What DAW/Hardware/Soundfont/VST use?

[Herr Dethnout]

Oh yeeeh another "What ******?" thread

I'm curious about the (little?) music community in Doomworld and their gear

I use as primary DAW FL Studio, but I'm making the transition to REAPER. I use some trackers (Famitracker, Furnace, Open ModPlug) too
Also, I use Domino for MIDI composing, a great Japanese-Only MIDI editor that luckily has a fanmade english translation

about soundfonts I have many but mostly use 2: SGM 2.01 and the great Patch93's SC-55 Soundfont (for midi playback)
 

And VST I use: Mainly I use Genny, vsti based on SEGA Mega Drive soundchips and ADLplug for a secret project, along with other free/built in VST and SF2 I found on internet heh

I use this Guitar SFZ (Requires a SFZ player like sforzando) with Grind Machine II amp too
 

[Remilia Scarlet]

I use Renoise mainly, together with a ton of different VSTs.  I used Cakewalk Sonar in the past for a long time, but moved to Renoise because I like the tracker layout, and I didn't like the newer Sonar versions after 8.5.

For VSTs, I mostly ImpOSCar2, Reaktor, SQ-80, and various other free synths.  For effects, I mostly use MeldaProduction stuff, or some really old Sonitus:fx plugins that I can't bear to part with.  The Sonitus:fx's reverb is easily my favorite ever <3  Its multiband compressor is also just really nice to use.  I also use Reaktor for effects and processing, but not as often as you might expect, though I usually use an aural exciter patch I have for it on my master bus...

 

Anyway, as far as SoundFonts go, I actually almost never use them, except to listen to old General MIDI files.  When I do, I either use some SC-55 Soundfont that I have (I dunno where I got it, but it's not Patch93's), which I've customized slightly, or a WinGroove SoundFont.  I use my own personal midi player to play them.  However, I've recently been thinking about going back and re-editing/expanding a lot of my old MIDI files that I wrote 20+ years ago during high school, and I'm on the lookout for a MIDI editor that's better than Qtractor, so I'll check out the one you linked ^_^

 

Uhh... link to music if you've never heard my stuff >_>

EDIT: oh yeah, I've tinkered with DefleMask and Sunvox from time to time, too. 

[leejacksonaudio]

I'm a very loyal Cakewalk by Bandlab user. Been using Cakewalk in one form or another since 1993. Powerful stuff, and it's free. Can't ask for better.

 

My sound interface hardware is a PreSonus Studio 1810C box. It's very stable, very reliable, although the driver installation is a bit confusing. It wants to install everything under the sun. Also, if you want full interactive access to their support forums, you're going to pay through the nose. The bang for the buck quotient outstrips the negatives, IMHO, at least for now.

 

VSTs and Soundfonts? Good lord. I have hundreds of VSTs, but I don't use Soundfonts. For VST sounds, which ones I use depends on which kind of music I'm writing. For electronic music, I'm defaulting lately to those by Cherry Audio. I use Addictive Drums 2 for my drumsets a lot of the time. However, for classical, guitars, and some drums, I don't use VSTs - I use Native Instruments' KOMPLETE, namely the KONTAKT software and plugins made for it.

In the KONTAKT realm, I like Aaron Venture's Infinite Brass and Infinite Woodwinds. I also use Orange Tree Samples for guitars, and the SCARBEE basses that come with NI KOMPLETE 13. I use various other SFX sounds as well.

 

One bit of hardware that's hard to replicate is my Roland SC-88Pro box. I use it for strings, drums, basses, synths, and other sounds. I also use it for fast prototyping, and for full composition in the Doom MIDI realm.

 

For FX VSTs, I use those from Waves and the MEGA bundle from Plugin Alliance, plus dozens of specialized FX VSTs.

 

I'll edit if I think of anything else. Let me know if you have any questions.

