DAW For Beginner

deakle

Experienced
I would like to do some very simple home recording (drums, bass, guitar) to practice along with. I am considering Reaper, Ableton Live 10, and Presonus Studio One 4. Both the Ableton Live and Presonus I would simply purchase the intro versions as that would be sufficient for me. Looking for advice on which would be easier for a beginner to get up and running quickly?
 
Tracktion. Hands down the easiest to understand and has 99% of the feature you need. You can ignore most of those features and just get down to recording. It rocks.
 
Both are fine. You could upgrade both to full products later. Logic is also nice on the Mac platform.
 
Ableton Live is cool as a live tool, but I think it limited as an actual according to hoyle DAW personally. Or maybe not “limited”, but sorta “not the right tool for the job”, maybe... I have limited exposure to Reaper myself, but it seemed pretty good when I was kicking the tires on it awhile back. No experience with Studio One myself, but I know some folks swear by it.

For really basic stuff, Audacity ain’t bad at all, and is completely free.
 
I'm a novice an use studio one 4. I looked at some of the others and studio one seemed easier to me. I've only used it for simple multitrack recording which is pretty easy. I bought ezdrummer on sale around the holidays and plan on making a more serious effort soon.
 
Ableton Live is cool as a live tool, but I think it limited as an actual according to hoyle DAW personally. Or maybe not “limited”, but sorta “not the right tool for the job”, maybe... I have limited exposure to Reaper myself, but it seemed pretty good when I was kicking the tires on it awhile back. No experience with Studio One myself, but I know some folks swear by it.

For really basic stuff, Audacity ain’t bad at all, and is completely free.
The gripe with Ableton Live is that their way of doing comp takes is very complex to set up. A no-brainer in Logic, go into preferences and set things for comp takes, I think audio takes are even comp takes by default.

Garageband is OK but it's better to graduate up to Logic for doing albums and more finishing work. You could make albums in GarageBand but when you start using Logic you know the difference. You could even continue using GarageBand projects in Logic, even switch Logic to GarageBand UI but most just move on to the more tape-recorder-mixing like UI.
 
Great thing about Reaper is the amount of ultra high quality instructional videos on their website. It’s very easy to get up and running using the videos.
 
Cakewalk. I've been using it since it was a MS-DOS MIDI sequencer that came in one single 3-1⁄2" floppy disk

An now it is gratis! by courtesy of the billionaire owner of BandLab.
 
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Just witnessed Garageband lead my son into an interest in recording. Perfect intro program to teach the basics then provide a smooth transition to Logic X which has to be one of the best, most complete, values on the market.
 
Thanks to all for the comments and suggestions! You even mentioned some software I had not considered. I love this forum. Everyone is willing to help and provides helpful, considerate comments.
 
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