First of choosing a DAW... in general the rule is simple, the one that you are most comfortable with will work best for you... unless you have some very specific needs only available trough a certain DAW.. so if you are on Windows, Reaper will do just fine, but make sure to run the latest version for compatibility reasons.

For people starting with DAW's in general on MAC (i am a mac user) i advice to start out with garageband and later on uograde to Logic, nithing beats Logic price/permance/feature ratio. But since you are on Windows, Reaper is just as good as any other. And quite affordable if i remeber well..

When it comes to Free VST's its nice to try out things, there is a few very very nice ones espescially on the EDM synth side of things. Check out www.kvraudio.com they have a whole listing of payed and free VST's with dozens of reviews. Free VST's are a lot of fun when using them on top of your arranger/synth/stagepiano. Just adding an extra voice on top of instead of your arrangers right hand sounds can be really fun. Altough Reaper is not the best host to do so. I am using Mainstage for this. A good free alternative for mainstage is

But if you are serious about VST's and using them as the base of your setup, then you need to invest in a base VST that covers the whole chebang.. make sure to check for price drops.. good packages to start are
- Native instruments Komplete
- UVI Falcon (or workstation)
- IK multimedia Sampletank 3 (max)
- steinberg Halion 6
All are of the highest quallity, but none of them is cheep. Also some of the more expensive DAWS like Cubase, Logic, Ableton, Bitwig come with a whole set of build in instruments.

If you plan adding sounds to your hardware set-up trough VST's there is a whole load of different more specific VST's that come to mind.
- Spectrasonics Omnisphere for a broad range of synthetic and organic sounds
- Spectrasonics Keyscape for realistic piano/dp and many other typical keyboard sounds
- Arturia V-collection which comes with 18 authentic sounding synth simulations of some of the best synths ever created
- pianoteq for very nice virtuall piano
And many many more choices.. i am using mainstage as live host to add these sounds to my keyboards. This is a very cheap host, but only works on MAC. On Windows, there is Brainspawn Forte and Cantabile and some others. The new Gigperformer is very promissing.


To finish my post just some great free ones you must try

-EDM grandpiano
-4front electric piano's
-MrRay (epiano)
-Sylenth1 (synth)
-UHE Zebralette (free version of Zebra)

Also make sure to try out the free versions of the main samplers, they all come with some free content
-NI kontakt
-IK sampletank3
-UVI Workstation