[Stethr1]

I've been using FLstudio since around early 2016 and haven't really used any DAW since. I have a copy of Studio One 4 but I haven't really touched it much since I'm honestly just not a fan of it. I've been meaning to learn ableton since it's what most of my musical peers use but modern version's lack support for 32-bit VSTs which would mean having to abandon alot of my daily drivers since they don't have 64-bit versions.

 

My gear is a set of 4-inch ave fusion studio monitors that are honestly kind awful but they get the job done whenever I need to check my mixes on speakers instead of headphones. I use a set of DT-770 Pros as my headphones and what I mostly use for making and mixing music with. I have them plugged into a Focusrite Scarlet Solo but before that I had a digidesign Mbox 2 mini that I got from a pawn shop for 15$. It worked well enough but the driver support in windows 10 was buggy as hell so I eventually had to stop using it.

 

I don't use soundfonts much anymore, partially because I can just use Kontakt libraries and spitfire plugins for realistic sounding instruments but also because I've largely moved onto making electronic music (especially trap and EDM) instead of rock and orchestral stuff so they don't really get used much unless I'm trying to make cheesy ps1 game music. I do occasionally use Roland Sound Canvas VA whenever I'm making doom midis though.

 

In terms of other plugins I mostly just use Serum for 99% of synths since it's easy to use and most presets I find nowdays are made for it. I usually use either Vengeance or KSHMR samples when it comes stuff like effects and drums but when I need realistic sounding drums I use addictive drums. In terms of effects and stuff I usually Saturn for distortion, OTT for heavy multi-band compression and an old distortion plugin called drove for extreme levels of distortion.

[Herr Dethnout]

5 hours ago, leejacksonaudio said:

I'm a very loyal Cakewalk by Bandlab user. Been using Cakewalk in one form or another since 1993. Powerful stuff, and it's free. Can't ask for better.

 

My sound interface hardware is a PreSonus Studio 1810C box. It's very stable, very reliable, although the driver installation is a bit confusing. It wants to install everything under the sun. Also, if you want full interactive access to their support forums, you're going to pay through the nose. The bang for the buck quotient outstrips the negatives, IMHO, at least for now.

 

VSTs and Soundfonts? Good lord. I have hundreds of VSTs, but I don't use Soundfonts. For VST sounds, which ones I use depends on which kind of music I'm writing. For electronic music, I'm defaulting lately to those by Cherry Audio. I use Addictive Drums 2 for my drumsets a lot of the time. However, for classical, guitars, and some drums, I don't use VSTs - I use Native Instruments' KOMPLETE, namely the KONTAKT software and plugins made for it.

In the KONTAKT realm, I like Aaron Venture's Infinite Brass and Infinite Woodwinds. I also use Orange Tree Samples for guitars, and the SCARBEE basses that come with NI KOMPLETE 13. I use various other SFX sounds as well.

 

One bit of hardware that's hard to replicate is my Roland SC-88Pro box. I use it for strings, drums, basses, synths, and other sounds. I also use it for fast prototyping, and for full composition in the Doom MIDI realm.

 

For FX VSTs, I use those from Waves and the MEGA bundle from Plugin Alliance, plus dozens of specialized FX VSTs.

 

I'll edit if I think of anything else. Let me know if you have any questions.

From Cakewalk I only used Express for midi composing few years ago, it was great when didn't have my usual DAWs in hand. idk How Bandlad's version is but I will try someday

Question: Did you use any other Software/Hardware aside SC-88Pro for composing Shadow Warrior CD OST ?
 

 

[Herr Dethnout]

8 hours ago, Remilia Scarlet said:

I use Renoise mainly, together with a ton of different VSTs.  I used Cakewalk Sonar in the past for a long time, but moved to Renoise because I like the tracker layout, and I didn't like the newer Sonar versions after 8.5.

For VSTs, I mostly ImpOSCar2, Reaktor, SQ-80, and various other free synths.  For effects, I mostly use MeldaProduction stuff, or some really old Sonitus:fx plugins that I can't bear to part with.  The Sonitus:fx's reverb is easily my favorite ever <3  Its multiband compressor is also just really nice to use.  I also use Reaktor for effects and processing, but not as often as you might expect, though I usually use an aural exciter patch I have for it on my master bus...

