DAWlish Jamming

I’m digging back into making music with computers. I went “DAW-less” without really realizing it was a thing until later on when I got invited to the dawless jamming Facebook channel by someone I knew. I used to run a music production meetup called Laptop Music Production Workshop while at the same time jamming with a group of people in a rock band setting – just guitars and drums and stuff. The jamming was just less stressful for me and it felt less like work since I’m a programmer and I make a living by typing on my laptop all day to begin with.

So I developed a bit of a hardware synth habit. I ended up buying a lot of stuff from Reverb and Craigslist. Some things I just always wanted like an Access Virus and some things that I figured I should have like a Moog Slim Phatty. I kept buying stuff with the hopes that I would come up with a full configuration that would let me just jam out full songs live with hardware. I bought an Elektron Octatrack to become the new center of the universe. It only has two stereo inputs so then I got some line mixer boxes to funnel the rest of the stuff into those inputs. It seemed kind of janky. The Octatrack is great but it starts to get confusing when you are trying to figure out the routing for everything and get things recorded into the tracks that you are expecting.

I also tried a bunch of different hardware MIDI seqencers. I bought an MMT-8 out of curiosity. I figured that this was such a staple of stage and studio setups for so many years it must have some kind of magic to it. It’s a cool box and certainly influenced many other future pieces of gear but it’s still kind of clunky to use to record. I had it synced to grab the output of another step sequencer and it kept missing the first note unless I delayed it a little bit. Lots of these boxes have little nits about them like this related to MIDI timing. I’m also annoyed by things like the internal sequencers not having options to start and stop the transport when in external MIDI sync mode. It’s frustrating to need MIDI tempo sync and clock but you don’t necessarily want the internal sequencer to start playing when another device in the MIDI chain starts. I tried using MPCs, some old Yamaha QYs and even a Trigger Finger Pro. Nothing that I’ve used really seems like the killer solution to hardware sequencing. It’s tempting to put things like the Yamaha RM1x on a pedestal as a great sequencer but the truth is that there are significant limitations like having to stop the transport to copy bars and do things that are trivial in a DAW. I’m a big fan of the Roland MC grooveboxes, but they really aren’t great as sequencers. Even the MC505 has to stop recording in order to change tracks. I even did a hardware mod on my 303 to enable remote control of the record button. It’s actually possible to drop in and out of record mode on time if you are really good at clicking stop and play on the beat. Flaky tactile switches makes this a risky proposition in any situation that involves an audience.

Turns out that doing everything without a computer is a pretty tall order. Computers do a lot of things it turns out. Simply recording a bunch of synth tracks at the same time requires some dedicated hardware recorder and then you have to do a mixdown etc. Unless you are happy with committing everything live to two tracks, which I have done but never felt super happy with.

Things like MIDI master clock boxes, merge/thru boxes, USB hosts, line mixers, tons of cabling and even rack mounts under my desk. All of this stuff seemed reasonable one step at a time but at the end of the day I kept re-configuring my setup after one jam and then it seemed like I needed even more stuff.

Eventually I just got some multichannel audio interfaces and tried to hook everything up to the computer under the auspices of running it as a digital mixer. I had the MOTU livemix software running and then started thinking “hey it would be great if I had eq on this thing”. I didn’t have a modern MOTU box as I think they support more DSP now than my old 828 did.

It became kind of a slippery slope. Now I have a DAW running and my external gear more or less hooked up with outboard delays and random guitar pedals patched through a bunch of ADAT preamp boxes into my Focusrite interface. At least now I can record all of my things at once. However it’s easy to forget the bad old days of weird MIDI timing issues and latency when running sound out and back through a software send through an external interface.

I’m now re-embracing the DAW as a centerpiece of my setup. I’m still using some external gear and one of my current theses is that using things like the sequencer or arpeggiator on a piece of hardware is a good way to be creative and in the flow when using a DAW. Jamming around on the hardware sequencer and then recording the MIDI into the DAW is pretty cool. I think I’m one of the only people that actually liked the Trigger Finger Pro which has a built-in sequencer.

The pieces of hardware that made the cut were my Shruthi, the Moog Minitaur and surprisingly my Virus. I’d been doing some isolated listening tests with the Virus and thought it sounded really dated and kind of thin but now that I’m using it along with some softsynths it has a quality that feels pretty solid. If you compare with plugins and turn off all the effects it still stacks up pretty well. I though that my Waldorf Pulse 2 would be one that I’d use all the time but as unique as it is, it doesn’t really stack up along with some of my other stuff. I’ll revisit it at some point but for now it’s not in the setup.