In my last few posts, I’ve been trying to deconstruct recording workflows (and doing so a bit too brashly), to ask an open question:

Can we improve the way recording works, for your average musician?

Let’s focus on recording at home for now, and acknowledge that professional studio recording and power users might have different requirements . Let’s also assume that I’m starting fresh on a new song.

The two scenarios we’ll consider are 1) that I’ve got an idea that I’d like to record, or that I’d like to play my instrument and see if I stumble on something that sounds nice while being recorded.

You can record an idea into a DAW or a wave editor, but before you move forward and use that recording to start a new song, you need to do some things like:

1. Chopping up the recording.
2. Picking a tempo for the song that matches your recording, in case you didn’t already pick a tempo beforehand.

These might seem obvious and completely necessary. How could you use a recording in a song without manually trimming it? How could you use a recording without having picked a tempo?

But when you think of a catchy melody in your head, did you start by picking a numerical tempo in your mind? Or did you just think of the melody? Is there a way to communicate a catchy melody to the computer without explicitly expressing the tempo, yet still allowing you to build on it (in a quantized environment like a DAW)? [1]

Now, what if we re-imagine the role of the computer in this. Instead of thinking about the computer as a workstation, which we sit down and operate, let’s think of it as something more passive. Could we change this workflow so that the computer instead passively supports you when you want to record, and maybe even eliminates the chopping and tempo picking you need to do before turning your recording into a song?

Sounds like a interesting challenge to me. So here’s my attempt at changing this recording workflow to eliminate these steps, in order to help you go from having an idea in your head to building a song around it, faster. It’s by no means perfect, and is not necessarily better, but it’s different, and I hope that it’s a good starting point from which we can build on.

The Freestyle Recorder is a completely hands-off MIDI recorder. I started by removing the record button. There’s no stopping it, it’s always recording into a 3 minute long buffer.  Next, it listens to what you play, and when it hears you stop playing, it automatically chops the thing you just played into a segment.

You can sit down and jam until you play something nice, and the Freestyle Recorder tries to cut up your takes automatically. You can just focus on playing.

Next, because the Freestyle Recorder is just listening for silence when it’s detecting takes, we need a way to tell it how to chop a recording more tightly. Remember, we want to avoid manual chopping. Next, let’s assume we want to produce a loop out of our recording.

But maybe we can kill two birds with one stone here. We still need to tell the computer some information about the tempo of our song, but BPM detection might not be accurate enough, and I didn’t play along with a metronome. I just played. How about if the recording were played back, and we just tapped along with it? This would tell us both the tempo of the recording, and give us a hint about how many beats were in the recording, so we can chop it tighter.

This is exactly what I programmed, and it works… OK. You need to play in 4/4 time, at a fairly constant tempo, and when you tap along with your recording, it has to be pretty tight. But if you get those things close enough, the Freestyle Recorder produces a seamless loop of your recording, without you ever having to hit record or entering a tempo. Above all, it’s different, and I hope this approach helps generate some new ideas to take it even further.

Did I mention that because it knows the loop length and tempo, the Freestyle Recorder can automatically snap a beat perfectly over your recording? When it works, it’s pure magic:

What’s your impression of the Freestyle Recorder? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

[1] BPM detection is one way to have a computer extract this information. My experience has been that some algorithms struggle with very short pieces. The algorithm I tested really struggled with jingles that were just a few bars long and played naturally.

In my last post, I wrote about how I think the typical DAW recording workflow is a bit lacking. As a result, I managed to turn the entire /r/edmproduction subreddit against me, where most of the readers don’t share my view. However, some insightful discourse followed, and I’d like to respond to a few points directly.

Warrior Bob makes a good point when he says that some DAWs offer some form of loop recording mode (which records linearly while looping playback) or multiple-take recording mode. Both of these modes help reduce the type of distracting transport juggling that I’m trying to avoid. But he also notes that my frustration might come from the lack of discoverability of these features – They’re too hard to figure out, often buried in a myriad of menu options, and that’s prevented me from stumbling across them earlier.

