Why you use multiple DAWs ?

[machinesworking]

This is really down to different workflows, that's all.

Yes, good workflow versus bad workflow.

Binary thinking at its core...

You know almost every successful big time band takes their finished tracks to a Pro Tools studio to mix and master right? I'm glad you've thought about what works best for you, but the simple fact is it's not the best for everyone.

Maybe you've never had to think about workflow but when I started I had two mono sequencers, a drum machine and a four track cassette recorder. I had to think long and hard about how to get a finished song out of that set-up. What was important and what wasn't. Things got better as time went by but there were ever-present limitations that forced you to be disciplined. A lot of you guys have never had that, you can just keep adding stuff and adding stuff until your CPU can't handle any more, so that's what you do. But I still stay focused on keeping things as simple as possible because you are always going to do a better job mixing 10 tracks than you are trying to juggle 30. Every track, every instrument, every effect has to earn it's place in the song, nothing gets a free ride.

Played guitar and a Radio Shack Realistic Moog in bands in 1983.
Started in 1986 down the sequencing path in an industrial rock band with a copy of Performer on a Mac+ and an Ensoniq Mirage.

You again have a binary way of thinking. I also mostly write with maybe a 12-24 parts, but I'm amazed at and in awe of people who mix and create with 30-90 tracks. Some people like film composers who use big orchestral mock ups always write with 30-120 parts. Everyone with 90 tracks to compose is using stems. There is no single right way to write music.

I think you actually have good intentions with this sort of militant fascist "there is only one right way" approach you take. I get that you're looking at mostly people getting in their own way workflow wise, but not everyone who uses more than one DAW is doing it because they're oblivious to the fact that it complicates things, and complication isn't always the enemy. If some DAW has a better approach I'm going to use it. Buying 8 DAWs today is cheaper than a single mono synth was in the 80's. They're just tools, if one has MPE and I think that's important to my creative process then I'm going to simply use it.

I think the bigger argument here is about a KISS (keep it simple stupid) approach, and an everything and the kitchen sink approach. For someone like you or me whose been doing this forever I really don't see any reason either approach wouldn't work, and would even say it's logical to keep in mind that you can oscillate between the two to jog yourself out of ruts.

I do think it's very logical to start off DAW wise (or anything wise really) using one DAW. If you don't know what you're doing or have yet to be able to write songs on a regular basis etc. then at least you need the skills to do this. Don't buy three big synths when you can't program one. Get some theory in if you're incapable of writing, even if you want to write non standard atonal music. Another guitar will not help you be a better guitar player.

The world is complex enough and music is diverse enough to where the players break all those rules, with good effect. People write simple pop songs with 100 tracks, the best guitar players might own 100 guitars, or one guitar, NIN use literally everything in the songwriting process. Autechre use 8 DAWs, nearly everyone in the "industry" takes their Cubase, Live, DP, etc. etc. rendered tracks to a "big" studio and mixes and masters in Pro Tools.

There are advantages and disadvantages to printing a song to audio. Commitment is not a bad thing, and even in your example, it's again trivial to go back to Orion and re-render the track. I'm actually surprised you left Orion honestly, Suicide Commando last time I checked still used a copy of Notator on an Atari to write with.

[vurt]

grrr.

[djboomstick]

Does it count if all my DAWs are all multiple versions cubase ?

Sx2 , for sweet vintage tones of winXP .
6 , for 32bit vst on 64bit windows . Some of those early vsts do really crazy stuff .
9.5 , i’m going to try not to have to use 9.5 anymore , but its there just incase i need to fall back .

10.5 i downloaded the installer today , took about 5 hours , haven't installed yet , looking forward to it

Ive tried most other DAWs . Before sx2 is so long ago I'm not going to remember them all .
I went back and forth between sx2 and live for a bit , whenever i needed to tempo correct some audio . . Til 6 came out .
Ive used and still use several built in hardware MIDI sequencers and a roland mc500mk2 , but that ends up in one cubase or another if i want to try to make something of it .

[BONES]

Binary thinking at its core...

Nice try but when it's your workflow versus mine, that doesn't leave room for a third option, does it? You explained your workflow and it was bad. I explained mine, which is clearly good. That you chose not to defend your workflow but instead to use semantics to try and attack mine shows that you have no logical argument to make in defense of your position.

