[LAU] Synths and sequencers for house/pop music?

[James Stone]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Jeremy Jongepier
<jeremy at autostatic.com> wrote:
> On 05/12/2011 10:48 AM, Ken Restivo wrote:
>> My 10-year-old daughter has started to express some interest in music.
>>
>> Somewhat predictably (and perhaps unfortunately too) she is into pop-star house stuff: Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga, Taio Cruz, Katy Perry, things of that nature. I know nothing of that style of music-- other then occasionally hearing it at the gym-- and I've no idea what tools are used to get those sounds.
>>
>> She's got a rather ancient Debian ThinkPad  of her own, with a working sound card. And I've got her set up with the basics, including the zita-at1 autotuner which so far to my ears seems to be the the number 1 most important ingredient in this style of music.
>
> Hello Ken,
>
> True :) If you've ever heard Katy Perry sing live without it you'll
> understand why ;)
>
>>
>> Are there any synths on Linux which I could set up for her which are good for getting those kinds of house/techno/pop sounds?
>>
>

For an all-in-one option, Neil is pretty ideal I would say (recording
vocals could be tricky but still do-able using the record machine
plugin).

I never got my head round LMMS back in the day (but to be fair I
haven't looked at it recently). It could work, but I found the
implementation of piano roll so unintutive as to be unusable.

My no1 suggestion would be Renoise tho - if you are willing to go the
non-open route! It's a kind of industry standard for writing this kind
of music. Less temperamental than Neil (at the moment). Fantastic
piece of software, and rock solid too. Does recording vocals
super-easily.

James