DAW Stuff

I’ve never had a single DAW that I used for everything. It seems like certain projects just need certain things that I’m familiar with in one of the DAWs that I use. I’ve been using FL Studio since version 2 or something like that in the late 90s. It still isn’t great for audio recording though. I have been using Reaper for nearly as long after brief stints with Nuendo, Logic, Sequoia, Pro Tools and I have no idea what else. It seems like in the early 2000s there were so many DAWs. Traktion, Studio One, maybe some others that I can’t recall now.

At the end of the day you have to learn something pretty well to be effective at completing actual projects. For me this ended up being Ableton by default. Mostly because everyone else seemed to be using it and if I showed a project to someone it was easier if I was already in Ableton.

I think that’s ok, but I still ended up using Bitwig for a while during my Linux audio phase. I’m maybe still in that phase somewhat. Ardour never did it for me but the availability of Bitwig was a major boon for me embracing Linux for audio.

This is a long rambling post to get my thoughts out now that I’m doing some more audio projects. My memory is pretty vague on why I decided to use the things I used over the years. FL Studio sticks out because it was the first. I had used Cakewalk for MIDI around that time, but doing audio based production was the game changer. Trackers like FastTracker were on my mind. I was blown away by FT2 with its realtime audio mixing of I think 32 channels each with a little oscilloscope waveform display. I ran that on my 386 machine at the time. I never did get productive with trackers though. It just was too much of an isolated environment.

Speaking of environments – as I get further into producing digital artworks I start to realize the value of multiple tools. It’s too easy to let the tool dictate the decisions you make in a work. Just by using multiple tools in your workflow it almost guarantees more innovation and variation in the work with little extra effort. I started projects in FL Studio and then finished them in Reaper. That was a major shift. Work with the strengths of getting sounds down on the timeline with FL easily and then work with the audio later on. In a way this makes sense even when dealing with new tools. Trying out a new tool has significant overhead and sometimes just taking the low hanging fruit and moving to a more established workflow gives you the best of all worlds without spending all of your time learning the depths of a new tool.

I’m still messing with ideas for my own DAW design. I think there are some gaps in the market still that Ableton purports to address but never really delivered. The “live” in Ableton Live was supposed to mean that you can erase the boundary between performance and composition. I don’t think it every fully delivered on that since it became a fully fledged studio tool. The clip view became a way of just a glorified mute screen for premade clips. Plenty of apps did this before in different ways even all the way back to the Alesis MMT-8. Why even have a grid or tracks? I’m thinking more in terms of just arpeggiators and playheads and data. What makes a song? Sections and parts, fills and grooves. Why not decouple this more from the idea of tracks and scenes?

The short answer is complexity. Tools like Jeskola Buzz explored the modular patching aspect of composition and the result is a large flow graph that is cool to manipulate but not super easy to control once an entire song gets built up.

What is the answer? Is there more to the grid? I’m doing more music theory study and learning more about classical music notation. There are definitely advantages for trained practitioners. The inscrutable key signature system enables experts to read music by sight the way we read sentences of text. The intervals notated by the dots on lines together can clump together to form “words” that can be read as a single unit without thinking. This is often overlooked by people trying to simplify music notation into a more logical piano-roll style of visualization. Can we bring the same shorthand into the DAW? The idea of a lead sheet with the chord changes and sections vs a long verbose song timeline would be a cool thing to see.

Back to commercial DAWs – is Ableton really the last word? I have a hard time believing this. Bitwig is heavily influence by Ableton and is not really a major paradigm shift. What about other media? Game engines and visualization? Is it possible that artists will not be solely musicians and sound designers but also visual artists as well? Some are tackling this but perhaps as more do integrated workstation solutions will emerge to support them. Touch Designer and Resulome along with DAW capabilities? A/V plugin formats merging Openframe and VST?