You know almost every successful big time band takes their finished tracks to a Pro Tools studio to mix and master right?

That's a different situation, in that they are not taking advantage of the software and/or equipment, but of the talent of the person who runs it. i.e. They don't take it to "Pro Tools" for mixing, they take it to a producer or an engineer they think has something to add to what they have already done. It's collaboration and if you've ever done a remix or provided a remix kit, you'll understand the limitations when compared to having access to the original project files.

In fact, a remix is a good illustration of my point - if all you do is work with stems, you are severely limited in what you can do but if you can use MIDI tracks and/or whole project files, you have a lot more freedom. Obviously with your own work, you are not looking to radically change it from it's original form but there will be times when tweaking an instrument is the best option for fixing a problem or improving a piece, so the analogy holds.

I'm glad you've thought about what works best for you, but the simple fact is it's not the best for everyone.

Of course it is, or would be if you weren't too stubborn to even consider that you might be doing it wrong.

Played guitar and a Radio Shack Realistic Moog in bands in 1983.
Started in 1986 down the sequencing path in an industrial rock band with a copy of Performer on a Mac+ and an Ensoniq Mirage.

That's with bands, where you have other people to do stuff for you. I've been getting up on stage all by myself since 1985 so I've had to rely on my sequencers for everything I wasn't playing by hand. If I'd had a band I could have got by with any old krap sequencer, if I'd needed one at all.

You again have a binary way of thinking. I also mostly write with maybe a 12-24 parts, but I'm amazed at and in awe of people who mix and create with 30-90 tracks.

I think they're idiots who probably don't know what they're doing (or are getting paid by the hour for it).

Some people like film composers who use big orchestral mock ups always write with 30-120 parts.

Yeah but it is likely they are doing that to impress the director, rather than because they really, really need to work like that. It becomes part of selling what you do. I see it at work all the time because i have to work with other people's After Effects projects. I have a reputation at work for being able to get my work done in a fraction of the time it takes anyone else and when I see the convoluted way in which many of the work, I understand completely why that is. Their projects grow organically, they never sit back and look at how they might be able to simplify anything. As their projects mature and change with feedback from their clients, they don't go back and look at what isn't needed any ore, they just leave it all in. Often, as in several times a week, I can reduce a project to one-tenth the size it was when I opened it in just a few minutes and I can halve the number of layers in compositions just by removing elements that are no longer contributing but are still switched on (layers are visible). The other guys focus solely on the output and pay little or no attention to how they got to where they are. They don't even understand the concept of workflow.

Everyone with 90 tracks to compose is using stems. There is no single right way to write music.

No-one is saying there is but there are better and worse ways and if I had 90 tracks, I'd be looking at reducing it to a manageable number, not pre-rendering them as stems. e.g. Let's say I'd written strings arrangement one instrument at a time and ended up with 20 parts. Once I was happy with that, I'd be bouncing the MIDI into a single clip and using a single instance of my favourite strings library to perform it. At the very least I'd put it into a group as a sub-mix to simplify the master mix.

I think you actually have good intentions with this sort of militant fascist "there is only one right way" approach you take.

I don't have anything like that approach. I would love nothing more than for someone to show me a better way of working. It's why I bother with this place at all. My folly is assuming other people are the same, when the reality is that all they want is confirmation that every stupid thing they do is the way everyone else is doing it. But every now and then I dig up a nugget of pure gold, so I persist.

I get that you're looking at mostly people getting in their own way workflow wise, but not everyone who uses more than one DAW is doing it because they're oblivious to the fact that it complicates things, and complication isn't always the enemy. If some DAW has a better approach I'm going to use it.

You don't see the contradiction in what you've said here? You are looking for the best approach but deliberately blinding yourself to the possibility than, in doing so, you are worsening the overall approach. It seems you aren't looking at the big picture, the end to end process, just at each little part of it in isolation.

Buying 8 DAWs today is cheaper than a single mono synth was in the 80's. They're just tools, if one has MPE and I think that's important to my creative process then I'm going to simply use it.

