studio setup of popular producers

[phreaque]

A nice advice I would prefer to hear if I wear you...
Go to music production services like Freshly Sequeezed Samples, Myloops.net, Vengeance sound, etc and start to learn from their templates what's going on.

[Sendy]

I'm not so sure about the word "professional" anymore. Given how it's now common knowledge that making a living and actually knowing what you're doing often have no correlation, I've found for me, the word has become decoupled with the concept of making a living. In fact, in the current financial and sociopolitical climate, the very concept of "making a living" seems to be breaking down

A lot of artists never made much money in their life, but posthumously they've gone on to become legends in the art world.

To me, something sounds professional if it sounds like whoever made it knew what they were doing. There's a certain hallmark that experience and dedication brings. They've taken care of the things most miss, like the background of the sonic image, note lengths and velocity, pitch articulations and musicality.

A person can be said to be professional if they can converse and work with others, know what they are doing, and have a knowledge of what their tools do, rather than just how to use them. Being able to work to briefs and deadlines also plays into it, but there are a lot of great artists who probably don't check that box

[kuzami]

The most important is experience and skill. Find a setup that works with you. If you want to se what pros use, you can check out the mentioned musicradar website or equipboard.com.

[e@rs]

Always use these: Image-Line FL Studio as a DAW, Vengeance samples for drums, NI Massive for basses, LennarDigital Sylenth1 and reFX Nexus for synth patches, NI Kontakt for strings and iZotope Ozone and Dada Life Sausage Fattener for mastering. This list will make you pro in no time.

Too bad you'll be sounding exactly like everybody else out there.

[pilgrim_heart]

the idea behind: you should know everything inside your DAW to decide/understand what you need and what isn't for you and your workflow. it's exactly not about using every possible feature. over the years i learned many things inside my DAW which i thought i don't need on first sight but i was wrong because i didn't know it better.

Hmm, I might have misunderstood you. From the emphasis on the "inside out" thing I thought your recommendation was to pretty much exclusively focus on learning the DAW for 1-2 years. If you meant it more like trying to make sure that one picks up enough knowledge of it along the way to know it pretty well in that time then I think we're basically on the same page. I recently switched to Reaper and I try to skim the manual when I'm bored to have an idea of what's in there as I think that's useful. I wouldn't really say that I need most of the the features I've discovered but they can certainly make life easier. I wouldn't really hold off looking at 3rd party plugins etc. though since these usually seem to perform different functions than the DAW features (that said I'd hold off buying plugins until I had a good idea what freeware stuff can do).