DAW is a meaningless marketing term, though fairly understood. A sequencer it is, putting sounds into order.

 

Gotta love pattern sequencers! For whatever reason I have some problems myself running them as MIDI plugins though I have no issues with hardware (or builtin) sequencers, even if they're way more limited than modern MIDI FX.

So I tend to run complex arpeggios and sequences and record them as MIDI. Stupid way of doing it really, but hey, as long as it works there's no problem, right?

 

I wonder why. They are the same as any other arp tools like Cthulhu, Nora, etc. One tip I can mention I guess; is that I often put a Logic Transposer plugin in my top Midi FX plugin slot before these other things. Sometimes the octaves don't match up the way you would expect, so the Transposer gives me 48 semitones I can shift the data up and down until they match up better. (but not actually moving the notes anywhere).

It's an old habit I picked up when using Drummer plugins. You can move the data up and down the scale and then watch the piano roll for that track to see where your notes are landing, and then compare with where the plugin instrument wants to receive the data. You can latch automate that transposer slider in Logic which is nice if you want a cut-up dj crossfader effect to beats and scratch effects.

 

Yeah, it's a force of habit for me I guess. The transpose function is handy, I personally use one on my keyboard into a MIDI arp/seq/generator -> into an another transpose then a scale (I just use Live's standard tune to get rid of one odd notes, nothing fancy). Then while tweaking record it into a MIDI track and edit as necessary. Maybe overkill but at least there's not too many buttons and I can get decent mileage out of a simple step sequencer.

My favourite is triggering a sequencer with another one, easily done with modular plugins (or hardware too). That way I can break the rhythm as well without getting too fancy.

 

MOTU Digital Performer

 

Redundant.

 

I use Cubase since Cubase SX now i use Cubase 13 Pro

 

electro plugin? It bakes electro funk?

 

Ableton + Elektron

 

WARNING : SHAMELESS GEAR PORN



I've recently acquired the Synthstrom Deluge and boy oh boy, it literally changed my life. For one, I have 1000 euros less on my bank account. For two, I've sold many pieces of gear to partly fill that hole. For three, I have a new thing I can look at while tripping (admiring myself in the mirror was getting stale).

Jokes aside, it's an amazing piece of gear. I hope I'll be able to make some music with it someday in the future.

 

Akai Rhythm Wolf

 

I've got Redundant Plus from sister site and I love it. Use it everyday, except when its a holiday or I'm working on the car or doing yard work or have to run errands, but yeah any other time I'm all up in that Redundant Plus. Can't wait for Redundant Plus Do Over Edition Deluxe, slated for 2025 release, but might slip out around Christmas... Comes with "Laid OFF, the Redundant Plus AI Plugin" it fires all your other VSTs and takesover like the new boss.

 

NASA said it can't get those stranded astronauts down from the space station till somebody returns the launch console which looks alot like the photo you just uploaded. just sayin.....

 

uses a 60 watt incandescent bulb for the baking, so it might be hard to replace in the future...

 

No, a workstation is not a meaningless marketing term. And you're doing way more with "sounds" than ordering them on a timeline.
A sequencer is a specific piece of software/hardware, like HY-Plugins HY-SeqCollection or Elektron Octatrack.
Steinberg Cubase or Ableton Live are not that. Shit, even Fruity Loops is not that anymore.

 

Ok then, what does a DAW do exactly? Apart from working with digital audio, like Audacity, right?.

See, the problem is that there is no definition, therefore it is a marketing term. But, as I said a fairly well understood one.

Might as well chuck in the word "professional" there, as in it gets me paid and let's me get on with my job. But again, there is no "professional" definition here, and some weirdoes use it to refer things that don't support "professional" things like BWF or MMC/MTC or, fuck it, SysEx.

 

I've gotten into waveform free and bought a few expansions clip launcher pro midi and sound engineer it's been a blast

 

a DAW is a category for software, not a marketing term. A long time ago, as software programs were written, someone would think thats a neat idea, but I could do that better. so someone would make a bit of software that would let you not only type out sentences, but also rearrange their order, and copy or delete words and phrases. Someone else would say that is great but can it add page numbers or what if it could check the spelling of the words, and so features were added. Programs were copied and eventually became abundant enough that they had to be categorized.

First it was just 2 categories, Business, or Personal, well maybe 3 if you add Utilities. That was it. Once these categories got too big they were subdefined, Spreadsheets,Accounting Packages, Inventory, Order tracking, Word Processing etc, and so programs that could edit audio or work with it somehow, grew and were eventually thrown together into a category called "Digital Audio Workstation", Workstation denoting it was a standalone dedicated use for a computer, Digital Audio, because we had already Analog Audio gear like Tape, and needed a way to differntiate, what these workstations did .

And so DAWs appeared as a category, and they were many and diverse and some did midi, and some did sequence and some did midi patch libraries and some did with audio what a word processor did with words, and one thing led to another and bob's your uncle we have more abilities than your average 1970's studio in a laptop you can carry around and yet somehow we have less real musical ideas than your average campfire of drunks stealing each others riffs and cowboy chords at a singalong.

and thats why a daw isnt a sequencer, but it may contain a sequencer...

 

Ok, last off-topic since this is not really that interesting, but a DAW is to audio processing as IDE is to text processing.

A text processor does something obvious, but the next delineation happens at a text editor / word processor boundary after which we have several bifurcations and a catch-fuck-all category called IDE, a tool that presumably can be used to develop software by writing code. Oh, but what about low code/no code environments? So IDE is then something that's being sold as a one-stop-shop for doing just that.

Same thing with DAWs, it's a tool ostensibly to mangle and create audio for some purpose. I can do that with Sound Forge or SoX if I want. But a DAW is just like an IDE, an idea (no pun intended) that you do all of your recording/editing/mixing in a box and putting it all into order for spitting out an audio product (a tune, a soundtrack, a foley edit, a collage of fart sounds). So in a sense, yes, a sequencer is not a DAW, but good luck selling a DAW-like product that doesn't contain one, making it purely a term of art in the salesmanship real.

(nicely crowbar'd "yoof these days" in there though, gotta love that!)

 

Bitwig?