That's the thing though, isn't it? You "simply use" this host for that process, and you "simply use" that host for this process and you can't see how it makes the overall process anything but simple. Using your MPE example, that is one reason I started looking for a new host - I wanted features my current host didn't support. But I didn't decide that I'd just add another one to the daisy chain. Quite the opposite, I found one that simplifies the process even further by allowing me to do a lot of things I would previously have had to go out to a standalone audio editor to do.Because even though Orion had good integration with external audio editors, it was still a more complicated process than doing it in situ.

I do think it's very logical to start off DAW wise (or anything wise really) using one DAW.

I see no logic in that at all. What if you start off on completely the wrong host for you? Your initial experience is awful and you give up. I think it is newcomers who need to try all the different flavours and find one that works for them. It's us old timers who can bend any host to our will because we have the skills and experience to do it. When I first made the move to computers for music, I tried Fruityloops, I tried Cakewalk and I tried Cubase. None of them worked for me. If I hadn't found Orion I'd have kept making music in hardware because it was quicker and easier.

The world is complex enough and music is diverse enough to where the players break all those rules, with good effect.

Sometimes, not all the time. And just because someone else manages it, doesn't make it the best or only way to go. Again, it is something I see both here and at work - people see something in a tutorial and think it's the way you have to do everything, without seeing that it really only applies to this narrow circumstance or that it only works for them because they are much better at it than you are.

There are advantages and disadvantages to printing a song to audio. Commitment is not a bad thing, and even in your example, it's again trivial to go back to Orion and re-render the track.

Once, maybe, but it's something you might need to do 20, 30 or even 50 times. Because that's the thing - you can't hear it in context until you render it again, then you realise that it needs another tweak so you go back and do that, then render it again. Then you realise you over-did it so you go back and re-tweak it a third time, then render it a third time. Then you realise it's affected another part so you go and do the same thing again. And again. And again. Pretty soon you've re-rendered 50 times. Or, more likely, you decide "that'll do, I'm sick of going back and forth all night" and you leave it, knowing it could be better.

I'm actually surprised you left Orion honestly, Suicide Commando last time I checked still used a copy of Notator on an Atari to write with.

That's because your notion of who I am/how I am is out of step with reality. Suicide Commando is terrible. He has been writing the same song over and over again for 20 years. You buy one album and you've heard them all.

[vurt]

tl/dr

"grrr!"

[machinesworking]

tl/dr

"grrr!"

Bones, get a kick out of you, but you right away proved my point while denying it.

Binary thinking at its core...

Nice try but when it's your workflow versus mine, that doesn't leave room for a third option, does it? You explained your workflow and it was bad. I explained mine, which is clearly good. That you chose not to defend your workflow but instead to use semantics to try and attack mine shows that you have no logical argument to make in defense of your position.

Christ really? It absolutely leaves room for a third option. It's quite possible that your workflow works for you, and mine works for me. The world is not black and white.
FFS! there's room for multiple options, besides just three, you're the one that only sees your own opinion as worthwhile here.

Here, I'll give you some real world examples of why, as of right now, I'm working in Bitwig and DP10.

Arguably DP10 will win out, but as of now the Clips and Session firing that I want from Live is in a 1.0 state, it's useable, barely. DP10 has song chaining, for live use this is better than anything else I've tried, each song is in it's own timeline, and they all play one right after another, opening the timeline etc. This also can open and close plug ins, but I use the V-Rack system to play Amplitube outside of the songs. Other DAWs allow multiple projects to be opened but it's not half as elegant.

Bitwig has a full featured Clip and Session system just like Live, consumes the same low amount of CPU as DP, and has great developers working with it to get fantastic control surface support, DP has none of this, it's an old school DAW in the classic sense with Mackie and HUI support only, no visual haptic response to support Push2 or Launchpads etc. DP does have my replacement for the Mackie Control though in a Raven MTi2 template, with the touch control that brings.

