LabRat

haha basically

Probably wavelab. Cubase is pretty dope but you probably have a limited version

Yeah absynth is a synth made by NI. It comes with the komplete series

Cool bananas. Absynth may help you add some extra anyosphere to those live recordings. Either way, if you're after a demo on it I can record something on Sunday or I can send you a video I did for a mate

Pretty

There's no doubt that pro tools has a lot of power. I'm not taking that away from it but it is expensive and it is a tricky bit of kit, and overboard for what I believe you want to use it for. However, if that's the way you wanna go then I'd say go for it. Have a look through forums or go chat to someone in a music shop about it. Also, if you want to make soundscapes I'd suggest you learn to use absynth. It will become a very handy tool for you. I'm happy to record a video making a sound if you like?

Don't know much about reason but like Mitch said any daw will be fine. If you want to manipulate audio, there's a bunch of cool samplers that can do tricky stuff otherwise ableton is pretty cool for that. I think pro tools is a bit much for what you're aiming for at the moment but will certainly work for what you want to do. Have you got experience in any other software?

I don't know if anyone here has used or uses pro tools. Ive had much experience with it and I don't like it. I don't think it's very user friendly but that's me. I'd suggest that what you already have would be find for compositions are you wanting to record into pro tools or just arrange audio clips?

Looks nice and neat

what kinda space have you got to work with? to get all that on 1 desk space is an absolute mission! but i like the idea. however, i think the ideas you have above will be good but if you have the room to work with, what about building an "L" style. technically, it's 1 desk as it's all connected together but the main thing is you'll have room to work. i'm thinking that this will be a bitch for productivity if you've got everything clustered together. the midi keyboard would be good either on the desk or in a slidy draw (or have the computer keyboard that way). i only say that because i have my midi keyboard on my desk with my mac keyboard and it doesn't work well for me. when i'm working on music i have both keyboards side by side. my midi controller is in the centre and the mac keyboard to the left of it. speaker wise, go with speaker stands - 100%. they're height adjustable and they don't take up a great deal of space. if you build boxes you could soundproof them which will be dope but for the ease and convenience the speaker stands will be the best. i'll think some more and see if i can think of an ergonomic way to have everything there but it's gonna be a super tight squeeze

don't do it! let me have a good squizz and i'll come up with something to help you out

that's bizarre actually but i guess it does happen. it's not overly complicated man. try mixing house and work your way into techno. the principles are very much the same so just keep practising. try not to over-think what you're doing either

this is track of the every day right now

the one everyone wants to know

not the best but it'll be quite helpful

I'm fairly bias towards Mac because I've always had one. I used a pc when I coproduced an album for a local artist and if the specs are there it'll be fine. I find 8gb of ram doesn't quite cut it, especially if you're stacking up the tracks. If you're comfortable using your pc I'd just upgrade the ram to 16gb and you should be sweet

Welcome mate! We've all been there playing all that fun stuff before lol

I don't know a lot about the maschine software but I can't confirm that sylenth is a great synth. I use it often. I hear that a lot of people use nexus mostly because they have really good presets. It is a great sounding synth and they seem to have modelled it quite well. Not sure if it's available for Mac though… I was looking years ago and haven't heard much about it since so will be interested to know if there's OS X support

Get the writing techniques down first. If you're on a Mac you'll have GarageBand installed which will be perfect to start arranging. If you're struggling with song structure have a listen to some tracks you want to take influence from and count the bars between sections. I'd suggest listening to a few songs as each producer has different ideas. Get a pen and pad and section it off - for example, intro, break down / build, 1st drop, 2nd break down, 2nd drop, outro. As you count how many bars that are between each section you'll start to see how similar or even the same most songs are. Keep in mind that majority of dance music is in a time signature of 4/4 which means there are 4 counts to make up the bar. It's unlikely you'll hear a time change in dance music but it does exist. I believe Porter Robinson had a time signature change to 6/8 in one of his bootlegs a few years ago. You'll know if you hear it because it will catch you out when you're counting

no need to stress about that

sounds like a good weekend

and this separate to the deadmau5 stuff

sharing before my battery on my laptop dies