want, if you have time, patience and some coding skills).

STUDIO ONE 3 and 4: The workflow is intuitive and the Scratchpad is one of the most brilliant features. The Browser is miles ahead of CbB as is setting up multiout instrument tracks. MIDI editing is more basic than in CbB but fairly intuitive as well. ARA  functionalities are probably the best on the market (kicking up Melodyne on a track is quite an experience compared to Sonar/CbB but hey Presonus is sitting on the tech).  Video functionalities are fariyl basic, but better thatn Sonar / CbB. Coming from CbB there was a learning curve as to the GUI but it wasn't too much.

BITWIG: Bitwig isn't for everyone. It is a pretty much completely differently though DAW from the rest. It takes quite a bit of time to get to know ins and outs coming from Sonar/CbB but once you get a grasp of the software then it is quite intuitive. Bitwig is not for heavy MIDI projects, those it can not handle like CbB, Studio One or any of the other major players. VST Sandboxing is probably one of the best things. You can crash a plugin and it just crashes the plugin only to be able to reload it with one click. A superb function. But the real thing with Bitwig is the modulation system. You can assign modulators to everything. And that is why I think Bitwig has a serious future for sound design work.

Was worried about the CA-2A myself as to me it beats out the competition (UAD atleast) hands down. Hopefully it will keep developing as a VST plugin and not as a CbB exclusive plugin.