These are just surface level, the core is that there have been IMO, basically two schools of thought in DAW development, modern trackers and clip firing type DAWs like Live, Bitwig, FL Studio etc. etc. and kitchen sink DAWs like Logic, Cubase, DP, PT, Reaper(sort of). The differences are obvious, massive control surface support, support for new protocols in touch surfaces, Ableton Link, modern GUIs in the Bitwig clan, but not a lot of "legacy" support, sometimes no rewire, SysEx, NRPN, missing sometimes MTC, MMC, film scoring capabilities, score sheets, event lists, keyboard shortcuts, etc. etc.

IMO completely different tasks and ways of working, and you don't have to choose to be constrained by choosing only one way, but look, it's not for everyone to care about that. I like real clip launching, with the outstanding control surface support that Bitwig has now thanks to Möss, and I like the performance and mixing capabilities (support for the Raven etc.) of DP10.

Anyway, like I said a dozen times, I don't think you're wrong for wanting to work in one DAW, but it's silly to think everyone who doesn't is wasting their time. It's not stupid to point out that most people who are doing so are probably wasting their time, but to think that everyone who doesn't work just like you is wrong or somehow that makes them polar opposites is just flat out binary thinking. That's not semantics, it's just a fact.

[perfumer]

Bones, some people are playing and having fun while doing it. Let's get inside that room/DAW and do this! Then let's go to the other one and do that! Yippee!!! Hey mama look - no hands!!! Vrooooommmm!!!

Bones, some people are working and will use whatever does the job. If it's not in Cubase - you can't do it and stop there. They do it in that other DAW and move on. It complicates things? Well, yes it does!

[perfumer]

I remember Peter Christopherson from Coil saying in an interview: People often ask us "How did you make that sound, how did you make that part?", etc. And his reply: Oh, don't ask please! We don't know, we don't remember! There's many stages - passing a file through hardware, then software, then back to hardware, there's several people involved, taking work off each other's hands and building on it, then there's... entertainments, so we can't tell you how we made that bass part in NASA Arab, sorry!

It's f**king COMPLICATED! But it's the best band ever!

[EnGee]

....

[Vladislav_Gronk]

It's hard to tell if Bones is trying to be edgy or actually is that toxic. Holy autism.

[wetdentist]

DAWs are used for more than just music.

Yes, in your case I imagine it is nothing more than a way to waste time but the statement was qualified so your response makes no sense in context anyway.

been through the ups and downs of Cakewalk/Sonar, but came out on top with Cakewalk by Bandlab (for recording audio, MIDI automation & mixing/mastering) and NI Maschine (which isn't technically a DAW) for beats/loops. i am pretty happy

Yeah but you can run Maschine inside Cakewalk so it's not really the same thing, in that you end up using just Cakewalk, don't you?

wow thank you for setting me straight!

[BONES]

It absolutely leaves room for a third option. It's quite possible that your workflow works for you, and mine works for me.

"Works for you" and "works for me" is completely beside the point. Something can work for you and still be objectively bad. Similarly, something can be objectively good yet still not work for you. They are two different things. I am sure your workflow works well enough for you but that doesn't automatically make it good. There are plenty of people driving around in 10 year old Corollas because that works for them but none of those people would argue that it makes their Corolla as good as someone else's Tesla Model 3. They can separate what works for them from what is actually good. That is something many people around here seem to struggle with.

FFS! there's room for multiple options, besides just three, you're the one that only sees your own opinion as worthwhile here.

That's because no-one has offered up anything better, at least so far. Because there is sure as hell plenty of room for improvement in my workflow. I still mostly bumble around Cubase and, whilst I am surprised at how much work I am getting done in it, I'm sure I can learn better ways of working that will make it even better for me.

Ultimately, though, I still find Orion much better in many important ways and if there was a really good way of starting a project in Orion and then moving it to Cubase with a minimum of compromise, I'd be all over it. But there isn't and the compromises involved in working like that far outweigh any benefits. And if you want to add a "for me" at the end of that, then that will be a "for me" for someone who has been using Orion for 20 years, produced five albums with it, the last of which was a chart-topper in our genre (well, no. 2 for the album but no. 1 for the first single from it) and never really found Orion limiting in any way. So if the compromises are going to be unacceptable for me, you have to imagine they are objectively unacceptable, surely?

Here, I'll give you some real world examples of why, as of right now, I'm working in Bitwig and DP10.

