Luna was originally only available with UAD Hardware. It’s a fully-fledged DAW and music production suite designed to run fully integrated with their fantastic DSP-run plugs. However, in a stunning move, Universal Audio has made Luna available free of charge to everyone. It’s available on macOS and Windows, is packed full of Universal Audio’s analogue emulation technology, and looks completely beautiful.

You can make music with unlimited audio and virtual instrument tracks. You can edit, mix, and apply audio processing based on the sound of classic consoles and vintage audio gear. The interface is stunningly fresh and slightly overwhelming, but there are lots of presets and templates built in to help you grapple with the extraordinary facilities.

Luna has full VST Plugin support so you can run all your favourite instruments and effects. It comes with a massive sample-based instrument called Shape that can load four layers of sounds and has built-in effects and filtering. It comes with a huge library of sounds covering keys, synths, orchestral instruments, guitars, drums and pretty much anything else you can think of. There’s a versatile built-in arpeggiator to transform your chords into exciting melodies, and all your editing is done directly on the timeline.

All of your tracks route through their own vintage channel strip with Oxide tape saturation options, API Vision or 2500 console processing, and metering. When you first install Luna, you also get to preview all the paid-for plugins for 30 days.

Obviously, Luna is designed to sell you more UA plugins, but you can use it with free plugins and instruments for a completely costless DAW experience. It doesn’t have some of the more creative sequencing options or the depth of sound design and audio editing of some other DAWs, but if you just want to make music with synths and audio, then Luna is fantastic.

Luna

Tracktion Corporation usually releases a new version of their excellent Waveform DAW every year. When they do so they’ve also been releasing an older version of their DAW for free. It’s difficult to overemphasize how awesome this is. Waveform Free is a fully-fledged DAW that only a couple of years ago was Tracktion’s flagship product. But Waveform Free has begun to evolve its own character and feature set as Tracktion has started to tailor it towards beginners and worked towards simplifying the interface.

Waveform works a bit differently than other DAWs but has a very intuitive and fast workflow. You have unlimited MIDI and audio tracks plus a suite of professional-grade processing, EQ and mixing effects. It has some great editing within MIDI clips where you can generate patterns and detailed automation. In fact, automation and modulation are everywhere because you can apply LFOs to any parameter in your project.

It has an effects rack where you can chain up plug-ins and create complex connections between all the audio processors. You can apply stacks of effects to individual audio clips.

Waveform Free has a number of cool instruments including a sampler and a 4-oscillator synthesizer. It also brought in MIDI chord progressions and melodic pattern generators.

There’s the sort of depth here you’d only find in top-end DAWs. It will do vocal comping, step sequencing, track freezing, MIDI learning, time and pitch warping and sync to video. It also fully supports VST plugins and instruments and will run on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Waveform Free is comprehensive, different, creative and adventurous and you know there’s a further route to go to in Waveform Pro if you want to progress further.

Tracktion Waveform Free

Releasing simpler versions of a flagship product is a tried and tested way of bringing users into your ecosystem. The thing with Prime is that it’s not half bad and has most of the features you’d expect to find in a DAW you’d pay for.

It has the same streamlined, single-window interface that’s great on high DPI screens and touch-enabled. It has unlimited audio and MIDI tracks including multiple MIDI track editing and audio comping. Version 5 brings in retrospective recording, MPE support and a redesigned Native Effects suite including Ampire for Guitarists. Automation, mixing, sidechaining, resampling and normalization is all there.

However, there’s also quite a bit missing when compared to the flagship version. Most problematic is the lack of support for VST plug-ins. It comes with a powerful workstation sampler synth called Presence XT but that’s about it and so in terms of sequencing virtual instruments it’s rather lacking.

And without the VST support, you can’t add other free (or paid for) instruments that you might have. You can, however, pay for the Mai Tai virtual analog synth as an add-on. Other cool Studio One features are also missing like the Scratch Pads, Chord track and Harmonic Editing, and Melodyne integration. But Studio One professional is a top-level and innovative DAW and there are reasons why they charge you for it.

There’s enough in Studio One Prime to keep the budding Producer happy and it builds up a knowledge base of the workflow for the inevitable upgrade to Artist or Professional versions. If it had VST support it could have a crack at being king of the heap of freeware DAWs, but as it is the technology and the workflow are excellent, it’s a very capable training ground for the fuller versions.

Studio One Prime V6

Zenbeats is a groovy, multi-platform and touch-friendly DAW taken on by Roland to showcase their Zenology technology and large collection of software instruments. It’s one of the most friendly pieces of music production software I’ve come across and combines regular timeline recording with a fantastic loop-based clip-launching interface. With an expandable sample library and some great built-in instruments, you’ll be making beats in no time.

The ZR1 Drum Sampler kicks things off with pattern-based drum programming running samples from Roland’s own vintage drum machines, the TR-808 and TR-909. Or, if you prefer, you can drop your own samples directly onto the pads and start working your own kits. The sequencing also contains lots of tools for adding accents and putting complex rhythms through your patterns.

And then you can build your tracks using the ZC1 ZEN-Core-powered Synthesizer, full of classic Roland sounds, and a sleek, manipulable interface and XY pad modulation. You can introduce scales to keep everything in tune and swap in sounds from lots of other sources. The full-screen mixer will help you balance and process your tracks with EQ, filters and 22 effects.

