The Tools I Use: My Current DAW, Plugins, and Setup

People ask me this all the time in the DMs, and the answer has not changed in years: FL Studio, all day. I started on it back when I was just figuring out what a kick drum even was, and every time I've tried to switch — and I have tried, twice — I come crawling back within a week.

There is something about the way FL Studio thinks that matches how my brain works. The Step Sequencer lets me lock in a drum pattern in under thirty seconds. The Piano Roll is still my favorite place to sketch melodies quickly. And the one thing that keeps me loyal above everything else: Lifetime Free Updates. I bought FL Studio Producer Edition years ago and have not had to treat every major update like a new purchase.

I run FL Studio on a Windows machine with an AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 64 GB of RAM. The RAM sounds like overkill until you're running Omnisphere, Kontakt, and a couple of Serum instances simultaneously and your session still breathes. I am not interested in fighting my tools. I want to sit down, load up the project, and create. A fast machine makes that possible.

Ableton Live is incredible — I know that. Kenny Beats swears by it. But every time I open Ableton, I feel like I'm working in someone else's kitchen. Everything is in the wrong drawer. FL Studio is my kitchen, and I know exactly where everything lives.

Essential Plugins I Can't Live Without

If my hard drive crashed tomorrow and I could only reinstall five plugins, here is what I would reach for first.

Omnisphere 2 by Spectrasonics is the first. It is a significant investment, so check current pricing before you buy, but nothing in my collection has paid for itself more times over. The library is enormous, but that is almost beside the point. The way you can layer two patches together, morph between them, run them through Omnisphere's own internal effects chain — that is where the magic lives. My best-selling beats often have an Omnisphere pad somewhere in the background, sitting in that low-mid frequency space that makes a track feel wide and cinematic without calling attention to itself.

Serum 2 by Xfer Records is my go-to for everything aggressive. Leads, supersaws, distorted 808 textures, future bass stabs — Serum handles all of it. The updated wavetable engine feels cleaner to me, and the visual interface means you can actually see what your sound is doing, which is invaluable when you're trying to learn synthesis rather than just tweak presets. Pricing and upgrade paths change, so treat the number on the sales page as the source of truth.

Kontakt by Native Instruments rounds out the holy trinity for me. If I need a real piano that actually sounds like a piano, a string section that breathes, or any kind of sampled instrument that needs to feel organic, Kontakt is where I go. Paired with third-party libraries — I use Spitfire Audio's Albion series heavily — it adds a dimension of realism that purely synthetic instruments struggle to replicate.

FabFilter Pro-Q is my mixing anchor. I do not mix with it in heavy-handed fashion; I use it to create space. A precise high-pass here, a subtle dip in the low-mids there. FabFilter's interface shows you exactly what you're doing, and the dynamic EQ mode is genuinely one of the most useful features in my entire signal chain. It is not cheap, so check current pricing and only buy it when you know why your stock EQ is not enough.

Valhalla Room is the last essential. Valhalla's plugins have always felt unusually affordable for what they deliver. My vocal reverbs, my snare spaces, my ambient send effects — all Valhalla Room. There is a warmth in that plugin that no other reverb at any price point has been able to replicate for me.

Hardware: What's on My Desk

My hardware setup is deliberately minimal. I spent years accumulating gear I thought I needed and slowly realized most of it was noise. What remains has earned its place.

The Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 4th Gen is my audio interface. Clean preamps, rock-solid drivers, zero fuss. I have been on Focusrite for years and I see no reason to change. It handles everything I throw at it — recording vocals or instruments, monitoring my mixes, sending audio to the reference speakers.

My controller is the Novation FLkey 37, which was designed specifically with FL Studio in mind. The integration is seamless: pads map directly to the Step Sequencer, the encoder knobs control mixer channels without any MIDI mapping setup. It feels like Novation and Image-Line sat in a room together and actually built this thing to be used, not just sold.

Monitors are Yamaha HS7s, which have been on this desk for four years. They are not flattering — every flaw in your mix is right there in your face — which is exactly why I chose them. I mix on the HS7s and then reference through headphones (Sony MDR-7506, still one of the best budget studio buys in audio) and on cheap earbuds, because that's where most people actually listen to music.

Free Plugins That Sound Expensive

One of the things I try to push back on is the idea that you need expensive tools to make professional music. Your ear and your taste are the most important equipment you have. That said, there are a few free plugins in my chain that I would keep even if money were no object.

Vital is the obvious one — a wavetable synthesizer that rivals Serum in capability and costs nothing for the base version. The entire synthesis engine is available in the free tier, while paid tiers add more content. When I am working with a younger producer or someone just getting started, Vital is the first plugin I tell them to download from the official Vital site.

OTT by Xfer Records is a free multiband compressor modeled after an Ableton Live preset that became so popular it got released as a standalone plugin. I use it as a send effect on melodic elements when I want them to jump out and sparkle. One knob, essentially — the depth control — and it transforms a flat synth pad into something that sounds mastered.

TDR Nova by Tokyo Dawn Records is a dynamic EQ that would not embarrass itself next to FabFilter Pro-Q in many situations. I use it on buses when I need frequency-specific compression rather than straight EQ. It is free, it is stable, and it is shockingly good.

How My Setup Changed Over the Years

When I first started producing, my setup was a laptop with a cracked copy of FL Studio, a cheap USB microphone, and a pair of consumer earbuds. I am not proud of the cracked copy — go buy the software, it matters — but I am also not going to pretend that I started with a $3,000 setup. I did not.

The biggest shift came not from adding tools but from removing them. I used to have every plugin pack I could get my hands on: sample packs I never opened, synths I loaded up once to scroll through presets and never touched again. At one point I had seventeen different reverb plugins installed. Now I have two — Valhalla Room and Valhalla Vintage Verb — and my mixes are better for it.

The second shift was in my computer. Moving from 16GB to 64GB of RAM, upgrading to a CPU that can actually handle large sample libraries — that changed my sessions in a real, tangible way. I stopped losing ideas to crashes and load times.

The third shift, and this is the one I talk about most when people ask for advice: I stopped upgrading gear as a form of procrastination. It is easy to convince yourself that your beats would be better if you just had a different synth, a different interface, a different keyboard. Sometimes that is true. Most of the time, though, you are using gear acquisition as a way to avoid sitting down and making music. At Plutony Beats, the rule is simple — if what I have can make the beat I am hearing in my head, that is enough.

If you are starting from zero, spend in this order: a reliable computer, decent headphones, one audio interface if you record, and then one paid tool only after you have outgrown the free or stock version. Build the habit before you build the shopping list.

Your tools do not make you a producer. Your output does. For a practical reset, write down the five tools you would reinstall first if your hard drive crashed, then make your next beat using only those. If you want to see how those choices fit into an actual session, I break down the process in my beat-making workflow guide.