Getting into music production is pretty scary for me, so far my biggest hurdle was choosing a DAW. I tried FL Studio which my friends suggested and my favorite artists (Porter Robinson & Jane Remover) use FL, but the workflow never really worked well for me. I then tried Ableton which felt a lot more in tune toward my workflow, and it felt right up my alley. It looked very basic but somehow still very pretty with the Immaterial theme, but it felt very... rigid. Like, lacking customization and stuff?
So I tried to look for something similar to Ableton but just better. I've tried other DAWs; Cubase, Studio One, Reaper (which I already have a discounted license of and use for voice over,) and every one of them I had issues with. Reaper suffered from white title/menu bar syndrome on Windows, as well as the GUIs being locked at 30hz and overall feeling pretty newbie unfriendly (No stock instruments, some plugins ig, not the most intuitive to use). Studio One had the same issue with the white titlebar and I didn't really like what they were doing with Studio One Pro+, otherwise it seemed solid. Cubase honestly scared me and I didn't feel comfortable using it (Plus the Pro version is super expensive).
Then I came across Bitwig.
It was exactly what I was looking for; It felt like Ableton, but better. Sure, it lacked some things like Piano Scale highlighting, proper theming (shoutout Berikai for the theme editor), and I'm sure there will be a lot of other things I'll learn to hate once I start making music, but everything else was amazing. It's buttery smooth, and it looks great (albeit with a theme, the default theme looks really bad to me to be honest.) Plus, it runs natively on Linux which will be great for me whenever I switch over to Linux. And on top of all of that, Bitwig has instruments and plugins. With Reaper and Cubase I was completely lost because all I had were some plugins I got but no instruments. FL and Ableton do have a good amount of instruments and plugins, and so does Bitwig!
Tauri - In The Dark Demo Project using No Toyz' Ghosty theme
So, yeah. I bought it. And I got really lucky with it too, I think I got it for one of the lowest prices available. Using both the Winter sale & Thomann's discounted pricing, I was able to snag a Studio EDU license for $172, which I was able to verify my education status of using last semester's college transcript. I'm really glad I was able to purchase it, especially since today the Winter Sale ended so the price for the EDU version went back up to $231 and the normal price on Thomann went back up to $325, so I got really lucky that I chose to buy it yesterday. I made a diagram to show the discounts for Bitwig that were in play here in-case it might help anyone.
Anyway, that's all I have. There's nowhere else really where I can explain why I'm so excited and why I think I got a good deal. Super excited to start making music.
By - -rikia
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