What's your favorite DAW?

Gear
21

@eric.kiser

It does not have to be hard or complex, in fact you don’t even need a computer at all!
There is another option, look at something like the Zoom live track L-12 https://tinyurl.com/y6lr2fdh This thing is pretty bad ass. It’s like a DAW but all in hardware. It allows you to connect your sources, be it MICs, Instruments, synths, or even an audio track from a phone or MP3 player. Sure it’s not going to have the depth of options a DAW offers, but for recording and capturing to a digital format, this is pretty darn simple.

You can record each of the sources separate, and play them back together or solo’d etc, and save them all to an SSD card, then you can copy those raw sound files where ever you want or to whomever you want. Its really cool if you want to say play the bass line, then you move onto guitar, then add some synth/drums and finally vocals. This box allows you to do it all, one track at a time or all the same time etc. Like a mini studio on your desktop.

Basically an all in one hardware solution. It’s much less to learn, compared to the complexity of a DAW, but also easily captures your audio from your instrument into a digital format. You can take SDcard and then move it into a DAW and continue to modify, manipulate, arrange and master in the DAW if you want.

But for just wanting to record and move tracks around, this would be a good solution. Yea it cost about $600 bucks, but if you look at the cost of DAW software and a USB mixer or audio interface… it’s a pretty comparable solution.

The nice thing about it, is that it’s hardware, no PC required, its small enough to pack up and take with you if you want to record live at a gig, you can find many youtube videos on it for more info. There are other similar pieces of hardware, but at the price, Zoom is prob the best in class.

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22

I will be the first to endorse Zoom products (their DAIs and effects processors are great, as are their voice recorders - all of which I own or have owned).

That said, for recording and sharing projects with friends, I’d go with something like GarageBand or Audacity before spending for the LiveTrak. GarageBand is dead simple once you watch a youtube tutorial or two, and will do a better job at the “passing a project back and forth” part. He will need a DAI though. I recommend the Zoom U-24 :slight_smile:

Now. That said, the LiveTrak does look awesome though, like a mixer with a builtin live mixdown recorder. If I needed a live mixer I would want that thing bad.

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23

Speaking of Zoom… I just got my daughter an R8 for her birthday. Seems pretty easy to use. With no prior experience, she’s gotten it figured out and has recorded an EP in 2 weeks. It packs a lot of features into a small package… it’s a portable (battery powered) 8 track recorder (SD card), DAI and DAW control surface all in one.

https://www.zoom-na.com/products/production-recording/multi-track-recorders/zoom-r8-recorder-interface-controller-sampler

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24

I really like their products. All built really well, and sound great.

Man the LiveTrak looks crazy good for what it is. Just forwarded it to a friend that could use something like that. Dedicated onboard compressor per channel plus also effects and parametric EQ per channel is awesome.

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25

Does anyone have a favorite drum set/drum machine VST (or other plugin or software instrument) they use? One thing I miss on Windows from Garageband is the excellent drum support.

Cakewalk has a good start but ideally I would like something that I can use with audacity (which probably means a standalone and not a plugin?)

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26

I’m not sure it will fit your needs, but you might check out Reaper. http://reaper.fm/ It has a free trial, with a pretty reasonable cost to license {$60}. I’m just getting started with it, but there does seem to be an extensive user community providing lots of samples and plugins [check out the Resources => REAPER stash section of their website] and lots of YouTube videos on how to do things. If you download it, check out the section on drums on page 317 of the user manual.

Unlike Audacity, which is more of an “audio editor”, Reaper is a full-function DAW. Unfortunately, with all that power comes lots of complexity! On the plus side, most of the seriously complicated stuff can just be ignored if you don’t need it. I got it to go with my Behringer UMC-404HD - which is a Christmas present so I won’t be able to actually play with it until tomorrow. :frowning:

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27

Thanks! Yeah I have Reaper - one major advantage it has over Audacity is it allows VST instruments (Audacity only works with effects as Audacity doesn’t do MIDI.)

I’m mostly wondering about people’s opinions on drum VSTi’s or standalone software drum machines.

But I should probably talk my friend into buying Reaper as at $60 it’s a bargain anyway.

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28

I can’t say that it is my favourite as I have not tried any others but my Novation keyboard and focusrite interface both came with Ableton so that is what I use right now.
I say use but I don’t really know how to use it at the moment but I have signed up for an online course for it.

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29

Logic Pro is really nice, particularly for the drum sounds. I do all my demo / metal-jams on Logic. One of the main comments I get from people listening to my rough demos is “are those real drums?”.
They’re not.
They’re computer drums… but I tap them out live, for the most part (so it sounds human-ly inaccurate) and the sample sounds are real nice.

