What's your favourite DAW's feature? I tried to make Reaper do-it-all

[Tj Shredder]

According to their site its a DWA… Ah, no KVR doesn’t check their links. In the KVR database its linked to a blog which doesn’t even explain what a DWA should be (very knowledgable people it seems ).
The MusE site is: https://muse-sequencer.github.io/

[BONES]

One is the Mix Engine Effects. No other DAW has that. PreSonus has several Mix Engine Effect plugins that do complete console emulation, including intelligent proximity-dependent cross-talk and non-linear analog summing. They give mixes a degree of depth that I have never heard before ITB.

That's interesting because I've tried that stuff out a few times and I think it makes everything sound worse.

The other is the ability to change a song's sample rate on the fly. No destructive conversion is involved. This means you can record at 96kHz or 192kHz and then mix at 44.1kHz or 48kHz to spare your CPU, and then mixdown at whatever sample rate your target medium is.

Surely that's the case with every DAW (except Cubase, I see below)? I've always assumed it was and never had reason to think it's not.

The ease with which you can create complex, labirynthine and branching patches on a single track is pretty overwhelming and just thinking about something similar in S1 or even Reason gives me anxiety, due to necessary number of tracks/channels and splitting/merging/cabling respectively.

That was one of the things I didn't like about Bitwig, too much emphasis on stuff I don't care about, stuff that encourages you to make things harder, not easier. That's why nothing will ever beat Orion when it comes to workflow - instead of indulging your stupidity, Orion forced you to think your way through to a more elegant, flexible solution.

[antic604]

The ease with which you can create complex, labirynthine and branching patches on a single track is pretty overwhelming and just thinking about something similar in S1 or even Reason gives me anxiety, due to necessary number of tracks/channels and splitting/merging/cabling respectively.

That was one of the things I didn't like about Bitwig, too much emphasis on stuff I don't care about, stuff that encourages you to make things harder, not easier. That's why nothing will ever beat Orion when it comes to workflow - instead of indulging your stupidity, Orion forced you to think your way through to a more elegant, flexible solution.

Thanks. It's great to read such encouraging, compassionate and caring stuff first thing in the morning...

[jamcat]

One is the Mix Engine Effects. No other DAW has that. PreSonus has several Mix Engine Effect plugins that do complete console emulation, including intelligent proximity-dependent cross-talk and non-linear analog summing. They give mixes a degree of depth that I have never heard before ITB.

That's interesting because I've tried that stuff out a few times and I think it makes everything sound worse.

The crosstalk is a beautiful thing. I think it is the missing element that separates digital summing from analog. But it’s a top-down thing. You need to mix into it. Adding it to an already tuned mix is going to throw everything off and make things weird.

It works well for a sort of traditional, organic studio recording vibe. But it might be out of place for electronic and more contemporary recording styles.

Though if you’re going for early Skinny Puppy/Tubeway Army/Ministry, then I think it would work well.

[PieBerger]

Hybrid Tracks in Bitwig. I like to bounce stuff into audio because I find it easier to sequence and arrange fixed blocks of audio and for a lot of sounds, I prefer to have any processing baked in, so that delay/reverb tails end when I want them to etc. I also like to be able to return to my sounds, to make new variations or change things I don't like and being able to manage all of this on a single channel is just the best. My previous workflow in Live involved a "graveyard" group, where I dumped all of the MIDI channels after bouncing to audio and spending a lot of time trying to make lots of different variations of ideas, to avoid constant flip-flop between MIDI and audio. It was serviceable, but kind of a pain and I much prefer the worfklow in Bitwig. I can come up with something "good enough" get it into audio, disable the synth and then move on to the next thing, with easy/flexible recall and tidy/low channel count projects.

[PieBerger]

The ease with which you can create complex, labirynthine and branching patches on a single track is pretty overwhelming and just thinking about something similar in S1 or even Reason gives me anxiety, due to necessary number of tracks/channels and splitting/merging/cabling respectively.

That was one of the things I didn't like about Bitwig, too much emphasis on stuff I don't care about, stuff that encourages you to make things harder, not easier. That's why nothing will ever beat Orion when it comes to workflow - instead of indulging your stupidity, Orion forced you to think your way through to a more elegant, flexible solution.

Thanks. It's great to read such encouraging, compassionate and caring stuff first thing in the morning...

Have some compassion yourself, this poor man is being forced to use another DAW and be bitter about it on a forum, oh the humanity!

[XorXisT]

I'm still learning Logic, so no comment for now.

My favorite feature in Ableton Live is 3 features that work together: Note Chance, Velocity Chance and Groove Random.

When all 3 are working together, every time I play a project, it sounds slight different every time.

This 3 features are my main reason to stick with Ableton Live.

[BONES]

Studio One has some probability elements within its patterns workflow. I keep meaning to use them but never get around to it. I'm too used to adding seemingly random variations as I program the parts that it doesn't feel like it really matters, even though it sounds like it would be really cool, if you know what I mean.

The crosstalk is a beautiful thing.

