Very simple here! I just use FL Studio 10 (I know, I KNOW, but considering how much I do /s it's not like I need too much more) and the stuff it comes with by default, my go to picks for instruments are Sytrus and Harmless, with Harmor thrown in the mix very ocasionally.
Also I use a lot of free soundfonts Ive collected, mostly the infamous touhou soundfont, but I also use squidfont_orchestral, tgsf21x, and a piano soundfont named Full Grand Piano (I used to use the earthbound and sega megadrive soundfonts as well but they dont blend with what I do usually).
I'd love to mess around with a tracker sometime to make some chiptunes but I haven't had the time to learn to use one, and right now studies are killing me so it's clearly not the time for it.
in the box, i'm using ableton 9.7.4 on my 2012 i5 macbook pro. it struggles a bit at times but it's still quite serviceable. had a few issues recording audio last week for this week's weeklybeat so i had to work around that. VSTs i use heaps of are massive, sylenth and m1. also use and abuse splice to a degree (nothing copyright infringing of course, only royalty free!). finally for the software side of things, i managed to get a hold of ozone elements 8 for free last year before they put out 9 so that really adds a bit of sheen and sparkle to the final products.
i haven't used any of my hardware on my two submissions (it's mainly been about just getting into a workflow for the first few weeks) - but i do have a microkorg, a korg ms2000b, a roland jd-xi, a casio cz5000 and an sp-505.
FLStudio is the heart of it all. Just upgraded to v20.6 and diggin' it. I have NI Maschine, but mostly just use it as an instrument to layer beats or perform with instruments which I drag as audio into FL's playlist. A few MIDI controllers (APC40 mkII, NI Komplete Kontrol S61 mkII). I do have Ableton 10.1 which I really just use for playing live, but everytime I build an Audio Effect Rack, I really want to get more into production in it - hoping to write an all Ableton song sometime this year.
Buncha 80s and 90s digital rack gear and other stuff I scooped in the late 2000s when I worked at a record shop and thrift shop at the same time and it was nearly free (seriously there was a period in time in the mid 2000s when a band I shared a space with had three Juno 60s piled up on the floor in the corner because they were just cheap keyboards nobody else wanted, so they used one until it had a problem and then put it in the corner and bought another for $150-$200 because it was cheaper than repairing them; they had some SH-101s too, same deal; the moral is never throw away anything if you can avoid it), and the early 2010s when I was earning more money for a year and a half than I did before or since and people cared about it a lot less than they do now. Sometimes a homemade electric guitar and amp. A handful of fancy things like an Octatrack I've been able to pick up over the last 5 or 6 years when freelance work is good. Try to build stuff from kits or scratch as much as possible these days (or find things that are free or cheap broken and try to fix them), even if it isn't cheaper in the end it lets me spread out the cost so I can manage things I couldn't even think about buying in one go, like for example I've been collecting the parts to build a Kijimi since last April and should be able to start working on it in a month or so. Hopefully it will work and show up in some tracks this spring.
Record and mix in Reaper with mostly Airwindows plugins and hardware reverb (for commercial stuff it's mainly Valhalla, TDR and Klanghelm standards but MJUC and the TDR EQs are the only ones I use in nearly every mix anymore).
I really respect the people who do everything ITB, I've tried a lot over the years and I never like the ideas I come up with that way.
Last edited by TubularCorporation (January 16, 2020 3:28 pm)
My current rig is:
Arturia Microfreak - Basically my dream synth. I did take the keybed off though, was sequencing it externally and i needed the extra desk space.
Korg Electribe ER-1 - A great drum machine, really snappy. Mine has a sentient (broken) pan encoder, but since use the mono jack on my mixer for it there's no issue.
Korg Monologue - A mighty monosynth capable of sinister acid tones or lovely leads. I also like making weird bleepy drum noises on it, though I prefer to do those on the ER-1. Making formants with the filter is also really nice.
MAM MB33 Retro - ReBirth on iPad was my proper introduction to electronic music, and so I've always been a fierce follower of the acid house sound. I had a Roland TB-3 for a long time, but I sold it and replaced it with this much smaller unit. It's not spot on to the OG 303 (especially not the square wave!) but I reckon it sounds very exciting and appropriately liquidy for all my 90s rave needs.
Modal Skulpt - An impulse buy that turned out very well. Has a lovely warm sound for a digital synth, brilliant filter and a 'spread' function that makes the unit sound huge.
Novation Circuit - the brains of my rig. I love the sequencer on this thing so much I bought another one to sequence the rest of my gear. I use the two units as an eight track drum machine too, loaded with samples from ReBirth for maximum nostalgia.
Roland VP-03 - Everyone needs a vocoder at some point, and this is mine. It's a bit finnicky to use, but I love the sound on it. Works great as a microphone when I'm playing Fortnite with my mates too, so that's a plus I guess.
Casio HT-3000 - Bought from a Cash Converters a while ago, lovely sounding 80s keyboard. Mine is basically a preset machine cos the internal battery is toast, but fortunately those presets are the business.
There's also my Korg Volca Sample, but that's getting replaced on Monday by an Elektron box - the buttons have deteriorated on it and they don't work much now (probably cos I used to make entire tracks on that thing - oops!) I've got other synths and gadgets like Pocket Operators and Volcas, but I don't really use them enough to count them as part of 'the rig' per se.
All my jams are recorded live into a Alto ZMX122FX mixer, which is run into a Presonus Audiobox iTwo, then into Audacity so I can check levels and export the thing. EQing and FX are done either on the synths or the mixer rather than computer, cos EQing every synth at once doesn't seem like a good idea. I've just started recording with Windows 10 after using MacOS my entire life, and it's surprisingly less painful than I expected.