Canoo thinks we should be happy with DAWs and just be grateful we don’t have to book time in a studio to do this type of recording. I like this modest attitude – The way we produce music on computers these days is incredibly powerful, flexible, and accessible. However, you could have said the same thing about the telephone in 1985. Why would you want to carry a phone around in your pocket? Fortunately, someone inventive at Motorola wasn’t so modest.

On the other hand, bandersong more or less agrees with me, and suggests an idea for an alternative workflow where you could jam out a bunch of different melodies over your existing tracks, and then sort through them later. You could do this sort of thing with the loop recording feature I mentioned at the start of this post, though you’d still have to chop up the MIDI sequence. The point is, maybe there’s some new ways to implement recording  that nobody’s thought of yet. I think bandersong’s constructive comment is a step in the right direction.

In these blog posts, I’ve intentionally taken a very critical approach to the design of DAWs in order to stress that they haven’t always been designed with workflow in mind. In response, the comments on Reddit and here on this blog (especially from people who disagree) have been pretty insightful and shown how different producers use these applications. One universal recommendation that’s been shared is to always read the manual. That’s one of the best ways to improve your workflow.

However, tearing apart the design of the DAW is the first step towards creating something better. By sharing my experiences making music, I hope to generate some discussion about common workflows and find out if anyone else has the same problems as I do. Maybe I just suck. Or maybe other people struggle with the same problems as I do. But without a critical discussion, there can’t be any progress, and developers will just continue building DAWs that get more complicated and more difficult to use.

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and rethink things. And by sharing your workflow, maybe we can all learn a thing or two.

Thanks for reading, and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Before I do a real follow-up to my last post about the traditional DAW workflow, I wanted to take another stab at the workflow diagram (below).

This time, I’ve outlined what I’ll call the “recording workflow”. You start with the same boring setup procedure that you have with the regular “mostly MIDI” workflow, and then you need to hook up your instrument or MIDI keyboard for recording. (“Where’s my USB cable?”, “Did I plug my guitar into the right jack?”….)

After that, you end up in this new songwriting cycle where jam out an idea on your keyboard or instrument, and try to record it. This is usually pretty fun, but I don’t think it’s nearly as fun as it could be. There’s a lot of micromanagement going on when you do this, which I’ve tried to emphasize in the diagram.

When I try to play something that I want to record, it usually takes me a few tries to get it right. In a DAW, this means a lot of jogging back and forth with the transport, arming recording, waiting for the down beat, and trying to play the melody again. Did I mess it up? Darn, I have to switch back to my mouse and keyboard, delete the bad MIDI part, and try again.

It’s a lot of back and forth, and to be honest, I think half the reason it takes me 5 tries to record something is because I have to put down my synth every time I make a mistake, and it’s sort of difficult to really get a good groove going because of that. I lose my rhythm and timing, and have to frantically try to get it back within those next 4 count-in beats, otherwise… I have to repeat the cycle yet again.

This entire workflow is modelled after recording on magnetic tapes. Except if you were recording on tape, you probably had a dude in a studio hitting record and rewinding for you. It’s 2012. Does this recording workflow even make sense anymore?

What do you think about recording in DAWs? Is it just me?
Leave a comment and let me know how you think recording should work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about music production workflows lately. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) can be incredible tools. They combine MIDI sequencers, audio editors, pattern editing, and allow you to drop plugins like SodaSynth into them as extra instruments or effects. With all of these features, most DAWs provide an all-in-one solution for music making, and are used by everyone from complete beginners to the best producers in the world.

But all of these features come at a price, both in dollars and time. High-end DAWs can be priced toward professionals and studios. The competition between DAWs has lead to feature creep, which has directly resulted in very complicated user interfaces, and incredibly steep learning curves. Adam and I like to joke that DAWs should brag about how many knobs per square cm they pack into their user interface. It’s almost ridiculous.

DAWs are powerful, but as many musicians will attest, they’re also difficult to learn. However, once you get a hang of how to use a DAW, get used to the workflow, and master the technical aspects of producing, you’re set.

Or are you?

In my next blog post, I’ll take a crack at answering that question. I’ve mocked up a diagram (below) exploring one of the main workflows for writing music in a DAW.

In the meantime, leave a comment and let me know what you think of the diagram! Does this fit your workflow?