 

Anyway, as far as SoundFonts go, I actually almost never use them, except to listen to old General MIDI files.  When I do, I either use some SC-55 Soundfont that I have (I dunno where I got it, but it's not Patch93's), which I've customized slightly, or a WinGroove SoundFont.  I use my own personal midi player to play them.  However, I've recently been thinking about going back and re-editing/expanding a lot of my old MIDI files that I wrote 20+ years ago during high school, and I'm on the lookout for a MIDI editor that's better than Qtractor, so I'll check out the one you linked ^_^

 

Uhh... link to music if you've never heard my stuff >_>

EDIT: oh yeah, I've tinkered with DefleMask and Sunvox from time to time, too. 

        
Domino is great, it has the best piano roll aside FL Studio one, and is pretty similar to Cakewalk Express/Sekaiju, Although you can use Open ModPlug for making midi with a Tracker Interface (I used it for my Map's song).

I only use Soundfonts mostly for midi playback and MIDI composing rather than composing in other DAW (I prefer SFZ and VST).

 

3 hours ago, Cr1ppling said:

I've been using FLstudio since around early 2016 and haven't really used any DAW since. I have a copy of Studio One 4 but I haven't really touched it much since I'm honestly just not a fan of it. I've been meaning to learn ableton since it's what most of my musical peers use but modern version's lack support for 32-bit VSTs which would mean having to abandon alot of my daily drivers since they don't have 64-bit versions.

 

My gear is a set of 4-inch ave fusion studio monitors that are honestly kind awful but they get the job done whenever I need to check my mixes on speakers instead of headphones. I use a set of DT-770 Pros as my headphones and what I mostly use for making and mixing music with. I have them plugged into a Focusrite Scarlet Solo but before that I had a digidesign Mbox 2 mini that I got from a pawn shop for 15$. It worked well enough but the driver support in windows 10 was buggy as hell so I eventually had to stop using it.

 

I don't use soundfonts much anymore, partially because I can just use Kontakt libraries and spitfire plugins for realistic sounding instruments but also because I've largely moved onto making electronic music (especially trap and EDM) instead of rock and orchestral stuff so they don't really get used much unless I'm trying to make cheesy ps1 game music. I do occasionally use Roland Sound Canvas VA whenever I'm making doom midis though.

 

In terms of other plugins I mostly just use Serum for 99% of synths since it's easy to use and most presets I find nowdays are made for it. I usually use either Vengeance or KSHMR samples when it comes stuff like effects and drums but when I need realistic sounding drums I use addictive drums. In terms of effects and stuff I usually Saturn for distortion, OTT for heavy multi-band compression and an old distortion plugin called drove for extreme levels of distortion.

Same, using FLStudio since 2014 and is hard to learn other DAW, but people told me that REAPER is better than FL so I give it a try heh

 

Edited September 10, 2022 by Herr Dethnout : double posting lol

[leejacksonaudio]

4 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

Question: Did you use any other Software/Hardware aside SC-88Pro for composing Shadow Warrior CD OST ?

 

Yes, I did, although I don't have some of it anymore. I used a Kurzweil K2500RS rackmount synth/sampler for hardware, and a software DAW called SAW Studio (which isn't in production anymore). And for the record, I only used a plain SC-88 - I didn't get my pro until after I was no longer at Apogee/3D Realms.

[SyntherAugustus]

I saw this thread earlier but forgot to write something.

 

I used FL Studio as a hobby for almost 10 years. It's pretty easy to use for someone starting out. I started to notice after a while I wanted more and I didn't know how to deal with that. A year ago (it's been a year, wow) I noticed Studio One has a monthly subscription ($15 for the software and their plugins plus access to tutorials and much more) versus having to pay $200 upfront for FL Studio so I gave it a try. After spending a lot of time learning Studio One (Presonus has a lot of tutorials on YT as well as their subscription page as free "masterclasses") it's well worth it. My songs have been converted from a huge mess of pattern lists into an organized track that I can produce a master properly and put out an album with. I guess the only issue is that I had to remake my songs from scratch which took a lot of time. Did you know they also have a live mode so you can bring your fancy laptop on stage with that midi controller and have at it? It's neat, but with my Fantom 08 I unfortunately have no use for it.