It was $200 when I bought in a few years ago.
Very worth it to me.

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30

I use Reaper since maybe 10 years now. I love it, it’s just 100% of what I want for a DAW.

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31

Yeah, I love GarageBand, and if I could talk my friend into getting a mac then I would just buy Logic now. Even the virtual drummers in GB are decent as a first stab for songs.

As it is I will probably buy Logic eventually anyway. It’s just good.

For now, Reaper seems like a good PC alternative. It’s powerful, inexpensive, does VSTi’s well, doesn’t have all the BandCamp claptrap around it that Cakewalk does now, and is really customizable. I grabbed it when @terb recommended it a while back and still have a few days on eval. I’ll see if I can talk my friend into it.

Audacity is dead simple but just too limited.

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32

Yeah Reaper looks like just the ticket here.

Another huge advantage of Reaper for me is that although I am a mac guy, my gaming PC is actually far more capable than my mac laptop for, well, anything really, except running a decent operating system :slight_smile:

(before anyone suggests linux - I love linux, don’t worry - but mac hardware is flawless running linux too in my experience, did it for several years on a mini)

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33

Just made it official and paid for Reaper. It’s great, all the DAW I will need. thanks for the tip @terb.

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34

I’m into Ableton, but I’m also a synth junky and it’s scene mode plays like a lot of my groove boxes/sequencers, so it feels familiar to the hardware I use.

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35

I’m always curious about other DAWs - and Abelton in particular. What is it about this one that makes grooves/synths so much more workable? I find that most of my more beats-oriented friends are using this.
Any specifics you can share to shed some light?

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36

@Gio I think there’s a couple of cool things about Ableton.

One cool thing is Time Warping samples (which I think they were the first DAW to do, or at least do well, but is probably a staple of DAWs nowadays). This let’s you take per-recorded samples and adjust their tempo to the BPM of the project without affecting the pitch! This makes it great to collect weird grooves/beats from anywhere, and not have to worry about tempo matching.

From their site: Audio Clips, Tempo, and Warping — Ableton Reference Manual Version 11 | Ableton

Unlike music stored on tape or in a traditional digital audio workstation, the music in Live remains “elastic“ at all times. Live is capable of time-warping samples while streaming them from disk so as to synchronize them to the current Live Set’s tempo. This happens without affecting the pitch, which can be changed independently. Mixing and matching audio from different origins is therefore extremely easy.

Another cool thing is a pretty tight hardware integration ecosystem. They make the Push2 control surface (which is wonderful), and companies like Novation and Akai also make some “made for Ableton” control surfaces that are super awesome. I think these pad-based controllers lend themselves the the beat/groove scene.

And to steal a quote from a site that I already closed the tab on :smile: :

Where Live really differentiates itself, though, is in Session View . Live started as a basic loop-triggering program , but has since evolved into a fully fledged DAW . Session View is where this loop triggering functionality lives.

So there is a traditional “Arrangement View” that’s sort of horizontal, time based view where tracks are stacked on top of each other - but at the same time you can switch to “Session View” Where it sort of flips, and the tracks become columns, and the rows underneath are like “Scenes” or “Pages” you might see on a hardware device that has a sequencer on it. You can then also trigger different parts of each column/track together or independently, so it isn’t as “time linear” as in Arrangement View (but can record everything to arrangement view for playback!)

Here are a couple screenshots I took to sort of illustrate this:

timeline_view
timeline_view1920×1041 147 KB

scene_view_1
scene_view_11920×1040 133 KB

scene_view_2
scene_view_21920×1040 127 KB

They probably have some better/cleaner screens on their their site :rofl: :

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37

Effects sync like that is super useful, and not just for samples. One good example is echo/delay time syncing so that the delays sync to the BPM automatically without you needing to find it with the pedal knob.

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38

Super rad - thanks for all the feedback. That is really nice to have a user report in on what makes their DAW their tool of choice.

The quote above reminded me of my buddy showing me his Garage Band live-electronic set up. It was similar - columns that could trigger, and all really facilitating a live-electronic-music set up. It was rad.

Thanks!

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39

Ableton has a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve had it a few years and would use anything else. It is very versatile and who wants to start learning another DAW after you’ve invested so much time learning to use it? It certainly isn’t cheap, but I like it’s versatility and plan to use it as a backup for open mic soon, as it is designed to be used as a performance tool ̣(sort of like a cut down version of Traktor).

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40

I’m in the Apple camp too. I tried ProTools (the free version) and I had all sorts of trouble understanding/using it. Logic and my brain work nicely together and it’s a great product. Most of my experience with Logic is recording acoustic drums and electronic drums.

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