Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpenner461 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed - I've been considering getting a DAW to hobby shop with, and have been on the fence between Logic, Ableton Live and Reason.

My (perhaps naive) impression is that Logic seems to be more geared towards recording live music, while Ableton and Reason seem to be more geared towards creating music in the program. They can all do both (recording live and create), but that's just my impression watching their demo videos etc (perhaps describing it as "core strength" vs "geared towards" is more accurate?). I'd love to hear from someone who's actually used one/more of them.

View on HN

I use all of them daily.

First things first. What I quickly discovered was that Logic _sounds_ better. Just dragging in a sample from you desktop seemed to reveal that logic was processing it in a higher quality. A weird thing, and maybe it's placebo, but everytime I go back to ableton I notice this. Furthermore, the bottom line is, my productions just sounds better in Logic. Maybe it's the workflow it encourages, I'm not sure. All I know is that no serious audio engineer would use anything else than Pro Tools or Logic for a serious recording, and I agree. At least that's my experience.

Regarding Reason: In my opinion, it has some of the best synths in the business. Which is why i rewire into Logic. A couple of youtube tutorials on Thor and you'll be going strong.

Ableton, well, I don't care much for it. The only thing i really miss is how easy it is to manipulate audio in it. A lot of people talk about how fast it is, but the design always seemed to get in my way. Personal preference i guess...

The Normalize on export function in Logic is works weirdly well too, especially considering you have almost no control over it. I almost always leave it on and in 5 years of professional composition work, have only chosen to switch it off once or twice-- and only because it was pushing some audio artifacts to the forefront that I had previously corrected.

Check the parameters of your default Simpler or clip in ableton before comparing the sound of a clip alone, I think you're missing something.

This is totally placebo. Ableton is completely transparent for audio as long as no audio stretching is involved. You have to be careful though because if you don't configure audio clips the right way and do route them through the time stretching algorithms you will definitely lose some sound quality.

Probably Live's biggest problem in this regard is that it doesn't make it as clear as it could that this kind of stretching is going on.

I spent a lot of time as a hobbyist using Reason. I found it super fun to play with, but I ran into two problems:

1. I almost never actually finished anything in it. That's a problem for me in general, but Reason exacerbates it. There are so many knobs to tweak, that I often ended up mired in the minutia of tweaking sounds. I found it hard to stay high level and focus on the music.

2. Compared to, say whaling on a real guitar or keyboard, I found Reason sounded very "dry" out of the box. To get something that didn't sound cheap or reedy, I had to do a lot of set-up: make a synth or two, wire them through a few effects and EQ, tweak everything, add some reverb, tweak some more. I felt like I wanted to decorate a cake, but Reason forced me to go out and thresh some wheat first. This level of control is really powerful if you're into sound design, but made it hard for me to make songs and music.

Of course, your mileage may vary. As far as fun toy to play with, though, Reason is a blast. I spent many a happy hour tweaking and playing with little loops.

For me #2 is a feature :)

It does take a bit longer but you have more control of how things fit in the mix.

I used to use Reason (way back in version 3), and now am a full-time Logic user for all my music production. I'd say this is a pretty fair characterization, although I actually use Logic with VST/AU instruments to do essentially the same thing I used to do in Reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com