In this serie:
Now that we have bought an audio interface, we need to think about the tape recorder, mixer, effects, anything required in a studio.
In a digital studio, the reel to reel recorder is part of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).
The digital audio workstation (DAW) has become the music producer’s canvas, a central software platform containing all the sounds, instruments, and tools they use for recording music (and other).
DAWs are deep, complex programs with lots to learn. Choosing a DAW is one of the biggest early decisions a producer faces. But what is a digital audio workstation exactly, what can you do with them, and which one is a best fit for your own ideas and interests?
Think of a DAW as a digital representation of a physical recording studio where you can produce audio for a wide variety of mediums including film, gaming, podcasting, music, UX, and more. The whole studio process is packed into one, the creative ideas in tandem with the technical. You can record tracks, build up beats, add instruments or vocal parts, then lay out the arrangement, apply effects, and mix the finished work all within one interconnected hub.
Today, the convenience and accessibility of DAWs have made them the most popular way of making music and editing audio — used by everyone from bedroom producers and songwriters all the way up to top industry professionals.
There’s a range of DAWs available that we will explore in more detail below, each with unique features and advantages. That said, common standards of design and compatibility can be identified across the different brands. Personally i use as DAW Presonus Studio One and Reaper, but it’s just because in my opinion they have the best workflow for me, the one that facilitates my personal way of working.
But all DAWs have points in common, find the one that best suits your personal preferences. If someone tells you “this sounds better than that,” doubt it. A DAW doesn’t have to “sound better” but allow you to manage the way you work most effectively without hindering your creativity.
We’re talking bits, they can’t sound better in one DAW than another. If they feel like they do, there’s something wrong with either your setup or DAW. There are lots of both free and paid ones. Find yours and learn to use it well, even reading the fucking manual. The DAW is the most important tool in your creative arsenal.
What can you do with a DAW?
1. Record, play and edit audio tracks
Digital audio workstations come with built-in viewport that allow you to record, save, edit, and playback audio. To record audio from external instruments or microphones, you need an audio interface. An audio interface takes audio signals and converts them into data that a computer can process, allowing you to record and edit audio in software based environments like a DAW.
Once you record, all audio is saved and displayed on the timeline, where you can cut, copy, and paste audio waveforms. From the sequencer window, you can easily mute waveforms, stitch them together, and crossfade them into one another, much like you would with audio recorded on physical tape.
2. Record, play and edit MIDI virtual instruments tracks
DAWs also allow you to play virtual instruments (VST) for composing music. Virtual instruments and effects are software programs designed to replicate the sounds of physical instruments like synthesizers, pianos, drums, guitars, violins, trumpets, and more, or create completely new digital instruments for which there is no analog reference.
Most DAWs come with stock libraries of sounds, but they also allow for third party plug-ins—external software that can be “plugged in” to a DAW to enhance its functionality. In general, each VST has an installer that copies the needed files in the right place, a location predefined by Steinberg, the inventor of VST technology. However, many free plugins don’t have an installer, so you’ll need to place the necessary files in the correct folder by yourself.
Also check that the VST plugin is consistent with your DAW, a 64 bit DAW wants 64 bit VSTs, or it won’t work.
As you can easily imagine, a track in which the events you play or the settings of an audio effect are recorded is not equivalent to an audio track: another very important technology comes into play: MIDI.
Yes, your DAW can record two types of events: audio, such as from a microphone or guitar plugged into your sound card input, or digital in a format called MIDI.
Midi tracks don’t contain audio, but a list of events such as how you pressed the A key for 1 second and with what intensity, and a series of other performance-related events. A example in the following table:
Don’t be scared, there’s no need to handwrite these codes. Your MIDI keyboard (you have one, don’t you?) will send the DAW everything needed to write your performance, just like when you use your PC keyboard to write text.
The enormous advantage is that, just like in a word processor, it will then be very easy to correct any errors, modify the execution, align the MIDI messages in a grid, manipulate the intensity of a note, in short, everything you possibly want to modify in your MIDI track. This track will faithfully send all the necessary MIDI messages to the virtual synth VST, which will play it using the sound you have chosen (any sound included in the library of the VST) and on the dedicated MIDI channel. All this events are recorded in the piano roll, vhere you can edit each note in very simple manner.
MIDI is so popular and flexible that you can find a lot of songs on MIDI format in many sites, where you can download a song and then import the file in your DAW, where you can manipulate sounds for better results for make the better cover never seen..
Sounds complicated but it’s not, just imagine a midi track as if it were text in your favorite word processor, and being able to edit each note as you would in the word processor.
If these concepts are difficult for you to understand, I recommend watching this video. It’s based on Studio One, a commercial DAW, but the concepts apply to any DAW.
Your DAW is not “only” a recorder, it also has a mixer to mix your sounds as you wish and VST plugins are not only instruments, but also sound effects of all kinds that you can apply to your tracks.
All this can be managed to get your final master in the preferred audio format and resolution.
There would still be a million things to say, and we’ll do it in dedicated posts. For now it’s enough for me to think that you understand how important it is to choose the right DAW for you, don’t follow the advice of gurus but get an idea by trying to work with one software and then another. The main functions of DAWs are almost equivalent, find the one that best fits your creative workflow, it’s the only trick.