Cubase

If I wasn’t using that I’d be using Ableton

I can speak to cubase & bitwig.

Cubase: Pros - it can do any genre, has great stock plugins. Phenomenal voice tools like the new vocal plugin in 13 & variaudio, retrospective record. Very efficient on the CPU. Cons - no lfo base modulation, and the media bay /browser is pretty clunky. Adding effects & tracks can take a few extra clicks compared to other draws. Workflow can be a little slow.

Bitwig: Pros - extremely fast at adding instruments & effects, modulation completely puts cubase’s to shame. Cool note effects & arpegiators. Instrument layers and group tracks are nice. Cons- Bitwig’s piano roll is pretty terrible, has no scale detection, you’ll spend longer placing notes. Stock plugins are pretty bad. No analysis tools, poor audio recording functionality, no track versions. Not as performant as cubase.

Summary: Despite bitwig’s fast instrument & effect adding workflows, Bitwig and cubase have roughly similar workflow speeds when you take bitwig’s poor piano roll into account. Cubase can do everything bitwig can do, but it takes more effort in some areas like adding tracks. Cubase’s modulation is TERRIBLE.

Ask yourself if lfo modulation is a deal breaker for you. If you need it, go bitwig, if you don’t, cubase is gonna be a better option for you

Of those three I think Bitwig is the best choice if you create electronic music. It’s very slick and can do some truly unique stuff. It also has a good non-linear workflow and it has everything you need included.

REAPER is very flexible, very powerful and unbeatable on price. It’s not for the faint of heart though and requires you to put in a lot of effort as a user to get going. Once you’ve done that it’s great though.

Cubase is also very feature rich and possibly the best DAW there is for songwriting and composition. I know lots of people use it for EDM but to me it seems its strength is in recording and arranging more traditional music.

You can make any kind of music in any DAW and I believe one will have most success sticking to one and really learn it as opposed to switching around because some specific feature catches your fancy.

In the end it comes down to which you feel more comfortable with and you should really try them out to see. But all those three are top drawer tools in their own specific ways.

If you want to make just beats and want to use the piano roll while doing so, might I suggest you take a look at FL Studio? It’s one of the easiest DAW to use and a lot of EDM producers & beatmakers use it, to work in a style similar to yours (drawing notes in the piano roll). That’s how I started. I still use FL Studio to this day. Although, I’ve grown into using traditional DAWs like Cubase, I still sometimes enjoy using FL Studio. It’s very very quick and gets you to the point quickly, as compared to something like Cubase. Cubase is a beast and can be super powerful if you know how to use it. But the learning curve is quite steep as compared to FL Studio. As for the tutorials, both of them have good resources available online on YouTube etc. Try the demo and see what you like.

Kind of surprised nobody here has mentioned Presonus Studio One. It’s made by previous Steinberg employees and is very similar to Cubase, but for many has a much more streamlined workflow.

You can demo it as well as Cubase, so I think it’s at least worth checking out. I’ve been using Cubase for years so it’s my preferred DAW, but if I were just starting out, I think I would likely find Studio One much easier to use.

I used Cubase for a long ass time and still do, but I also used bitwig alot and I think I’d recommend you that. Note that bitwig is actually quite an expensive daw. Each full version update is like 100€, so for that price there is a serious lack of normal functions. But it’s easier and more intuitive/fun to jam out beats than cubase for sure, no question about that.

For your situation? Frooty loops all the way (FL studio or whatever it’s called now).