Best application for VST instruments?

rumblesushi

Partly due to a lack of capital and partly for fun, I'd like to make some chiptunes for my first couple of games.

I've downloaded about 10 different VST plugins, all claiming to do old school 8bit or 16bit sounds, the thing is, I don't have anything to plug them into

I downloaded a Cubase trial, and for an electronic music novice, it's very hard to use. And expensive.

Does anyone know of a cheap and cheerful, preferably free, basic music program that supports VST plugins?

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

Maph

I'm liking Renoise, it's not free (58 euros), but it's really cheap compared to the other sound production suites. But it's a tracker (vertical composing) so it takes a bit of getting used to. This is for if you want to compose some music though.
http://www.renoise.com/

If you're pure into chiptunes, check out DrPetter's SFXr. One of my favorite tools for that classic chip sound! You can export your sound straight to WAV, so that's pretty neat. No need to render out your sounds with some editing afterwards like with VSTs.
http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html

Slum

just use simple waveform samples and a tracker like milkytracker if you want to do some chiptunage. No VST host required

eld

Or also, DrPetters Musagi!

http://www.drpetter.se/project_musagi.html

rumblesushi

Maph, thanks for the link, renoise looks promising, I'm going to try it out.

Oh and I already have SFXr, you're right, it's awesome for those classic old school videogame sound effects

eld, thanks for that link too, from the same guy that did SFXr, looks good.

Racer445

i picked up ableton last year and it's one of the most intuitive programs i have ever used. of course, it is a little pricey for your purpose! it's certainly my go-to though whenever i need a full DAW to produce something for reals.

the cheapest and best way to get REAL FM chipsounds is to dig out an old computer that has a soundcard with the yamaha OPL series of chips in it. the adlib family of cards had these as well as many many old soundblasters and compatible knockoffs. i had two old pentium 120mhz laptops in my closet that had these chips, so i just installed dos 6.22 and a free tracker then started jamming away!

these chips are the same as the ones found in old consoles like the genesis and neogeo. if you've got some really old pc have a look at the soundcard!

Calabi

I recently bought Renoise, dont know how to make music or anything but its reasonably simple and straightforward, fun to play around with.

throttlekitty

I used Jeskola BUZZ when I was dinking around with music last. It's free, has loads of user-made instruments and effects, but is also a tracker with a bit of a learning curve. Well-suited for chiptunes though.

Ben Apuna

Knowing nothing about music and sound fx apps (yet), I'll just throw in some links hoping they might be useful...

Similar to Sfxr is Bfxr.

and

pxtone, manual, and tutorial.

Frump

I've heard of Reaper being a pretty good intro app. It seems affordable but I've never used it myself.

I started off with FL Studio like a lot of people on the internet, but I now realize it's kind of like the Blender of DAWs. It does things in sort of the same ways but much different and sillier. Moving to Cubase or Ableton whenever I can be arsed.

Good Luck with the chip tunes

synergy11

Check Sonar they have some really cheap versions.

Also a lot of VST Virtual Instruments can run stand alone. Like Garritan and others.

Check Omnisphere out by Spectrasonics. I compose with that all the time. It's freaking mind blowing.

Arkadius

I heard Fruity loops studio is good, but I no pro on this stuff.
http://flstudio.image-line.com/

Snowfly

I like Reaper as well. For a while I was structuring songs using nothing but the built-in synth, and they all came out sounding like chiptunes, so maybe you can check that out. It's very easy to use as well, and cheap, with an uncrippled trial version.

Fomori

Yeah I keep hearing really good things about Reaper. Free/cheap yet very powerful and professional.

HonkyPunch

my brother uses his LsDJ http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/ and produces some pretty good stuff.
http://trebledeathsystem.com/releases/20
(They actually have some pretty good music there. Treble Death could probably help you quite a bit on this field, and if you make anything, post it there and get some feedback.)
Personally the only thing i've ever even fiddled with is piggy tracker, because it works on my psp.
i'm awful at music.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_music)

rumblesushi

Thanks for the input guys, that's plenty to be getting on with. Now it's just trying to fit in learning some basic music production when I'm working like 11 hours a day

BTW regarding Fruity Loops, that's the only music program I've ever properly used YEARS ago, and I found it relatively easy to compose a basic track.

Blender on the other hand, ergh.

Dylan Brady

Fruity loops is faily easy to use, but If your going to learn a DAW I always say people should look at Ableton Live.
I switched from FL a couple years back and havent looked back

WillMac

Ableton is brilliant, you can do alsorts with that and audio and midi is timestretched in real-time... get the demo and try. http://www.ableton.com/

Puredata is worth a look, is open source and you can visual code your own synths, sequencers and fx.http://puredata.info/

Audacity is free audio editor akin to soundforge and useful for all audio chopping and conversions i think.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Ben Apuna

I just learned about Nodal on Google+ It looks pretty cool, sort of like Kismet for midi.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUabb325D4[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPh3QVZsWw[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbFwJB-YF_k[/ame]

While looking into this type of generative music software I also ran across Tiction.

http://vimeo.com/1756994

http://vimeo.com/1757232

http://vimeo.com/2136366

I think these node based music creation apps seem a lot more approachable from a visual artist's perspective.

System

Ah man what a coincidence this got bumped!

Makkon's awesome compositions over in WAYWO massively inspired me to dust off my midi interface and get back in touch with the composing scene after doing nothin for the past 4 years or so.

So I'm curious, in relation to VST's like NI's Komplete stuff, does that run in Logic? I'm so out of touch but Logic uses AU's right?

passerby

TeeJay wrote: »

Ah man what a coincidence this got bumped!

Makkon's awesome compositions over in WAYWO massively inspired me to dust off my midi interface and get back in touch with the composing scene after doing nothin for the past 4 years or so.

So I'm curious, in relation to VST's like NI's Komplete stuff, does that run in Logic? I'm so out of touch but Logic uses AU's right?

what plug-in formates does logic take.

i know it supports RTAS and VST but, and think it might work on a audio units or core audio setup.

but i cant say for sure since olny daw's i use are pro tools and cubase/nuendo