No, it's not. It is something that the engineers who design mixing desks bust a gut to eliminate. It's something audio engineers and producers do their best to minimise. It's a hateful, awful thing.

You need to mix into it. Adding it to an already tuned mix is going to throw everything off and make things weird.

That's true of whichever mastering chain you use, therefore it was something I set up before I started doing anything else. It was benign enough on a couple of songs but it made some others sound worse so I went back to my old set-up after a using it on half-a-dozen pieces. OTOH, FireCobra always makes it sound better, especially where there are guitars, so that's what I went back to.

Though if you’re going for early Skinny Puppy/Tubeway Army/Ministry, then I think it would work well.

We go for a NOVAkILL vibe, we don't give a shit want anyone else sounds like. We just want it to sound as good as it can sound.

[jamcat]

The crosstalk is a beautiful thing.

No, it's not. It is something that the engineers who design mixing desks bust a gut to eliminate. It's something audio engineers and producers do their best to minimise. It's a hateful, awful thing.

But it exists and is a fact of life in all analog consoles. There are lots of things electrical engineers tried to minimize in gear, and they succeeded in reducing it, but never in eliminating it. And then when the world went digital and actually did eliminate them, people started missing them. I find that the crosstalk in CTC-1 and Retro Mix Legends Adds a depth and "glue" to the mix when mixed in the right amount. (Too much starts affecting stereo localization.) Like a real console, the crosstalk comes only from adjacent channels, which is an important element. The free Console Shaper does not have proximity-based crosstalk, so if that's all you've used I can tell you it's night and day with the REDD, Neve, API, and SSL models in CTC-1 and Retro Mix Legends.

You need to mix into it. Adding it to an already tuned mix is going to throw everything off and make things weird.

That's true of whichever mastering chain you use, therefore it was something I set up before I started doing anything else. It was benign enough on a couple of songs but it made some others sound worse so I went back to my old set-up after a using it on half-a-dozen pieces. OTOH, FireCobra always makes it sound better, especially where there are guitars, so that's what I went back to.

Mix Engine FX and standard saturation plugins like FireCobra do not need to be mutually exclusive. Mix Engine FX are not merely adding saturation. It is a complete non-linear replacement for Studio One's standard summing engine.

For my tracks, each channel goes through several stages of subtle saturation to recreate the same signal path it would have gone through in an studio some time in the 1980s: |amp → mic pre/transformers → console channel strip → tape|↳ |console channel strip → rack FX| ⇉ |mix bus → tape|. I actually set up two different console scenes in Studio One, a "tracking" console and a "mixing" console. Only the mixing console channels have Mix Engine FX passing through them. I do that by using sends to route the tracking console channels to the mixing console channels and terminate the tracking console channels on a muted FX channel. Mix Engine FX are not passed through to FX channels, so everything behind the FX channel is walled off. This means I only get crosstalk on the "mixing" console channels, and not in my ampsims which are the first inserts in the tracking channels. I have found it to be very effective for achieving what I'm going for, but not everyone has the same goals that I do.

Though if you’re going for early Skinny Puppy/Tubeway Army/Ministry, then I think it would work well.

We go for a NOVAkILL vibe, we don't give a shit want anyone else sounds like. We just want it to sound as good as it can sound.

I use these as an example because they were making records in a very traditional way at the time, but they were just using a lot of synths. Skinny Puppy synced up CV hardware sequencers as best they could for drums and arpeggiated parts, but they were still playing a lot by hand and recording them through miked amps into a console, same as Depeche Mode at the time.

There is an organic quality to those early albums I mentioned that was lost by the later part of the '80s once MIDI rigs and software sequencers took over, which was my point for mentioning them. I don't really know much about your band other than you do industrial, whether you go for the sterile, dehumanized sound, or more of a raw, live feel. If it's the latter, some of the stuff I'm talking about may be of interest to you.

[Hewitt Huntwork]

In Studio One I like the chord track. It's a bit like Toontrack's EZ Keys but having used both, I like S1 much better.

Live has a couple of features I wish Studio One did: 1 click tempo map from an existing audio file, and their groove feature seems to work better than Studio One's. I may be misinformed about how good these features are because I haven't used Live.

[BONES]

But it exists and is a fact of life in all analog consoles. There are lots of things electrical engineers tried to minimize in gear, and they succeeded in reducing it, but never in eliminating it. And then when the world went digital and actually did eliminate them, people started missing them.

No they didn't, them embraced digital precision wholeheartedly, just as they did when synths went digital. It's only more recently that a generation who don't know how good they have things think that it was anything other than a total nightmare. I put those people one step above flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers in the level of absurdity in their beliefs. (And I am being serious, to me it is every bit as delusional.)

Mix Engine FX and standard saturation plugins like FireCobra do not need to be mutually exclusive. Mix Engine FX are not merely adding saturation. It is a complete non-linear replacement for Studio One's standard summing engine.

This is the problem - you are looking at how these things work, all I care about is how my mix sounds when I use them. What they are is of less than no interest to me, it's what they do that matters.

