After building up a nice DAWless setup, I'm starting to want my DAW again

[Uncle E]

stop saying dawless if youre over 25!

If someone is dawless, do we call them a daw-cel?

[EdwardGivens]

That won't happen with hardware.

I used to use an Ensoniq EPS16+
Wonderful machine. Luscious effects, programmable as hell. I paid $2700 for it in 1991. Giant paperweight now.

[BONES]

This is actually the setup that was used in the 80's and even the 90's.
The first midi sequencers (C-lab creator/notator, Steinberg 24 etc.)
already existed, but many musicians limited themselves to working with
hardware midi sequencers at that time.

Not really. My hardware sequencers were just as easy to work with and a shitload more reliable. By 1986 I had a Korg SQD-1, which was a great sequencer that was easy to use and loaded a song in just a couple of seconds. With the advent of Korg's M1 and it's successors, hardware sequencing got much better than anything you could do ITB at the time.

If your setup in the 90s was evolved at all then you were using racks of stuff, a larger format mixer with the holy grail of the home studio being some kind of 8-bus board. Polyphony came from using multiple synths and you spent hours and many dollars wiring shit up and debugging flakey budget patch-bay bullshit.

Maybe that was your experience but it didn't have to be like that at all. My set-up n the 90s was mostly my workstation - M1 -> 01R/W -> Trinity - and a sampler - DSS-1 -> ASR-10. In the early 90s I'd also have had a separate drum machine - DDD-5 -> S3 - but once I got the 01R/W I had enough MIDI channels to do drums without a drum machine.

This, of course, was all for live performance, I still used to hire a proper studio (and an engineer) to record, although once I got the Trinity with the 4 track audio recording capability I started to record vocals at home, too.

VST's don't have a physical presence. You don't get to impress yourself or others with your gear.

Does that matter? My goal was always to have the most minimal set-up I could get away with. I wanted to impress people with my performance, not with my set-up.

If I were gigging still I'd take my linnstrument and a durable laptop. Easy setup easy teardown.

Yep. my whole set-up today fits in my carry-on luggage. I took all my gear to a gig on the bus once, too. Even my keyboard stand breaks down small enough to fit into a (large) suitcase. Still, when we play locally, I still like to bring a big ger synth or two, just for show.

Once I got back into hardware, it was never about quitting DAWs. It was about rediscovering the joy I felt from my first real synth (a Moog Micromoog), the inspiration, and let's be honest, about the really fun toys.

I'm the opposite. My memories of hardware were all about what a punish everything was. I get far more fun and satisfaction out of software than I ever did from hardware. Plus, of course, the results are orders of magnitude better with software, too.

stop saying dawless if youre over 25!

I f**king hate it when people say "daw", instead of "D. A. W." It would never in a million years have occurred to me to say "daw".

Anyway, onto the thread title. Who the f**k wouldn't have seen that coming, eh!?! I haven't used a set-up that is as big a punish as that since I got my Yamaha QX-7 sequencer and my first multi-timbral synth (CZ101) in 1985.

[zerocrossing]

stop saying dawless if youre over 25!

If someone is dawless, do we call them a daw-cel?

That joke was dawful.

[justin3am]

I think it's good to try things even if they may not work out. Anything can be a learning experience. I mean part of learning my preferences was figuring out what I didn't like.

I would also say that I sometimes notice this kinda pendulum behavior, where folks decide they want to try a new way of working and they overshoot and end up changing things that didn't need to be changed, then they decide that the new way of working didn't work out so they swing all the way back in the other direction. This may happen a few times before they find a good balance. Sure with some more consideration, perhaps they wouldn't need to go through all that to find the balance which works for them... but the path to getting there is sometimes fun or frustrating in a way that's informative/useful.

I frequently create stuff without a DAW but when I do it's a completely different approach and a different set of skills at play. I would never declare myself to be 'dawless', since even when I use tape, an outboard digital recorder or even my phone, I bring the audio back into the computer for editing/post-processing before release. I'm probably fortunate in that I don't have to choose one way of working over another, I can just have different workstations that I can use depending on how I want to work on a given day. Or maybe that lack of commitment is it's own burden.

[Uncle E]

I will say that dipping my toe into dawless made me appreciate my DAW.

[foosnark]

I would also say that I sometimes notice this kinda pendulum behavior, where folks decide they want to try a new way of working and they overshoot and end up changing things that didn't need to be changed, then they decide that the new way of working so they swing all the way back in the other direction. This may happen a few times before they find a good balance. Sure with some more consideration, perhaps they wouldn't need to go through all that to find the balance which works for them... but the path to getting there is sometimes fun or frustrating in a way that's informative/useful.

Yes, and yes to that last part too. I have gone on some weird tangents that didn't work out, but I learned things from them.