 

Studio One on top, FL Studio on bottom

 

After realizing I didn't have to put EVERYTHING into "patterns", life got a lot easier. I can drone on for a while about how much more I like Studio One, but I think the $15 subscription makes it worth it to try. Presonus also has some nice hardware. I bought the Faderport 8 and their R65 Studio Monitors a while back.

FL Studio has a slight edge over Studio One in that the latter doesn't save program changes in midi exports for some reason, so I keep FL Studio installed for that mostly.

 

Anyway enough about Studio One, here's the current list of active plugins I use.

 

Ample Sound guitars and basses, highly recommend. These guitars come with their own amps that sound very good on their own. For an example, Here's an example showing Hellrazer's capabilites. or Their acoustic guitars

Superior Drummer 3  I recommend buying the base package and exploring it before b-lining into an expansion. I ended up using the base content instead.

Roland Zenology - This is mostly because I own a Roland Fantom 08 and a Roland Ax-Edge which can use the instruments made in Zenology. 

Archetype Petrucci - To get the maximum sound out of your real or virtual guitars. Neural DSP makes some great software.

Parallax - Same thing but for bass. Unlike Petrucci, I have to use separate plugins to add chorus and delay/reverb, but that's fine.

Ravenscroft 275 - Great sounding piano but a little tricky to use at first since you can't modify the attack and release, so you have to program it like a real piano.

IK Multimedia products - Sampletank 4, Syntronik 2, T-Racks, Amplitube 5, and MODO Drum and MODO Bass are all useful, but they're mostly backups when the above list doesn't work. The two MODO instruments are cpu synthesized, meaning unlike the others, you'll get a much smaller footprint on your HD at the cost of how good the sound is out of the box. 

 

 

Edited September 11, 2022 by SyntherAugustus

[ClumsyDoomer]

DAW: Reaper. Moved to it in 2016 out of morbid curiosity: zero regrets, enjoying and appreciating everything about it.
Favorite VST effect manufacturers: Fabfilter, Ignite amps. Tried way more of them but always reaching out for these two first. When there's a serious project, I open up a couple of Waves plugins as well of course. Speaking of guitar tones, I've still got those ancient free LePou plugins from back when I was starting doing music. They're actually holding up pretty well and Neural DSP never really interested me. ProFET is an amazing distortion pedal sim, free as well, and nothing has ever seemed better to me. Really evil sound, or maybe I just got attached to it and managed to squeeze all of its juices.
Favorite VST instrument manufacturers: Spectrasonics, Toontrack. Same as above - tried more but these two I value the most. Spectrasonics does all of my keys desires, and Toontrack is just drums. I mainly do rock/metal stuff, but everything about live drums in real life makes me really uncomfortable. The loudness, all of the studio engineering, ... the search for a decent drummer, price.

Hardware: Behringer UMC202HD interface, JBL LSR305 speakers, Behringer UMX490 keys, a couple of guitars

[Doomkid]

For makin' MIDIs, I use Guitar Pro 5 out of familiarity, but Sekaiju is what I'd point any composers toward. You can change every little last detail SO easily using it.

 

Soundfonts? Dear lord man, I have over 500 decent ones in my collection. I'm really partial to the SC-55 variants in particular, and I'll be making a comparison video & archive of all of those soon too.

[Kyka]

Long Term ProTools user here, but I have never done any music for Doom though. I will one day. For now I appreciate the suggestions of peoples gear that they are using. ProTools, as wonderful as it is, has a subscription setup seems designed to frustrate.

 

Am open to using Reaper, and Ableton is amazing.

 

@Doomkid Thanks for the pointer to Sekaiju. Never heard of it.

