Do you more or less use fixed sets of tools in your personal projects, and maybe have a strong DAW preference? Maybe you use lots of stuff and are acquainted with even more, but you believe that if you were forced to pare things down, just having a handful would satisfy your needs and not much was lost.

With how easy it is to try basically everything I could ever ask to, I have a limitless repository that I’m constantly wading around. My strange employment has given me time to learn *a lot* in a couple of years, and they’re all so goddamn special to me, lol. Maybe 30 total VST/VSTIs at the core. But 150 more on the periphery.

Now about your daw... How closely do you stick to your primary when producing for yourself? In 2-3 years, I’ve split my time fairly evenly across Fruity Loops, Ableton and Studio One (a real good variety imo), and I’m acquainted with probably the rest of the usual ones, and I have no desire to settle down with any. Fruity Loops’ piano roll, routing, and playlist editor are all super neat. Don’t care for Live’s highly appealing Session view, but the Max4live instruments are indispensable and it’s really easy to oversee and surf among lots of processors spread out wherever. Studio One just does so much stuff very well— its the easiest for me to use as the meta-DAW. Super stable, easy on the eyes, a Jill-of-all-trades. In my more indulgent state, I confess to even syncing all three at once on separate machines. Why not huh? Or I could just switch to Reaper.

Do you do this? I don’t feel especially hindered by spreading my learning out. They’re fundamentally all the same to me, but they still act on me and reciprocate with my work in different ways. I think that’s cool! Shortcuts are kind of a pain, especially when using 3 at once..

Maybe I just have a weak musical identity? I don’t think I do!

Are you an audio slut or what? Why?

 

I forgot the “what do you dream of” part but I’ve already posted enough for now

 

I personally could live only with Serum and Ableton with all of its internal effects + Max4Live. And Kontakt. Kontakt is life

 

That’s a wicked trio. I rarely open Kontakt these days but I would still really enjoy myself if all I could ever use was kontakt and a DAW. Max4live is brilliant huh? Have you fucked with the IRCAM tools? They’re probably my favorites. I’m chained to Live forever for this Max stuff.

 

I was too 6:00AM-stoned when I made this thread

 

I coded my own DAW...REAPER ftw...it took like 10 years in total to slowly create what I felt like was needed. From C++ to python, lua and eel...lots of way to go around things. But you can create stuff that don't exist ANYWHERE. That' s all I need these days...I don't care about effects, instruments, samples...I love them, I know what I want, I know what is part of my sound...but that's all an icing on the cake. My DAW allows me to keep my flow and that's all that matters for me. I can do music only 3 hours a week, but in these 3 hours I can manage all that is needed. So yeah...REAPER and my almost-a-decade investement is my main tool for music

P.S.
Nothing wrong with being high...god bless the plant

 

Here, Reaper is the centre of everything, and I'm not using many VST instruments any more. Finding out what I want and need was a blessing for me, because I wish I could do music entirely without the computer, but I would like to finalise the mix and master with the computer, of course. It's the creative process that computer stifles a bit for me. The constant staring at the screen and having to use the mouse. Since I have a lot of hardware, I would like to be able to sequence it outside "the box".

Mind you, I have spent most of my life in front of the screen and using the mouse, but it still doesn't feel natural for making music to me.

Nevertheless, I cope with it somehow. Reaper makes things easier. Having connected my main rig with the laptop, especially. So I'm using laptop for sequencing "on the fly", and then fire up my main computer as necessary.

 

The most useful thing I did was to organize my sample/midi library. Tagging close to over 1 million samples took nearly 3 days to do but so damn worth it. This was done with loopmasters loopcloud which imo I see as one of the most invaluable tool in my arsenal.

 

Last edited: Apr 15, 2019

Being pulled somewhat more to Mac than Win, I still do miss my favorite wave editor on Windows: Adobe Audition 1.5.
I have Ocenaudio which is really great, but it does not (yet?) offer the power, usability-speed and efficiency of that old Audition version under Windows. Wavelab is out of the question.
I ended up using a combination of Ocenaudio and my own sox scripts on Mac and although these are much faster than Audition in audio file processing, it's far from what I call user-friendly and they can't do everything.

 

lots of microphones....... guitars.. acustica guuitars--- bongos....... all percussions.. a great ssd hard drive.. bass guitars.. but in the end I can archive all I want with 1 guitar. 1 piano controller.. i bass guitar.. and 2 mics and logic. maybe better monitors. TIME. you will need TIME. feelings. alot of feelings.. slow down.. sometimes go fast.. strange dreams. eetc.