The biggest one of those was probably dumping a lot of my Eurorack favorites thinking I could replace them with an ER-301 Sound Computer. It's like a software modular system inside of a Eurorack module... but with less DSP power than a DAW, an interface very much inferior to a DAW GUI, and very few of the advantages of modular hardware. Over time I wound up pretty much reversing the entire change and buying a lot of those modules back (or replacing them with different options to cover similar functions).

But using it to recreate some other gear gave me quite a few insights about FM and PM and wavefolding, reverb, granular etc. It also taught me an important, if somewhat expensive and painful, lesson about what it is I like about hardware in the first place

[enroe]

This is actually the setup that was used in the 80's and even the 90's.
The first midi sequencers (C-lab creator/notator, Steinberg 24 etc.)
already existed, but many musicians limited themselves to working with
hardware midi sequencers at that time.

Not really. My hardware sequencers were just as easy to work with and a shitload more reliable. By 1986 I had a Korg SQD-1, which was a great sequencer that was easy to use and loaded a song in just a couple of seconds. With the advent of Korg's M1 and it's successors, hardware sequencing got much better than anything you could do ITB at the time.

Anyway, onto the thread title. Who the f**k wouldn't have seen that coming, eh!?! I haven't used a set-up that is as big a punish as that since I got my Yamaha QX-7 sequencer and my first multi-timbral synth (CZ101) in 1985.

Haha, yes, very nice that you remember this time so enthusiastically.
But that's also included a lot of romanticizing: I myself - but most musicians -
were very impressed at the time by the new possibilities opened up by
the hardware sequencers: Suddenly everyone could have their own fully
automated studio! That was brilliant - it made the creativity explode.

Nevertheless, it was also the case that the first software sequencers -
back then on the Atari - expanded the possibilities again.

And yet I would say: if someone is happy with hardware sequencers and
knows how to use them, then he should do it. The limitation of the possibilities
can promote creativity: Maybe the super song will succeed with the hardware
sequencer from the 80s? Let's go!

[BONES]

Are you nucking futs!?! I would never, ever go back to any of that. What we can do today is so many orders of magnitude better than what we could do back then that my hand would get a cramp from writing all the zeroes.

[machinesworking]

Are you nucking futs!?! I would never, ever go back to any of that. What we can do today is so many orders of magnitude better than what we could do back then that my hand would get a cramp from writing all the zeroes.

Have to agree, the only sampler we could afford was the Mirage, hexadecimal display meant a pen and paper to calculate sample time left etc.... fun.

[BONES]

Yeah and, with my first sampler (DSS-1), I had to be able to get through a whole gig with just the contents of one-side of a double-sided floppy, because it took way too long to load anything for me to do it on stage. So that was a whopping 600kb of samples I could use for maybe 15 songs. At least the ASR-10 had SCSI. I bought a SyQuest drive for it and it was amazing!

[BertKoor]

Mostly I think the DAWless craze is about minimalism and a search for authenticity. Authenticity is IMO a useless goal, but minimalism makes sense. If you're confronted with only 3-8 sound generation devices in a fixed setup, you will eventually know them well, it takes some choice away which can be a good thing in the creative process. People get stifled by choice, if all you have is an 808 clone you're not spending any time searching for the perfect kick etc.

Cue Caustic3! Not a full DAW, not hardware, still fun...

[machinesworking]

Yeah and, with my first sampler (DSS-1), I had to be able to get through a whole gig with just the contents of one-side of a double-sided floppy, because it took way too long to load anything for me to do it on stage. So that was a whopping 600kb of samples I could use for maybe 15 songs. At least the ASR-10 had SCSI. I bought a SyQuest drive for it and it was amazing!

In Systems Collapse, my band in the 80's we used a four track tape machine with more studio collages, soundtrack stuff (think Cleanse Fold and Manipulate era Skinny Puppy or early Cabarete Voltaire loops), to allow the keyboard player time to load the Mirage. Needless to say our set was based around those floppies. Certain songs always followed the previous etc.

All of this takes me back to the idea of choice overkill for some, and that being the driving force behind trends like DAWless etc. It''s not that it's better, it's that it limits choice, forcing decisions for those that can't create their own arbitrary rules to get something done. I had a conversation with another musician where he was convinced somehow that analog tape was "warmer" than digital. I think you're aware that it's not, it's just a far wider range, so piercing high end and overwhelming low is possible. That and saturation on the master that can easily be replicated with plug ins.

I guess it's really whatever gets you away from making dozens of loops that go nowhere, I just wish people were honest about it instead of coming up with nonsense like "warmth, hands on" etc.

[BONES]

I've got a better story. When I had my first MIDI sequencer, a Yamaha QX7, I could only fit half a set on it so I used my 4-track Fostex to play the backing for a cover on two channels, while the other two channels loaded the next 6 songs into the QX7. It worked surprising well and I probably played 40 or 50 gigs like that before I got my SQD-1.

[EdwardGivens]

Do do do. Daw daw daw. That's all I want to say to you.