FL Studio will always stand out as a top choice amongst beatmakers. It’s always been focused on the internal generation of music using drum machines, samples and virtual instruments. The default interface is a simple step-sequencer that gets you creating rhythms before you’ve learned anything else about the software. From there is grows into a massive network of creative tools designed to put your ideas on the track.

It’s developed over the years to be a fully fledged DAW with live recording, mixing, processing and all the detailed editing you could want. But it excels at dumping in samples, looping, slicing, arranging beats into huge drops and rearranging them in a lively, animated interface. You can multiple ideas flooding in at once, drawing on a vast library of virtual sounds from kick ass bass synths to huge pads. It will let you automate everything leaving you hands-free to manipulate and perform.

FL Studio is extremely flexible, home-studio friendly and packed with professional features that will take you from your first kick drum pattern to a complete album.

FL Studio: $99 to $599
FL Studio

Ableton Live tends to portray itself as the beat making DAW for grown-ups. While it has a similar internal focus to FL Studio it shies away from the loudness of FL interface and runs with a more subtle, serious air. For some it’s a little too pompous but for many the dark levels of detail in Ableton Live have the power to unlock the deepest treasures of creativity.

Live is all about the loops, the clips and the scenes. You can throw in a bunch of samples and just see what sticks. Create stacks of variations, launch racks of hits and patterns, and work your ideas into a fully formed live performance that you can take on the road, just from your laptop. Ableton Live has a sort of modular makeup where you can plugin in all sorts of beat wrenching devices that will bend time, slice rhythms and rework your thoughts into amazing bits of music.

It can do all the other DAW stuff as well like live mixing and recording, vocal comping, effects and MIDI processing. But it’s the power to manipulate and respond to intuitive creativity where Live really shines.

Ableton Live: $99 to $599
Ableton

Reason is a huge synthesizer and sampling workstation. Built on an almost infinite rack of sounds it can create anything you can imagine and then rewire itself into things you can’t even contemplate. It has the most awesome, vintage-style starting points with samplers based on the classic S-Series, beat makers based on the MPC and synths based on throbbing analog emulations. It will slice and dice your loops in a way that only the inventors of the Recycle technology know how. Reason is for people who want to get their hands dirty.

As you build your tracks you build a rack of gear that reflects your tone and sound choices. It’s modular so you can patch together exactly how you want sound and control to flow around the system. It has a huge mixer console for pushing and squashing your beats in all the best possible ways and brilliantly replicates the way people were cutting tracks in hardware studios, but with the convenience of software.

As with the other DAWs its fully up for the challenge of recording bands, choirs and soulful singers. It has all the automation and arrangement ability and will give you a finished track ready for distribution. If hardware is your thing, then Reason is way to go.

Reason Studio: $19.99 per month subscription or $499
Reason

From the makers of the legendary MPC music production workstation comes a DAW that’s dedicated to beat making. It follows the MPC workflow in having a 16-pad, sample triggering interface for quickly and intuitively laying down your beats. But that’s just the start as you find yourself developing your tracks and the best thing is that it’s completely free.

MPC Beats comes packed with over 2GB of content including samples, loops and virtual instruments. You can of course pack in your own samples and recordings or browse through some of the vast library of additional content through the MPC Beats Expansions. Full sample editing, slicing and kit generation is all built with remarkable ease. You can sequence and edit your beats using the piano roll editor and dig into over 80 audio effects plugins to manipulate and transform your sound.

It will connect directly to any Akai, M-Audio or Alesis MIDI controller for a more hardware-based interface. You can expand the sound palette with third party VST Plugins and virtual instruments. MPC Beats doesn’t quite go the whole hog in terms of DAW features but it does support up to two stereo audio channels of live recording. So you can drop your singer or rap performance right alongside your tracks.

MPC Beats: Free with in-app expansions
MPC Beats

Maschine Mk3 is hands down one of the most phenominal hardware/software combinations out there. It’s fast, intuitive, fun and is filled with the most extraordinary sounds and features. Onbviously it derives some of its workflow from the legendary MPC but Maschine has taken it to completely different levels.

