Music

There is a best Digital Audio Workstation

Kye Fox

— 2 min read

A DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation, is a big, fancy environment for working with sound. The common truism is, to an extent, true: you can do anything in any DAW.

But the more advanced you get, or the more niche your need, the more friction you'll encounter if you pick the wrong one. They are developed with a set of use cases in mind and it does no one any good to pretend like it's not true.

Try all the demos.

You mainly work with real/sampled instruments and intend to import sounds or record them into your DAW:

  • Cubase: has some nice tools for working with virtual instruments and has built-in notation editing. I don't trust them after a licensing snafu, but I would get over it and figure it out if I needed to work with anything from Steinberg. Popular for orchestral production.
  • Studio One: this one is nice if you don't expect to collaborate. Presonus Sphere is a fairly comprehensive package, though you can buy a permanent license to Studio One and the various instruments in the subscription for a markup.
  • Pro Tools: everyone hates it, but it's the standard for studios that do live recording.
  • Reaper: really just a good all-around tool and quite affordable. I used this for a long time despite doing electronic music. Getting into Live the first time was like a breath of fresh air, but I still go back to Reaper for complex editing of audio. Get Reapack and the SWS extensions. Learn to love actions and build your own set of toolbars from them as you find you use certain things more than others.

You want to make electronic music:

  • FL Studio: the step sequencer and pattern palette make loopy music fun and easy, at least according to friends who use it.
  • Ableton Live: the standard in electronic music production and performance. As of Live 11 and 12, Ableton is introducing a steady stream of features missed by FL Studio holdouts who wished they could use Live.
  • BitWig Studio: does much of what Ableton Live does, but is more focused on the Eurorack/VCV Rack crowd. If you don't know what that means, skip it and go to Ableton Live. Live can do everything BitWig does well enough.

You're some kind of weird little gremlin:

  • LMMS comes with some nice chiptune synths.
  • The Ardour people are nice and seem committed to creating a professional option for Linux-based music production.
  • I got started on OpenMPT a very long time ago and it's still around.
  • SunVox: the weird little gremlin's weird little gremlin. Is it a tracker? Is it a DAW? Such questions fade into irrelevance. I never used it much but it looks fun and a lot of people love it.
  • Reason: a rack-based DAW for people cool enough to have one or more vertical monitors and a love of skeuomorphism.

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