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!