Maschine gives you a integrated hardware and software system that includes a sampler, mixer, arranger, effects, virtual instruments and an audio interface. Hook it up to a laptop and you have a complete music making workstation. On the hardware you can build tracks, activate scenes, dial in effects and select instruments. You can pump out beats, record performances, edit patterns and add automation.

For more detailed editing you refer back to the software with its piano roll editor and fine control over every effect and instrument parameter. But the majority of the work can be done on the Maschine itself. It comes with 8GB of samples, loops, kits, instruments, patterns and projects. It has 19 premium virtual instruments including the awesome Massive and deeply analog Monark and you can delve into the huge library of expansions to build on your sound palette.

Maschine is ready for sampling and capturing your performances. It can be the centre of your studio or part of a larger setup ready for however you want to work.

Maschine Mikro: $199
Maschine: $499
Maschine+: $899
Maschine

Serato Studio is all about sampling. Built on its original DJ platform, Serato Studio has harnessed its music production technology to help you build samples into clips and clips into scenes.

Front and center is its ability to split mixed tracks into stems giving you the perfect environment for sampling exactly what you’re after. You can pull out the vocals, isolate the drum beat, slice out that piano line and manipulate them into your own tracks. It uses a machine-learning algorithm to separate out the audio stems into vocals, drum beats, melodies and basslines with a single click.

Your samples can then be flipped, layered, chopped and sliced to create new sounds or new rhythms as you re-sequence beats and find fresh ideas. Serato will handle the sync and even magically find samples from your own library to fit with what you’re doing. You can then build your track up with clips and scenes as it all starts to come together. Following on from the DJ legacy the output of your tracks is always visualised as a dynamic waveform, just as it would if you were Djing; it’s a very unique feature.

It’s really the sampling and DJ approach that sets Serato Studio apart and so if that’s your thing then you should give it a look.

Serato Studio: Free or $9.99 subscription for all features
Serato Studio

Not a DAW this time but a beat producing virtual instrument. Arcade brings the fun of slicing and dicing samples into your existing DAW as a playground of pulling apart loops and resequencing ideas. With over 64,000 samples and 1,300 instruments, Arcade is going to keep you busy for a very long time.

Arcade works by offering you a couple of octaves of playable loops and hits loaded across your keyboard within a stunning interface that invites playful exploration or effects and manipulations. The samples fit together into a style or mood and are production-ready. However, you can do whatever you like with them. Sitting down with Arcade is like opening up a pandoras box of beat possibilities. You can just spend time playing and exploring before digging into what really gets you moving.

Beyond hits, chords and loops you can also access a whole load of chromatic instruments. You can use them for basslines, chords, pads, atmospherics, melodies and arpeggios. With each instrument comes a number of parameters to push the timbre, enhance the tone, filter the outcome and modulate the signals.

You can build your own kits from the sounds you find or bring in your own library and construct whole new instruments to run in your DAW. It’s desperately cool and ready to play.

Output Arcade: $12.99 to $25.99 subscription
Output Arcade

In a similar vein to Arcade, Beatmaker from Ujam is basically a whole bunch of sample currated into instruments, kits and styles to launch you into your next beat-laden project. Currently there are 14 Beatmaker instruments filled with 140 drum kits covering 410 styles and getting on for 7000 phrases and patterns. It’s all about electronic rhythms and the best in digital grooves.

Each plugin is designed to find the perfect feel for your genre and style. There are laid back kits with the loosest of grooves, tight face-breaking snares and deep club classics. You can move from cinematic to latin club beats, movie scores to hyper-processed K-Pop. If you need trip hop or trap then look no further or if 80s synthwave is your thing then you’ll find that amongst the EDM heavy hitters and bombastic beats.

Instead of loops, Beatmaker uses patterns or rhythmical phrases to work and rework the samples. Styles can act as a spring board for your own creativity as you explore and groove along with your MIDI controller. You can tweak the sounds and push the rhythms on-the-fly. You can then work on within your DAW either running them in tandom or exporting MIDI patterns for further analysis.

It can be a playground for inspiration or you might find your whole jam in here.

Ujam Beatmaker: $129+
UJam Beatmaker