Best Music Producing Software For Beginners – Easy And Cheap

At the very beginning, it might feel a bit frustrating to make music when you don’t know all the details about the software. Everything might look really complicated and nothing seems to make sense.

Furthermore, professional music production softwares cost huge money, so beginners are usually not willing to invest so much money into it.

If you are still looking for a beginner-friendly music production software

We have good news.

We’ve covered the best music production softwares for beginners that are cheap to start with and is easy to use.

So let’s have a look.

The Best Music Production Software For Beginners

FL Studio Fruity Edition

Fruity Loops is one of the most popular music production software. And there are several reasons why it is so. 

First of all, it is not very pricey. Especially if you buy a Fruity Edition version.

Secondly, it is very beginner-friendly. It does not have a complicated interface, so you can start creating music fast, without lots of tutorials or additional guidance. 

Community. Since FL Studio is used by lots of people, there is a lot of material to learn from. If you need any tutorial about a certain topic, it is highly expected that you can find it on youtube or on some forums.

Plugins, VSTS. There are a lot of built-in plugins that are essential for music production. The most common tools for mixing are compressor, equalizer, reverb, delay. Without them, it is hardly possible to mix a track. This version will include all the essential tools to enable you to make records.

Moreover, these plugins are designed in a way that is simple to understand and easy to use. Thus, it will be helpful for you as a beginner music producer since it will allow you to understand the interface quicker and make better beats.

Piano Roll. This is where you layout your melodies and chords. FL Studio provides a lot of extra features to it. For example, if you draw a few notes on a piano roll, it will automatically catch a key your melody is written in and then it will highlight all the keynotes that relates to the current song key. It might be super useful for music producers that do not have a perfect musical education. 

Automation mapping. It is a very handy tool that allows you to map out all the effects along the track. With this feature, you can record every aspect of synth modulation, track volume, reverb density and much more.

Cons:

With Fruity Edition, you will not be able to record external audio. For that you will need producer package, that will cost 200$

Reaper

Even though UI does not look sexy, it is one of the cheapest DAW’s on the market.

And it is a great choice for beginners because it is also easy to use and is built to work with a simple audio setup.

Reaper includes all the essential features that common digital audio workstations have to offer. It is used in commercial and home studios, broadcasting, sound design, game development and more. 

There are some major benefits in this DAW:

• It has powerful audio and midi routing with multichannel support. This means that you are able to record multiple instruments separately simultaneously.
• Supports majority of third party plugins
• Has essential builtin plugins, effects for audio modulation
• Audio automation is available as well.
• Super lightweight and fast
• Very customizable (you can modify from themes to even menus)

Logic

This is available only on Mac OS, so if you do not have it you can skip this daw.

It comes at a reasonable price and provides outstanding quality and a lot of features.

First of all, as all of the mac products, it also has great looks. The interface will make your music production workflow more exciting just by working with a beautifully designed interface.

It has a massive collection of built-in plugins and VSTs that will take your music production to the next level. It contains professionally crafted sound packs. From human feel acoustic sound VSTs to vintage authentic effects that will make your track sound unique.

If you are working a lot with sampling, this software has a plugin called Smart Tempo, that will synchronize all sample tempos automatically.

Ableton Live Intro Version

This daw is capable not only for music production but also capable of making live performances with it.

Ableton Live comes with 3 versions, varying from 79$ to 599$. As a beginner, the best choice is to start with the intro version (79$) since it has all the essential features. And by the time you start to feel comfortable with it, you can then upgrade the current version with a more advanced one, and you will not need to pay full price.

For the full feature list, you can check the comparison table here. 

I will emphasize the more important ones here:

• Over 5 GB of built-in sounds(1500+ samples)
• 4 software instruments
• 21 Audio Effects
• 8 Midi Effects
• Midi output to hardware synths
• Multiple Automation Lanes

Know what you want before buying music production software

Even though we are focusing mainly on beginners friendly music softwares, keep in mind that if you get started to work with one program, it might be hard for you to switch to a new one.

So have a long term vision in mind of what you want to achieve as a music producer. Pre-plan what tools and features you might need in the future. And this might help you a lot since you won’t need to switch to a completely new interface if you will make the right decision in the first place.

Summary

I’ve taken a little preview of the most popular digital audio workstations for beginners.

The main focus points was the price and easy to understand interface.

Whatever you will choose from our list, all of them are easy to get started. And all of them have capabilities of making a hit record without a doubt.

Now the question is which one you will enjoy the most.

I would suggest you go through all of the trial versions of the mentioned softwares in this article. Then you will get a real sense of how it works and how it feels like to work with it.

I hope that this article was helpful to you and I wish you a great day!

Don’t forget to comment and express your own opinion on beginner-friendly music production programs:)