HI Cody,
Producing and remixing are 2 different skill sets (which often complement each other) but are not the same – it takes a certain level of musical understanding to take a track and change it into something different but that level is much higher if you are creating your own tracks from scratch..
And again there is a difference from remixing live and remixing in a studio environment. If you want to remix live, I cannot help you (although I would advise against getting older hardware and suggest choosing your software carefully – many people prefer Ableton for remixing over Traktor and I haven’t heard of maschine being used properly live by many people at all..) If you do get hardware, make sure that it supports the software you are using – You have mentioned 3 different controllers and all are designed for different software. The Maschine is for just that – Maschine (which apparently links to Traktor), the F1 is for Traktor natively and the Launchpad is designed for Ableton.. You need to make your mind up – download some trials!!)
BUT, if you are looking at remixing and/or producing in a studio environment, I wouldn’t be looking at any of the ones you suggested – indeed beyond a midi keyboard I wouldn’t get any hardware at all (I haven’t)..
What you would want in this situation is a DAW – Digital Audio Workstation – which is software designed for producing midi tracks/mixing audio and creating music.
Examples of this would be:
Apple Logic Pro X
Avid Pro Tools
FL Studio
Reaper
Reason
etc.
Have a look at this thread for the pros/cons of all of these and more.. http://www.digitaldjtips.com/topic/daw-selection-help/
Basically, you need to decide what you want to do with the software, that will lead you to which bit of software to use (many do the same things but all have a different workflow), and that will lead you to how much hardware you need to work with it.
bob6397
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