If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. No one but you can ever make the improvements to your life that you think it needs.

Here's a reason to sleep at night and work on music during the day: Your brain is a muscle, and the way you work that muscle is by making decisions. From what you're going to eat to breakfast and wear for the day to how you're going to react to that car that forgot to use its blinker when turning in front of you or how you're going to EQ that snare drum. The more that muscle is worked, the more it gets worn out and the less effective it becomes at making future decisions until it gets a chance to rest and stop making those decisions.

When you sit down at the computer at night, it will be more difficult to make decisions. Especially if you've had a very long day at school or work, and DEFINITELY if you've had a bad day. Plus, you end up staying awake and further stimulating yourself with sensory input until very late, losing both sleep and productivity.

Now if you make music in the morning, your brain is fresh and your mind is ready to create - and if you end up having a shitty day afterwards, you've already completed your music session for the day so you won't risk having an unproductive session or worse, one that doesn't happen at all.

Allow me to make an argument for headroom, though it's super subjective, because even inside the digital domain there are a few good reasons to employ proper gain staging.

First, it teaches you good habits like gain staging, which can be translated into the physical world (you want your signal coming into the mic and thru the preamp to be hot enough to not need a lot of boost to the level afterwards while quiet enough to allow a good amount of dynamic range. It also teaches you the very valuable lesson of Red Is Bad, which in my opinion is as valuable as learning the limits to 32-bit floating point audio.

It also prevents unwanted behavior from happening with third party software. Like Farley hinted at, some plugins will respond differently to a redlined signal because of how their algorithms function. Either they're designed to switch and function differently, like certain analog gear would when you pushed a too-hot signal through it, or they're just designed to expect normal levels and break down at that volume.

Finally, it helps you maintain a clear and representative mixing environment. Your DAW might be 32-bit but your interface isn't and your speakers sure as hell aren't. Why would you even want to risk having the signal distort and give you a signal response that's not actually present? Of course, this can be solved just by putting a clean limiter on your master or using a volume trim plugin like Utility or Fruity Balance to pull down everything before going out to your speakers down -5 or -10 dB if you really don't wanna gain stage before that.

The biggest argument against it is that it does not provide you with an accurate representation of what is coming out of your speakers. When you are trying to make proper mixing decisions, you want to have your speakers to match as 1:1 as possible so you only fix what is present, not what is added.

If you're unable to get a good sounding mix WITHOUT slapping on a mastering chain, that's probably a sign that you're perceiving louder as better like henny said - which is a natural human response. If you pulled down the volume fader on your master to peak around where it did before ozone, how would it sound?

At the same time, there are arguments to be made for mixing into a mastering limiter. SeamlessR has said he applies a mastering chain as soon as he considers the main section of the drop or chorus of his song to be "complete" because through experience he has found that to achieve the mix he desires a standard premaster level balance would not achieve the same result as when it's slammed into Maximus as hard as possible to become Da Fattest Sausage. So if you're making like gnarly bass-heavy Brostep, it might be better to start with Ozone on (or try to put it on as fast as possible).

Under $500? I think the 2i2 is probably gonna be near the top of your price point, The Apogee Duet is just under $600 and is probably what I would consider top quality in the entry level audio interface department. You really should be fine with the 2i2 until you're ready to drop a grand or two on something like the Apollo Twin or a rack-mounted interface.

You don't - The waveforms are whatever pitch you play the notes at. I definitely suggest taking some time and going over the massive user manual if you haven't already.

You'd be using the modulation oscillator - set it to +5, -7, +7 or -5. That would be a fourth above or below and a fifth above or below, respectively. Phase is just frequency modulation, so use that or Ring Mod on your oscillator then pluck it with a filter.

A major part of the sound to get these is the specific tonal relationship between the operators you're using. FM8, Sytrus, Operator, or any other FM synth will work, as will synths capable of FM like Serum. If the synth can do Amplitude Modulation or Ring Modulation (AM or RM), even better.

Try modulating square wave or a sine wave by a saw wave or another harmonically active waveform that's a perfect fifth or perfect fourth away - either five or seven semitones up or down, depending upon where you wanna go, increase the unison so you can get a wider sound, then slap a low pass filter on top with a quick decay and no sustain. If you're still not getting the sound you want, reverse which sound is the carrier and which sound is the operator.

Some of the sounds will be FM specifically, others will be AM or RM - they'll all get you close to the sound you want, so just experiment with waveforms and modulation modes until it sticks.

@Mussar, would be cool to hear some of those tricks 

They're the same tricks you'll find in most youtube tutorials or "workflow optimization" lectures -

1. Analyze a lot of other people's music to see how they construct their tracks and to steal their chord progressions for later use (I have a little notebook that I've been filling with progressions from classical music and jazz lately, for example). Copy down their basic song structure (i.e. 16 bar intro, 12 bar verse, 8 bar chorus, etc.) so if you're ever feeling uninspired you can just put down that arrangement skeleton and use it as a reference.

2. Practice iterative production and subtractive arrangement - if you can't get a great loop going on your first try, don't try to get a great loop going. Just build a mediocre loop, then duplicate it out and test out variations on that until something cooler comes up. If it's not interesting enough yet, just duplicate it out and make a few more minor changes. Alternately, keep stacking related ideas on top of each other for the same 4, 8, or 16 bar loop until it sounds like there's probably one or two elements that are pushing it over the top into the realm of "too busy." Then just duplicate out that loop until you've filled up however long your arrangement should be. Usually you'll get a feeling, but don't be afraid to just copy the length of another song or pick the arbitrary 3:15-3:45 "made for radio" duration.  Once you have that, mark off the arrangement and just delete whatever shouldn't be in those sections. No drums in the breakdown, no bassline in the intro or outro, etc. You'd be amazed at how much faster you'll get to a finished track just by practicing the subtractive arrangement concept.

3. Stockpile ideas, even without creating songs. Devote time just to writing chord progressions or melodies or drum loops that you can save on your hard drive for later. Set aside time specifically to design bass patches and create an archive of sampled one shots and reverb tails and white noise sweeps with different automations and lengths and all that good stuff. Go through all your old projects and gut them for spare parts - Synth presets, FX chains, even musical content (best with unreleased and abandoned music, obviously). I know Deadmau5 for example can bring a lot of his tracks together extremely quickly just because he has folders upon folders of MIDI files that he's written and saved - once he's ready for arranging and orchestrating he can just drag and drop.


There's probably more, but these will probably be a good place to start.

Ninja Edit: To echo what ZAU said, it really is all a matter of practice. The more focused and direct effort you put into achieving your goal, the greater the returns on your work. Don't just dick around in you DAW trying to write a song - plan your actions, then follow through on those plans.

The more you do it, the easier it gets - and there are a few tricks to speed you along the way whenever you get stuck. A year or two ago, a song would have taken a month or more to get past a loop, and I'm just now getting to the point where I can get the track arranged and mostly composed in about 4-5 hours of solid work over a day or two.

The hard part is finding time to finish them between homework and classes.