pharmatic, I have also started using Reaper - and it is a wonder to behold... of course, it is not like let's say Live 7, it's slightly less intuitive.
However: there are very few cheap apps that invest part of their time to create an interface that is accessible to users. Most of the other cheap/free daws that I have come across are either damaging to the eye (some piano rolls seem to be half a pixel wide!) and not easy to grasp unless you read a 100 pages long pdf.
You can make simple stuff in reaper without reading anything about it, then with a few searches in their wonderful forums, you get the rest...
Atm, I am using reaper non-commercial (I paid around 35 quid for it), plus Iblit and Polyiblit for my leads (free), Dominator for my basses (Computer music, free with the mag), and Blue glitch to add extra fuziness to my rythm (free).
You can create wondrous stuff with only a few quid... although it is true that a tool like live would ease my live quite a lot, but paying 300 pounds for it... scary!
However: there are very few cheap apps that invest part of their time to create an interface that is accessible to users. Most of the other cheap/free daws that I have come across are either damaging to the eye (some piano rolls seem to be half a pixel wide!) and not easy to grasp unless you read a 100 pages long pdf.
You can make simple stuff in reaper without reading anything about it, then with a few searches in their wonderful forums, you get the rest...
Atm, I am using reaper non-commercial (I paid around 35 quid for it), plus Iblit and Polyiblit for my leads (free), Dominator for my basses (Computer music, free with the mag), and Blue glitch to add extra fuziness to my rythm (free).
You can create wondrous stuff with only a few quid... although it is true that a tool like live would ease my live quite a lot, but paying 300 pounds for it... scary!