For my tracks, each channel goes through several stages of subtle saturation to recreate the same signal path it would have gone through in an studio some time in the 1980s

Why? So you can sound as bad as stuff did back then? Because, trust me, all your favourite 80s music sounds like crap by modern standards, you're just too blinded by nostalgia to hear it. It's something that has become blindingly clear to me over the last year or so, as I've made more than 60 80s covers. Even when my mixes are only rough, if I play the original to listen to something in particular, it is really striking how bad most of the originals sound. I sure as hell would never want my versions to sound that bad.

There is an organic quality to those early albums I mentioned that was lost by the later part of the '80s once MIDI rigs and software sequencers took over, which was my point for mentioning them.

No, what there is in their later work is a clarity and power that was missing in their earlier recordings. It's just a shame their best songs were wasted on those early recordings. OTOH, look at a band like Frontline Assembly, whose song writing got better as the technology did. All their best work came in the mid 90s and beyond - best songs and best production - and you can hear how much better it all is.

I don't really know much about your band other than you do industrial, whether you go for the sterile, dehumanized sound, or more of a raw, live feel. If it's the latter, some of the stuff I'm talking about may be of interest to you.

All too complicated. I hardly use any effects at all. Even FireCobra comes off before I render anything and beyond that, there are usually only two or three other effects in use in any given mix, at least until the vocals get recorded.

[jamcat]

I put those people one step above flat Earthers

The surface of a sphere is in fact 2-dimensional, which is easy to prove with multivariable calculus. On a much larger scale, superstring/M theory tells us that our universe is 3-dimensional information projected on a 2-dimensional brane. So maybe they're onto something.

Why? So you can sound as bad as stuff did back then? Because, trust me, all your favourite 80s music sounds like crap by modern standards, you're just too blinded by nostalgia to hear it. It's something that has become blindingly clear to me over the last year or so, as I've made more than 60 80s covers. Even when my mixes are only rough, if I play the original to listen to something in particular, it is really striking how bad most of the originals sound. I sure as hell would never want my versions to sound that bad.

The nice thing about analog modeling in the digital domain is we have control over exactly how much of it we have. What I'm looking for specifically is the organic sound of harmonic excitement and transparent compression that you can only get from many subtle layers of it at each stage of the signal path. But I'm not overdoing it to the point where it's degrading the mix. I'm very much against suffocating a mix with a brickwall limiter, carving it up with EQ, or overcooking it with a saturator just for the sake of it. That's mostly what I'm hearing in modern production, and what I want to avoid. The way I work ends up needing very little EQing or compression on the mixing channel strip because it's already been shaped along the way in small increments.

There were a lot of bad sounding albums made on the cheap in the '80s, particularly among underground artists. But there were also albums made that exceed anything today in terms of of dynamics, fidelity, production value, and raw performance. I'd put anything from U2 or Pink Floyd up against anything made today.

[legendCNCD]

Favourite function is Ableton Live 10's Capture MIDI https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... pture-MIDI

[n I I e]

M4L. Try implement that with the ugly as hell Reaper.

[BONES]

I put those people one step above flat Earthers

The surface of a sphere is in fact 2-dimensional, which is easy to prove with multivariable calculus.

No, it's curved, it cannot be described effectively in two dimensions, calculus be damned.

On a much larger scale, superstring/M theory tells us that our universe is 3-dimensional information projected on a 2-dimensional brane. So maybe they're onto something.

You'll notice that it is still called a "Theory", it is yet to be proven to be true and it still doesn't work without having to invent a whole heap of stuff that can never be proven to actually exist. It is interesting maths but AFAIK hasn't been able to predict anything, which makes it kind of useless. And whilst 'branes are generally represented as being like sheets of paper, they can actually have as many dimensions as you need them to to make your maths work (which is why I think it's a shit theory).

Why? So you can sound as bad as stuff did back then? Because, trust me, all your favourite 80s music sounds like crap by modern standards, you're just too blinded by nostalgia to hear it. It's something that has become blindingly clear to me over the last year or so, as I've made more than 60 80s covers. Even when my mixes are only rough, if I play the original to listen to something in particular, it is really striking how bad most of the originals sound. I sure as hell would never want my versions to sound that bad.

The way I work ends up needing very little EQing or compression on the mixing channel strip because it's already been shaped along the way in small increments.

Same here. I normally only EQ my drums, everything else goes through clean, and I try not to use EQ when mastering, even subtly. Inevitably, though, some of the instrument patches I use will have their own internal EQ but if I notice it, I usually turn it off and make the part work without it.

But there were also albums made that exceed anything today in terms of of dynamics, fidelity, production value, and raw performance.

Nothing that interests me. There is certainly nothing in anything I've heard of Pink Floyd or U2 that I'd be keen to emulate, although U2's Boy is the best Echo & the Bunnymen album ever made. The songs I'm talking about that sound naff are mostly Top 10 hits, not dodgy underground recordings.