Hey guys. I bought a cheap chinese MIDI keyboard and I want to make a few dungeon synth songs with it, just for my own enjoyment. I want to buy a decent (affordable) recording program and I am looking at Reaper and Ableton Live. I want to know what your opinion is of the two and which one you believe would be the better option? I don't have any experience with anything outside of Protools which I won't be considering. Also, do I need to buy a recording interface? I will only be using my keyboard and VST's to make music so I don't believe I need one, but do you think it might benefit me in the future? thanks.

I make all my music (including my synth project) using Reaper. you can use it for free for an indefinite amount of time, so I always suggest trying it out. There are hundreds of hours of high-quality tutorials out there if you need help.

For an interface, as long as your keyboard has a USB output then you should be OK. But if you ever decide to augment your stuff with live sounds (guitars, vocals, percussion, etc) then you'll want to invest in an interface with one or two mic preamps. The Focusrite Scarlett series would be a fine starting point at a modest budget.

Thanks a lot mate, I suspected Reaper might be the superior program. I did download a trial version and had a play with adding tracks and piano VST's, so I think I'll buy a commercial license to get a permanent copy of the program.

Thanks a lot for your interface recommendation, I'm going to save one of those Focusrite Scarlett deals for future reference if I choose to add acoustic lines to my tracks as well. I have a cheap no name steel string I could wack some new strings on and do some finger stuff with.

I only ever used Reaper once and I remember hating it. From what I remember it’s got a really clunky interface and looks similar to Audacity. I’ve used Ableton Live for nearly everything I’ve done. Really easy to pick up for a beginner, great plug-ins right out of the box, great audio time-stretching abilities, and aesthetically pleasing interface. It comes with a wavetable synth, an FM synth, an analog synth, and some other modeling based ones (my favorite is the wavetable). The only low point I can think of is the price tag, but you get a hell of a lot for it. And if the Suite version is too expensive, you can get the Standard version and just install a cheap VST synth.

I produce ambient techno (link in sig, shameless self-promotion wooo) and I've used Live for 7 years. Absolutely the best in the industry for producing anything synth-related, since you can use its session mode to quickly switch between midi or audio clips on various tracks while leaving other active tracks running. Its UI is also the cleanest and easiest to navigate of anything I've used, especially for in-box effects and instruments.

I recommend Reaper by far. It has a slightly steeper learning curve, but it is easily one of the most powerful DAWs on the market by far. You can use it just to mess around, record, mix, master, etc. It also has a lot of hidden tools that are incredibly useful. Whether I'm working on metal, or mixing acoustic orchestral/classical stuff, or working on electroacoustic music with 10+ channels, Reaper is definitely my go to.

Ableton is great for what it is. It's really a great tool for electronic music of all kinds, especially when playing live. However, it really suffers (imho) when it comes to having to edit audio for an actual production. One of its great advantages though is Max for Live which is really great if you're into programming. It's also much easier to get into, but I rarely use it except if I have basically no time to prepare for something.