[Herr Dethnout]

38 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

For makin' MIDIs, I use Guitar Pro 5 out of familiarity, but Sekaiju is what I'd point any composers toward. You can change every little last detail SO easily using it.

I use Guitar Pro mostly for converting tabs I found on internet into midis or for Clone Hero charting. I tried Sekaiju once, looks like old Cakewalk at first sight but I wasn't able to understand the program, also his Piano Roll kinda sucked IMO. I still up with Domino.
 

45 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Soundfonts? Dear lord man, I have over 500 decent ones in my collection. I'm really partial to the SC-55 variants in particular, and I'll be making a comparison video & archive of all of those soon too.

Your archive is a must for everybody who wants an accurate alternative to Microsoft GS or SCVA. Thanks for all!

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

Lmms is fairly decent, and you can make MIDI tracks with it as well as other stuff with it.

[Fernito]

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

For makin' MIDIs, I use Guitar Pro 5 out of familiarity, but Sekaiju is what I'd point any composers toward. You can change every little last detail SO easily using it.

 

Wait, WAT!? I thought I was the only being in this universe using GP5 for making MIDIs, and I have to admit, I was even a little bit ashamed of mentioning it here. But not anymore c: GP5 BROS UNITE!

 

 

 

[Kyka]

2 hours ago, Fernito said:

 

Wait, WAT!? I thought I was the only being in this universe using GP5 for making MIDIs, and I have to admit, I was even a little bit ashamed of mentioning it here. But not anymore c: GP5 BROS UNITE!

 

Now I wanna be a GP5 bro.

[Fernito]

16 minutes ago, Kyka said:

 

Now I wanna be a GP5 bro.

hahaha join the gang, mate! Requirements: Pentium 2 or higher + some MBs RAM

[LordEntr0py]

I own Ableton Suite 11 and Reason 12, but haven't used them for making Doom music. I'm slowly working on a UDMF set I might compose some MP3 music for.

 

Would be nice to compose MIDIs for Doom in Ableton, but it's not so simple to set up for that.

I have Sekaiju installed. Perhaps I'll learn to use it eventually...

[PsychEyeball]

I'm still lost in music limbo and haven't settled on any DAW to use long-term. I just can't seem to find the perfect match and this has been haunting me forever.

 

For the longest of times, I used Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 for everything, but more recent versions of Sonar felt really clunky to me anymore so I stopped using it. Tried FL Studio: hate its workflow and its pattern-based approach which encourages you to be lazy and repetitive. Studio One: just didn't gel with me and its handling of MIDI commands felt erratic. Reaper: almost there, but key parts of the workflow felt really awkward and annoy me to no end. At this point part of me is wishing for there to be a DAW that's just Sonar 8.5, but for modern computers. 

 

For MIDI composing I'm using Cakewalk by Bandlab. It's not Sonar 8.5, but it's been better than the last few paid versions of SONAR and it's fine for MIDI composing.

 

Never was much of a soundfont nut, I'd never compose with soundfonts in mind. I'd always compose under whatever default MIDI synth my soundcard has and soundfonts would only be used for listening. The three soundfonts I'd use would be CT4GM (the default low-fi MIDI soundfont you'd typically use with Sound Blaster cards in the 2000s), SGM-180 v1.5 and SGM-180 v2.01. I'd typically prefer the sound of the former even though there's more volume imbalance between instruments and the newer version is better balanced in general. Since I went back into MIDI composing, I got myself a Roland Sound Canvas SC-8820 and a Yamaha MU1000 EX (the latter has no ties to Doom at all, but I was curious to see how it'd fare against the Roland MIDI synth).

 

Other physical gear I own right now is a Roland Integra-7 and a Yamaha MODX6. VST-wise, I own too much shit to mention. Whatever would be most often used would be Dimension Pro, anything from the KOMPLETE series from Native Instruments (mainly Kontakt, Battery, Drumlab, Reaktor) imPOScar, the MusicLab Real Guitars and so on.

