Hi, I am pretty inspired by lots of hip hop artists who mainly make beats. I really want to learn and make it a fun hobby of mine mainly because I love listening to music. I mainly listen to jazz rap and trip-hop. Stuff like this:
Anyways, I feel like it's finally time to learn. I have pretty much no musical background, except I used to play the piano and I plan to pick up on it again because I want to make jazzy hip hop beats for the most part!
What programs are good to get? I see that there are many choices such as FL Studio, Sony Acid, Ableton Live, etc, but which one is considered to be the most powerful as well as noob friendly? I've started reading some guides and played around with Ableton, but it's complicating as fuck.
Besides computer programs, will I be needing any other equipment? If I do, is it necessary to get these equipments now?
My friend actually bought one of those studio recorder thingies (it was probably like semi-pro grade). I also remember seeing another friend playing around with this on-board program on his Macbook...
If you don't already have a midi controller I would suggest a keystation http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=USBkeyboardcontrollers they are simply midi controllers and don't have any on board sounds of their own, however with an insane array of Vst plugins to choose between your possibility with sounds are endless.
Now you need a good program to use, I have experience with Cubase and more recently Presonus Studio One, both are very solid and I find Studio One to be extremely user friendly. I've never used Pro Tools, but its pretty much the industry standard so outside of the learning curve it may be worth checking out.
For Vsts Native Instruments has an extensive library of great plugins http://www.native-instruments.com/ you can check out a bunch of samples on the site and see what you like.
There really isn't a 'best' digital audio workstation, there are advantages to each one. The one I started out on and the one that feels most like home for me is FL Studio, the interface is much more accessible and the sequencer is much more user friendly than others in my opinion. Like Cygnus said Pro Tools is the industry standard, but really it's about what works for you so try out as many as you can and see what you like. Other than that, I'd say that you should learn how to play piano and learn some basic theory.
IME FL Studio is pretty easy for a beginner to get into (although it's the only program I've used much tbh), and the nice thing is you don't even need to buy any equipment if all you want to do is make trip-hop type stuff since the built-in instruments are all pretty good for that style of music.
As was already mentioned, you'll probably need some basic music theory knowledge (you said you played piano for a bit, but I'm not sure how much theory you know from that), but you can google all of that relatively easy. This is a pretty decent place to get started on that if need some instruction in music theory: http://www.emusictheory.com/
You can get the demo version of FL Studio for free (as well as the other versions you have to pay for, although you can also get those version from other sources *ahem*) here: http://flstudio.image-line.com/
There are also a lot of tutorials for using FL Studio all over the internet, you can either google them or search on youtube.
Edit: Here's some random stuff I did on FL Studio. Most of the stuff is pretty simplistic, but it should give an idea of the kind of stuff that's possible using no equipment except a computer and FL Studio. http://www.last.fm/music/Falcynn/New Stuff
Hate to be off topic, but I just listened to tha DJ Krush guy, and hes awesome. Any chance I could get you to post a bunch of similar artists in this thread?
If you're into hip hop stuff you should definitely go for FL Studio. It's amazingly easy to make beats with it. I'm a musician but I suspect you wouldn't need much musical experience to start making beats with FL... Just watch 1 basic tutorial on youtube and you'll be good to go.
With FL studio you can get a reasonable beat in about 20 minutes once you are able to locate all the tools you need, which in itself only takes about 20 mins.
EPT