One of the best features is that it’s completely cross-compatible across multiple platforms and devices. So you make a tune on your iPhone on the bus home and then pull the same project onto your Windows laptop. You could then send it to a friend who could add vocals on their Android phone – nothing else quite does this.

The free version is a little bit restricted, but for a few dollars, you can unlock a huge amount of library, extra effects, the SampleVerse modular synthesizer, VST Plugin support and unlimited mixing and export options.

Roland Zenbeats

From Akai, the makers of classic samplers and MPC workstations, comes an interesting music production platform called MPC Beats. It’s focused on beat making, sample triggering and producing tracks and is very capable of being the centre of your studio.

MPC Beats is built around the workflow of the classic MPC workstation. It features 16 pads for triggering drums, loops and samples. It has a sample editor to chop and slice your samples into new kits and exciting sounds. And there’s a traditional piano roll view for detailed editing over your sequences.

It comes with 2GB of sample library to get you started covering genres like Trap, Dance, Pop and Hip Hop. There are a few software instruments to craft melodies and dynamic phrases alongside your beats and remixing. MPC Beats comes with over 80 effect plugins to send your tracks into different directions, to process your sounds and make things amazing. There’s full support for VST/AU plugins so you can add your favorite virtual instruments and effects.

For audio recording there are only two stereo tracks, but it’s enough to let you add vocals, guitar, harmony and other live elements that you are not running directly through the sampling engine.

MPC Beats has a very different look and flow to most other DAWs and while it lacks audio tracks it more than makes up for it with creative sampling and beat making.

MPC Beats

Bandlab appears to have ditched Cakewalk and are moving forward with their own DAW. BandLab is an online DAW built for collaboration and social fraternizing.

Sounds like fun but it’s also a pretty decent piece of recording software. But the best feature is that it’s all online and runs in your browser and so it doesn’t matter which computer or platform you use, you can pick up your project where you left off. So you can do a bit of recording at home, and then mix on your phone on the way to using a computer at school or work, and then do some more tweaking on your mom’s MacBook. It’s completely platform agnostic.

And the feature list is ridiculous. It comes with 120 professionally crafted virtual instruments, amp models for guitar and bass, guitar and vocal effects processing and real-time automatic pitch correction. You get access to over 2,000 royalty-free loops, drum pattern editors, MIDI sequencing and loop triggering.

You can record audio directly into BandLab or upload audio from another DAW. And when your project is done, BandLab offers free algorithmic mastering, which means a computer does it rather than a human. But even so, you get a pretty finished product at the end.

The collaboration side is also very interesting. When you’re not chatting to other musicians and Producers you can invite them to contribute to your project. Grant them access and they can add tracks, edits or mixes for some truly collaborative creativity without having to Dropbox files anywhere. It’s all saved in unlimited space in the Cloud. Unlimited tracks, unlimited projects, unlimited collaboration.

Ok, it’s not Pro Tools. You’re not dealing with complex synchronization or hardware synthesizers. The audio connection and monitoring to an online DAW are going to be problematic in terms of latency. But the recording, sequencing, editing, and mixing are all there, and the ease of collaboration makes BandLab a very interesting and sociable experience.

BandLab

Simplicity is the name of the game in SoundBridge. It has a good, clean and familiar look and ticks all the usual DAW type boxes with MIDI and audio tracks, mixing and processing. Strangely, they don’t give away too much information about the feature set or functionality and talk about it having “friendly pricing”. However, there is a free version that’s restricted to 10 tracks and doesn’t have all the library included in the paid version.

You get MIDI and audio tracks with full automation and a drag-and-drop interface that feels like a cross between FL Studio and Studio One. SoundBridge is very much into using a touch interface and so the design of the interface lends itself to finger-sized touching. It also has a strong connection to the SoundBridge Academy courses and online collaboration platform SkyTracks.io.

It’s a little light on its own plugins but you do get the RitMix drum machine which is pretty good fun and as SoundBridge supports VST plugins then you can always add further ones. In fact, once you’ve registered you get access to a decent bundle of freeware effects and instruments from third parties in a useful single download.

SoundBridge

GarageBand is the annoyingly good music-making platform that has excelled on iOS and just refuses to go away. Built by the people behind Logic Pro, it has a certain gravitas that peeks out from behind the rather toy-like interface. But the interface works, it brings people in, it makes it so easy to start recording, sampling, playing with instruments and writing songs.

It’s right there, beautifully touch-enabled and even though it was originally built for MacOS, it simply shines on the iPad.

It has drummers, loops, and rhythms built. You’ll find live instruments, synthesizers, and samplers all wired in and ready to go. You can add vocals, guitars, all processed by built-in amp models and effects. Being on the iPad or on your iPhone you can mix and tweak on the bus or in the park. When you’re ready you can hit a button to publish to Facebook, SoundCloud, YouTube or whatever.

It has its limitations (like 32 tracks) but that’s as much to do with the limitations of iOS hardware as anything else, and it can’t route MIDI out to external instruments. But it does communicate well with Audiobus and accepts AU plug-ins for further expansion. As something that’s installed by default on your iPad, it’s a pretty awesome place to start making music for free.

Apple GarageBand

Beef up your free DAW with our picks for the best free drum VSTs and the best free VST instruments!