 

(Geez I need to get my butt in gear again huh)

[bofu]

I've tried a few different programs to make MIDI, but the one I keep going back to is this old program called Noteworthy Composer. (Yes, I've been using it since @PsychEyeball and I first got into MIDI writing decades ago.) For non-Doom music, however, I use programs like Sibelius and Dorico Pro if it's going to be very notation-heavy and Steinberg Cubase if it's not.

 

As far as hardware goes, nothing special needed for MIDI, though I do tend to test using SC-55 soundfonts. I plan on getting myself an actual module at some point, but I haven't found the right one yet. I work with actual audio signals a lot, so I use a Behringer U-Phoria UMC1820 audio interface.

 

A lot of the stuff I write that just uses MIDI for the instrument instructions and not actual audio uses VST instruments rather than soundfonts. For orchestral stuff, I've used Garritan Personal Orchestra pretty extensively, but I'm starting to outgrow it and am looking into Miroslav Philharmonik or CineSamples, which are much more expensive.

 

I'm more used to writing music via notation than via piano rolls, with the exception of when I'm mixing live audio and MIDI instruments, in which case the piano roll used by Cakewalk or Cubase is perfect for me.

[ClumsyDoomer]

If we're going shameless, here's my demo of ProFET, my favorite guitar plugin.
Full chain: ProFET, The anvil, NadIR, Fabfilter EQ and reverb. I recorded the guitar into this channel, monitored it via my speakers and miced the room simultaneously. The final sound is about 50/50 of those two channels. Also I subtracted some of the "guitar frequencies" from the original track and pitch-shifted it to match the 440hz master tune, though the values aren't precise.

(What a lovely track, will record a full cover one day. It's 11 minutes long)

 

[Sonikkumania]

I like FLStudio but I also own the license for Magix Music Maker. I'm happy with FLStudio though even though the music I make with it is rather primitive.. But it has my fingerprint, lol.

 

I haven't been into sounfonts before much, I've been just happy with Windows Media Player which I guess uses MS GM Synth obviously? But now I've started to experiment with them, atm I use rlndgm.sf2 with VLCPlayer.

 

But since you guys seem to be more pro about digital audio practices, can you help me out and tell why some midi tracks have different instrument channels when played with different software? It's not just a soundfont issue, I tried to play same .mid with VLCPlayer and then SLADE's midi player. The latter plays the track correctly - as does WMP. This same issue is noticeable with some other tracks too but others play just fine, so I dunno.

 

But will definately check out that Genny VST.

[leejacksonaudio]

1 hour ago, Sonikkumania said:

But since you guys seem to be more pro about digital audio practices, can you help me out and tell why some midi tracks have different instrument channels when played with different software? It's not just a soundfont issue, I tried to play same .mid with VLCPlayer and then SLADE's midi player. The latter plays the track correctly - as does WMP. This same issue is noticeable with some other tracks too but others play just fine, so I dunno.

 

It wouldn't happen to be a Duke Nukem 3D MIDI that you're trying to play that's giving you the problems, would it?

[Sonikkumania]

3 minutes ago, leejacksonaudio said:

 

It wouldn't happen to be a Duke Nukem 3D MIDI that you're trying to play that's giving you the problems, would it?

Heh nope, I'm talking about Tek War midis and some others I found from the web. Idk maybe it's due to the midi source being random.

[DoomGater]

After 30 or so years Steinberg (Starting with Pro-16 on a C64, Twelve/ Twenty-Four under Atari ST and Cubase under Atari & Windows) I switched last year to Reaper running under Xubuntu. I/F is Steinberg UR242, no VSTs, no Soundfonts,

 

Complete analog approach using a 32ch Soundcraft console, many Synths (Minimoog, Prodigy, Minitaur, Behringer Model D & 2x Crave, 4x Yamaha Refaces, Montage & MX49,

Roland Gaia, SC155,SC55. SK88Pro, some guitars, some basses, some tube amps, lots of 19", desktop and pedal FX plus a Hohner Melodica.
Oh yeah: for pure MIDI Recording an old Roland MC50MkII with USB-mod (But haven't used it quite along time).