I’m not a musician, but being a prog rock fan, I always was more interested in how music gets made than your average fanboi on the street. I guess I’d have to blame my old Music professor, who made us listen Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet when I was 12 and he was so cool that I can still play flute and read music.
However, being a proghead didn’t stop me to develop some guilty pleasures so, as soon it became possible, I started toying with trackers and soft synths.
Nowadays there’s nothing stopping you to create quite cool music in your bedroom. Granted, it’s not like playing on stage or rehearsing in studios, but you can churn out real nice electro working from home (that’s what I did with some friends in these months, btw) spending little or no money.
There are countless resources out there to help you get started: here are my suggestions (that are free or mostly free)
OpenMPT is my go-to tracker. It is free, it can use VSTs on windows, it runs nicely under WINE (so you can use it on Linux, too) and can open the metric ton of old MODs you (or, more likely, your father) has stored somewhere.
LMMS LMMS is a nice multiplatform DAW that runs on MacOS, Linux, Windows. It’s got its own synths (including the all-powerful ZynAddSubFX) and, with some tweaking, can be used to create nice tunes (I know because I used it). Worth a try.
Ardour A powerful, albeit quite complex to setup, open source DAW. Code is free/libre. However, compiled images are not. This means that the only free binary images can be downloaded only as packages in your favorite linux distro. Use it if you’re serious about making music using linux.
Audacity THE multiplatform audio editor.
Reaper Not free, but reasonably priced for its sheer power (and you can freely try it for one month and then it’s only a nag screen for one minute). I used it during the quarantine – thanks to a license expressly made for these weird times – and it’s worth every cent of the retail price. There are tutorials galore on the web ( Kenny Gioia’s ones are clear and comprehensive, start from here).
Wavosaur is fast, powerful and very lightweight audio editor for windows (buy very WINE-friendly). Also, check out https://blog.wavosaur.com/
VST4Free A one-stop shop for most FREE VSTs (virtual instruments and fx) for DAWs.
Some shameless promotion: My Bancamp Page contains some stuff I made over the years, including a techno trance tune with mellotrons and a 14/4 time signature, which is quit weird but still somewhat groovy.