I've used a fair bit of the expensive stuff, albeit illicitly
obtained. There are some bits and pieces that I can imagine not being
able to live without if I were doing seriously pro work (a multiband
compressor VST plugin comes to mind), but a lot of the time it's a
trade-off between time and money. Sonar for instance is very cool, but
what makes it cool is more the way it bundles a set of useful things
together and makes them easy to use, rather than the quality of its
functionality relative to other packages. You can do the same things
with much cheaper gear, if you're prepared to tinker and work-around.
Bit of blatant own-trumpet-blowing here: if you listen to the fourth
collection of w/trem tunes, _Speaks Your Weight_ -
http://codepoetics.com/wtrem/speaks_your_weight/ - you'll get some
idea of what's possible using entirely free software and a fairly crap
soundcard. It doesn't push the boundaries, by any means, but it's
slicker than what some of my contempories were producing with better
gear (IMHO, of course - I'd had a lot of practice by that point at
making certain procedures work for me, and _Speaks Your Weight_
represents pretty much the best that I was able to do using those
techniques, so I'm perhaps unreasonably proud of it).
Dominic
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