I'm currently using Ableton live 9, but I've had experience with Logic, Reaper, Garage band, Cubase, and Studio One. I would pick either Ableton or Reaper personally, favoring Ableton slightly because it's my current go-to.
Reaper is great because it's lightweight, efficient, and the learning curve isn't as bad as some people might lead you to believe. The creator can be quite efficient and it's a great tool with a lot of utility you wouldn't expect from a sub $100.00 DAW. Overall it's lacking some features that a more "premium" DAW might have, but you have to ask yourself if you need feature bloat in your life.
Ableton was my least favorite DAW at first. It seemed clunky and the workflow wasn't great for a beginner. After I really committed and learned the intricacies though, I'd prefer it over almost anything (Aside from Logic if I had a Mac). The way it interacts with VST's is great, the layout for track volume, panning, and fx control is absolutely wonderful. The Midi control is also really easy and programming drums is a breeze once you're used to creating beats. It has a ton of built in features and samples that are useful right from the get go. Seeing as you're on PC, I would definitely give the full versions of Ableton a shot. My gripes are that it's much more geared towards capturing live performance, The tempo controls are difficult to deal with at first, and (as far as I can tell) it doesn't do hardware latency correction all that well.
Cubase would probably win more points with me if they didn't automate so much. Sometimes you want more control over everything, so it's really a taste thing. Nothing about Cubase 8 is bad, in fact it's much more feature rich than Ableton. The midi control differences are what really changes things for me, but Cubase is much more efficient with loops and samples. It's hard to go wrong with either choice.
