Reply to Well I'm in the hole now.

Broke down and bought Ableton Suite 8. And Albino 3.

Going to take me a bit to work that one off, but I'm having a shitload of fun. I've been playing with the Demo of Ableton for awhile now, and really wanted to save stuff. God bless credit cards.

I know I could have bought a controller for the price of all this, but it's one of the reasons I've been holding off for so long. I wanted to make the right decision for myself, and I am really happy with choosing Ableton, even if I'm still just playing with the x-session.

And the Albino 3 just to top it off because I played around with the demo, and want to try and get to use the most praised synth out there. It's actually really intuitive we've I've had issues before with other ones, and so that's the most important thing.

Other than that, I've been doing more production style stuff rather than working with ableton as a DJing tool... just because I caught the old bug again. (Production brain seems to kick up with me every so often).

So I've been spending all day messing around. Here's a bit of a tune I'm working on:

http://soundcloud.com/crb/dirty-seed-edit-2

Dirty Seeds (second edit... I'm about on the 5th now). Chill Dubstep track (since I haven't figured out how to really get filthy yet :P)

It's a "work in progress" and would love to hear feedback about it. I know it's not mastered well at all, and I need to work on my LFO skills. But I believe it's sounding pretty good.

It's nice just being able to kick back and enjoy messing with things, and saving my progress. I used to use FL and I just never really liked the work flow of the program, although one of my other buddies swears by the program. I believe I made the right long-term decision, and it's a great feeling.