Funny how this thread started 13 years ago and is still going.

FL Studio, Producer Edition for me. It was a steep learning curve but Udemy has some good courses on it. It is reasonably priced at about $200, for playing around with no serious intentions but still feature rich enough for professional purposes. It also has a cool mobile device version.

Ableton is about twice the price at the same feature level. I started with Pro Tools as it came free with my audio interface but again the price for a reasonably fully functioning version was closer to $1000 than it was to $100.

Audacity is a great free open source tool to record your guitar playing or vocals, I still use it sometimes for specific things.

Cheers,

Valberg