Wow, thank you so much!

Let's talk DAWs. I have used Logic for the last 10+ years, and I love it for almost everything. I wasn't always a Mac-ophile, but I'm in pretty deep now.

The great:

Logic is built for composing and editing. It's so much fun to audition different sound effects on a recorded track quickly and non-destructively. I love the flexible programmable percussion. that makes you feel like you actually were part of the creative process and didn't just steal a loop. The built-in patches for guitars are good enough that I haven't recorded an electric guitar through a real amp since, basically forever. The interface for recording multiple takes and taking the perfect clips from each one is simply divine.

The pretty good:

Logic has built in pitch correction, which I happily admit to using (fight me), but it is very time consuming to do it right. You can't just set the key and turn it on or off... you have to edit each note individually or it will either be wrong or add cracks and pops. Sometimes, it decides that two notes are actually a single note, and won't let you correct them individually.

To record lead vocals on a song that I care about, I usually spend about 20 minutes recording 5-6 takes, 60 minutes picking the best take for each phrase (or word). and another 60 minutes playing with the pitch correction. If there are harmonies, multiply all that by the number of tracks. Sounds awful, I know, but it's very Zen.

The not so good:

Mastering. I used to have a PC, and used SONAR as the DAW, I had a hacked copy of a mastering program called T-Racks that was just glorious and idiot-proof. The built in mastering algorithms on Logic just don't sound right to me, and I'm not smart enough to figure out why. My solution? I've hired a guy named Michael on Fiverr.com to master my songs. It's $7/song, and he gets them back to me within 24 hours. I'm sure he doesn't actually listen to the songs. he probably just plugs everything into T-Racks!

And that, thenewgreen, is my excuse for only doing one song a month. More would be simply too expensive.