The DAW as a Studio as an Instrument
Michael McDowell wrote an article earlier this year about the podcast industry’s reliance on Pro Tools, which sparked an online discussion on its gatekeeping role. In response, Brendan Baker ran a set of free workshops showing people how to switch to Reaper. They’re great, and highly recommended.
I have never really used Pro Tools properly, so I can’t comment on it directly, but I have recently made the switch to Reaper for the bulk of my recording and editing work. It is the third platform I have used extensively, after Ableton Live and Logic Pro, and I’m glad I made the switch. It is very powerful and it makes a lot of sense for a podcast producer.
However, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using Ableton and Logic. In fact, adding a new DAW to my repertoire has only helped me refine my workflow and learn more about the way I like to do things. All DAWs these days are incredibly powerful and you can perform every step of audio production on just about any of them.
But they’re not all the same. They have strengths and weaknesses. Their design leads you to think and work in different ways, and those distinctions are really useful tools to exploit. I find that it helps to think of each DAW as a different part of a studio, where you perform different functions.
This is the way I see the ones I use:
REAPER
This is like the mixing console/tape machine in the studio. It’s where raw audio comes in, gets recorded, and can then be cut, copied, moved and automated. All the “grunt work” of audio production happens here. Reaper’s editing abilities are massive and fully customisable, so with a few custom key strokes, you can do 90% of your editing work with just 2 or 3 adjacent keys.
The ripple editing feature in itself is worth the price of admission alone. This allows you to move the audio on all tracks backwards and forwards as a block, a vital skill when editing a podcast.
(I’m getting flashbacks now to when I was editing on Ableton and I would get an 11th-hour request from a producer to shorten a pause or remove a breath 2:13 seconds into a 15-minute piece and realise what a clammy-palmed hassle it was going to be.)
LOGIC PRO
Look at how pretty the GUI is on that crushed signal!
Past the control room where the console and tape machine sit, you can walk into another room, full of expensive guitars, tube amplifiers and vintage synths, all miked up and ready to go. That’s Logic.
The amount of native instruments and effects included in Logic is crazy (and more are available for download), so there’s no need for any external plugins. Everything sounds great and if you want your compressor’s interface to look like a pristine Urei Blackface 1076 while you use it to utterly butcher your sound, you're in luck!
I like to use Logic for composition and sound design. Once I have all my tape laid out and a basic structure down for a piece, I can move to Logic and pretend I’m Hans Zimmer for a few hours. Then I’ll suddenyl remember I’m working on a lighthearted story about buying a new dog, so I should probably cool it with the ominous timpani motifs.
ABLETON LIVE
Past your live instrument room—in a small space with poor lighting and ventilation, with cables strewn everywhere—sits Ableton Live, which feels like a fully decked-out modular synthesiser plugged into a bunch of effect pedals. Routing is quick and easy, everything can connect to everything else, it’s additive and intuitive and it makes NOIZE!!!!
You can create large effect chains and move them from track to track with ease, and the Max for Live extensions only add extra weirdness to your musical palette. I personally love using the Convolution Reverb with a random musical sample instead of an impulse response, then feed a whole instrument’s audio into it and see what happens. You can get haunting spectres of musical parts, undulating, muted yet resonant.
(Oh yeah… and bleeps and bloops if that’s what you need.)
I’m sure my workflow will continue to change depending on my demands and my own interests. I’m still learning how to use Reaper properly so I’m sure it will present new possibilities as I keep experimenting with it. And who knows, before long, a new platform might come along, like the TikTok of audio production, and all the creative kids will be on it, and I’ll have to go back to square one again.
That’s a fun square to be on.