{"id":739,"date":"2021-09-15T01:41:42","date_gmt":"2021-09-15T01:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/?page_id=739"},"modified":"2024-06-04T07:46:09","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T07:46:09","slug":"a-completely-biased-guide-to-daws","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/a-completely-biased-guide-to-daws\/","title":{"rendered":"A completely biased guide to DAWs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is a matter of taste. As you have appalling taste, you are lucky that I have found time to instruct you in the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ableton Live.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Notably not called Ableton Compose<\/em>, because trying to write actual music with this tool is like keyhole surgery, one little box at a time. Live<\/em> was first developed for deejays to string together bits of other people\u2019s music to a click track. Since that time, it has been encrusted with a tower of technical jiggery pokery that makes Live<\/em> the premiere tool of \u2018barbeque boys\u2019 the world over. If you want to synchronise two machines, or write code that burps every third bar, or run a bassoon through a duct simulation you are well served. But the vast forehead of this thing remains built on the reptile brain underneath, and it fails at facilitating any attempt at flowing empathic music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have live performances where you need six of this followed by seven of that and the whole thing must be panned just so \u2013 you will use Live. If you want to surprise yourself with a tantalising melody you will not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bitwig.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

See Ableton Live.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pro Tools.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

If you have an uncle with a large recording studio; custom furnishings, several thousand dollars on each microphone, grand piano in room C \u2013 you may be a candidate for Pro Tools<\/em>. It will slot nicely into this high-end milieu, easing your work up to the top shelf. But buying Pro Tools<\/em>, in itself, does not manifest this uncle, any more than red Ferrari brings forth a trophy wife. There are many tools that will do exactly same thing for much less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

True, Pro Tools<\/em> is well made. Most of their stupid bullshit such as real-time mix downs and forced hardware is gone, but there are still AAX plugins \u2013  an industry standard unused by anyone else in the industry. They cost an insulting amount, which can be paid off every month. Or you know, you could just go elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reason.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The curious thing is that Reason\u2019s<\/em> illustrations of hardware racks appeared just when real hardware racks were going in the garbage. Such that many Reason<\/em> users are convinced that actual hardware is a clever manifestation of the GUI (and if you don\u2019t believe that you\u2019ve never met a child amazed that \u2018wow you have a collectable of the save icon!\u2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up with racks and damn, I like them in Reason<\/em>. They are cheerful. I like scrolling up and down and hitting the tab key to plug wobbling cables in the back, and hitting the tab and scrolling up and down and actually\u2026 that cable thing gets tedious<\/em>. You need a really big screen to see what you\u2019re doing, and then a magnifying glass to read the controls on all those boxes you\u2019re trying to navigate. Reason<\/em> completely fails at scale, being too small and too large simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I must admit I\u2019ve never bothered to use Reason<\/em> as a DAW. It\u2019s my modular synthesiser which I plug into real DAWs and in that respect, it\u2019s a damn fine thing, better than any eurorack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Logic.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Platform limited is bullshit. Same goes for Sonar.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cubase.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Like if your grandad got a hold of monkey glands or something and kept living way beyond a natural span of existence. I had CARD32 on a Commodore 64 way back in dinosaur times. Then it was on the Atari and it still gets out of the coffin every night. I guess I am Grandma, and got used to Cubase<\/em> and throw my hands in the air and go \u201cWhelp! That\u2019s Grandad For Ya!\u201d. (Actually, at one time I tried using Logic<\/em> back when it was on PC. That was foul, like \u2018locked in some taxation consultancy for weeks on end\u2019 foul. The Environment \u2013 what the fuck.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You are not ever going to get super excited about Cubase,<\/em> but like Microsoft Excel<\/em> it is going to do the job well enough, and in software that\u2019s probably all you can hope for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traction.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

They changed the name to Waveform<\/em> and added a mixer and MIDI editor. In version 8. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Renoise.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

No, typing hexadecimal into a grid is not cool, it\u2019s the antithesis of music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reaper.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot to like about Reaper<\/em> as a sound editor. In an age where ambisonics is taking on increasing importance, restricting waveforms to 5.1 or stereo is shooting yourself in the foot, and the only competition are the overpriced Nuendo<\/em> and Pro Tools HD<\/em>. It makes serious attempts at reducing bloat, embracing formats, and providing a range of useful tools in the box. And it\u2019s CHEAP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you\u2019re not out of the woods. Once past the basics it\u2019s got a lot of idiosyncrasies, not cute ones, but mind numbingly painful<\/em> ones, the sort that drives you to scream WTF and to curse the manual which is (a) a fan written wiki and (b) always out of date with the five new versions a week. Reaper<\/em> is not open source, but it sure smells<\/em> like open source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And MIDI handling is not handled well at all. It\u2019s an audio editor with some MIDI tacked on, and you\u2019ll need to buy a real MIDI tool alongside Reaper<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FL Studio.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I used FL Studio<\/em> for ages. Then I stopped for a while, to try change my working methods. When I tried to go back to it, I found myself outside a mental wall. All the things that seemed normal before seemed weird and twisted. I could still get old projects up and running, but the thought of doing anything new with it was perverse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I realised I\u2019d been in a cult. I\u2019d since become deprogrammed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FL is like if you put a drum machine on steroids, lots of steroids, INSANE levels. It\u2019s a drum machine levelled up a billionity-billion times. I mean, I scored a motion picture on FL once upon a time. It can do it, hell \u2013 it can probably do anything, but it will do it in a way that makes no sense anywhere outside the cult headquarters, because it\u2019s built on layer upon layer of feature additions. Things rarely get designed in a holistic manner in FL, they get layered on top. Like if you want to freeze the audio on a track, there was some convoluted procedure with placing an Edison plug in on a mixer track\u2026 these days I just freeze the track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t hate on it, and hell, you might even be enthralled by it. See you when you get out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last update 15 Sep 21<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is a matter of taste. As you have appalling taste, you are lucky that I have found time to instruct you in the matter. Ableton Live. Notably not called Ableton Compose, because trying to write actual music with this tool is like keyhole surgery, one little box at a time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-739","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","tag-essay"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}