Daw for remixing music and production

[Supermixer]

Hello and happy new year to you. Before i post my questions let me give u a high level background that will lead into my questions. Im currently a mobile dj ( also played music in a few clubs over the years too) and have been in the business for 20 years...Im a huge fan of beatmixing and truly enjoy mixing music at gigs... ive taken a strong liking to dj remix companies and have collected many of these cds over the years which i incorporate into my gigs....ive always been fascinated by how the music gets reconstructed, added beats , samples, etc....ive always had the vision of doing something like this someday and that day is approaching....

Ive just purchased a new 17" macbook pro and will be starting to use this with serato at gigs....
Along with this i would like to start remixing music professionally as one day its going to get harder to shlep equipment in and out of venues...

Ive started to do some research on protools and abelton...not sure what else is out there though but still looking...

Wanted to get your thoughts and opinions as to what software will work well with what i'd like to do..

Thanks for reading

Jamie

[Andrew_Malloy]

Ableton Live is great for taking snips of music and reconstructing it live. The Matrix view is killer for this. My suggestion is to download the demo for Live and go through the tutorial that is built in to it.

If you are really serious about live, grab a controller like the Launchpad.

[Supermixer]

Thank you andrew for the response....is abelton also good for editing tracks, adding samples, etc. ?

[Andrew_Malloy]

It isn't as powerful as say Soundforge for directly editing samples, but you can always keep that tool like that on the side for such a thing. But Live is near perfect for adding samples, key changing, tempo stretching, requantizing, etc.

[Supermixer]

Can protools do the same or similar functions as abelton can do? Is audio editing more geared in the protools world vs abelton? yeah soundforge was really good for editing and moving snips of audio around ..

[Andrew_Malloy]

There are functions that are exclusive to both. Generally, Ableton is really well accepted for the ability to create whole compositions from loops very quickly with the matrix window. It takes a little bit of time to grasp, but it is very, very powerful. Pro Tools has nothing like this.

On the other hand, Pro Tools has very surgical editing tools like Soundforge, but it handles them in a non-destructive manner which is the opposite approach, yet very effective. Ultimately, my opinion is that Live is more for you.

[Supermixer]

Ahh, gotcha . i've been reading about the new abelton and am quite impressed with it.
i hope to purchase a copy of it in the near future but will go through the tutorial and download the trial version..Thanks so much for your help ..