Choosing a DAW

Why are there so many options? Back when I was getting started with electronic music I used Hammerhead. And Rubberduck h3o. These were not VSTs. Steinberg had not invented that yet.

In order to create a track you had to export wav files and stitch them together in something like Soundforge. Cakewalk came out with integrated audio recording somewhere around this time and Steinberg Cubase VST hit the scene.

I think there was some gray area here where Rebirth came out with 303 and 909 emulations. I messed with that but felt like it was too limited in its sonic palette. I guess other people felt the same because soon after that Reason hit the scene.

Anyway I ended up going from Hammerhead to Fruityloops since that seemed like the most logical progression. FL was pretty similar to hammerhead in the beginning but had lots more features.

I stuck with FL for a long time. It was hard to finish a track in FL. It was easy to start though. So I ended up with folders and folders of loops and very few finished tracks.

Ableton came on the scene early on. I didn’t get it at first. I kept using FL. I messed with other DAWs like Nuendo. I was doing some recording for bands around that time. I can’t remember what all I was doing.

I did some sessions on ADATs. I was recording with a band that was led by a pianist. I was messing with Fruityloops between takes on the studio computer in Las Vegas. I was downloading all sorts of VSTs from Usenet.

At some point, alternatives to Reason started to emerge. Things like Bitwig. Wow runs under Linux how cool.

At some other point I’m like hey why am I not being very productive? Oh yeah. Maybe I should just use Ableton.