Without pointlessly quoting all you points, let me say that you've listed a bunch of things but given absolutely no indication of how you use the two together. It reads as though you use DP10 for live performance and Bitwig for something else. Where do the two cross-over?

BTW, I really like the sound of DP10's song chaining. It is something I have been looking for since I left my hardware sequencers behind in the late 90s. I've looked at DP before and I thought it looked pretty good. I'm not sure about the clip thing, though. I tried it in Bitwig but couldn't see the point. The way Cubase does it - clips within the timeline - is really all I need to develop an idea and turn it into a song. I never saw Orion's pattern based workflow as one of its strengths, either, but it worked well enough.

Anyway, like I said a dozen times, I don't think you're wrong for wanting to work in one DAW, but it's silly to think everyone who doesn't is wasting their time.

I don't just work in one host. We are using Cubase for production but we'll still be playing live with Orion, at least for the time being. Cubase isn't anywhere near stable enough to be trusted on stage and all our songs exist in Orion anyway. We'd have to port a lot of old songs into Cubase to play 'em live. What I won't be doing, going forward, is starting something in Orion and then moving it across to Cubase to finish it. Any new material we have will start and finish in Cubase. If, once it's finished, I need to port it to Orion to play live, we'll see how well that works when we need to.

[BONES]

Bones, some people are playing and having fun while doing it. Let's get inside that room/DAW and do this! Then let's go to the other one and do that! Yippee!!! Hey mama look - no hands!!! Vrooooommmm!!!

Except it's not like that at all because in between they have to trudge 4 miles through snow in a blizzard. They'd be much better off staying warm and snug at home and having all their fun there.

Bones, some people are working and will use whatever does the job. If it's not in Cubase - you can't do it and stop there.

Name something I might want to do that I can't do in Cubase. If you can think of something, and I'm doubtful you can, remember that it would need to be something important enough that I'd be willing to compromise my workflow by rendering out a bunch of stems or starting over again in another host application.

It's f**king COMPLICATED! But it's the best band ever!

I thought you said it was Coil? They're terrible and that quote (the one I didn't re-quote) tells you why.

You can use Bitwig the linear traditional way without using the clip launcher at all, but for me actually, I use the clips/ideas launcher like a multi sketch and when I'm ready to start put most of the ideas together, I begin to use the Linear approach.

You can work like that in Cubase, in the timeline (Project window). You just add a clip to a track, press "P" to set the loop points to the start and end of the clip and away you go.

Now, for mixing and mastering, this is a completely another topic for me as I don't mix (like a mixing engineer!) and never did master anything I believe these are for Professionals to do, and I mean by Professionals that they do it as a daily job (mixing is another than mastering of course).

I used to think that, then our label paid a really good mastering engineer, who at the time was doing all of EMI's mastering in Germany, 1000 euros to master our first album. He did a krap job, it sounds really brittle in the top end and muddy in the mids. Since then the label has been very happy to let me do it. Now that we are using Cubase, it is yet another thing I used to have to do outside my host that I can now do in the same environment as the rest of the process. Never having to leave Cubase and only having to render once allows me to do a much better job because it means I can change things from the very beginning of the process all the way through to the end.

[EnGee]

There is the arranger in Cubase for looping ... etc. But still Bitwig/Live approach/workflow in organising ideas is much better for me (and some other people)

Regarding mixing and mastering stages. Well, nothing is impossible! You can do it by yourself if you have the knowledge and acoustic environment. For me I lack both Anyway, music is a hobby for me. I'm not sure what I was going to do if I'm professional.

For now, I just try avoiding mudding my tracks with overusing effects. I also use as fewer tracks as possible. I have good monitors and I think this is a very helpful as well. But I actually don't like mixing/mastering at all. I feel them a burden.

[CrystalWizard]

This thread is a forkin’ hysterical read! Great KVRAudio comedy (but with plenty of interesting points mixed in, at least 20 tracks worth )
I use two DAWs one that i’m more familiar with and i make my weird noise with and one that i use for more “normal” stuff like tracking, mixing, and mastering (which is a separate funny subject to me when it’s not for LP or ugh mp3)I’m fairly happy with my setup. If i had the currency i would probably get a third DAW that seems well suited to my weird noise thing.