Making Beats
You can do it with any DAW software but, some DAWs offer a few more items that’ll help you achieve what you’re After. If you don’t have the money to purchase 3rd party virtual instruments/don’t have hardware synths, and samplers, wanting to get your sounds from inside the software, some are better at this than others. FL Studio gives a ton of sounds, plus you can mix, and record into it. I’ve used it, not my thing, others have turned out great music with it. Cubase, Logic, and Digital Performer 9.5, along with Studio One Pro 3, all do a great job of giving you a good recording platform, and enough virtual instruments to do a lot of different types of music. Most of those also come with guitar amp simulators, and pretty much every plugin, and effect you need to make pro recordings. They all do midi well, and audio recording well. A cheaper DAW is Reaper, it’s a software is solid, cheaper around $60.00 USD, and can do midi, virtual instruments, and audio recording, just fine. Because of the cheaper price it doesn’t have much in the way of virtual instruments inside of it. It does work well with 3rd party software instruments, and plug ins. Pro tools is used in most pro studios, it’s more expensive, doesn’t have a ton of virtual instruments, it does have some of the best editing, and shortcut features out there. One of them is not going to blow the others away in sound quality or anything like that. Find one you can afford, that gives you what you want( research). Then learn everything you can about it ( especially the under the hood power, and shortcuts). If I could only pick out 2 it would be Digital Performer 9.5, and Studio One Pro 3. Some good interfaces, Behringer UMC204HD, Focusrite Scarlett 212. For just starting out that’s what I’d get. I’d have no problem recording vocals into either one and taking to a pro studio. Remember these interfaces are way better than what the pros where using 15 yrs ago.