If you had to stick to one DAW, which one would it be?

[jens]

Well, feel free to educate me, then, because in the video I skipped through on YT this morning,, it looked like exactly the same thing to me.

They are really very different. In some regards Studio One's Arranger is more powerful, in others Reason's Blocks though - personally I by far prefer the latter (due to the kind of music I make) - here's a quick overview:

Blocks doesn't have an arranger tool in the first place i.e. you can't rearrange the song just by moving entries in a list up/down.

Blocks instead is simply enough a two layer system of a maximum of 33 competing timelines (one main timeline plus 32 Blocks). The first layer is the Blocks, which has a lower priority and any clip that resides on the main timeline has as the top layer the higher one; I.e. you can add clips on top of the (faintly drawn) Blocks layer. That way you can modify the Blocks-based arrangement simply by adding coloured clips on top of the faint arrangement base, which also makes it super-easy to visually see where you altered the Blocks-based arragement structure. If you change the underlying Blocks the clips that sit on the main timeline are not affected - and vice versa.

As far as I know the only DAW that offers a similar system is Digital Performer with its Chunks.
But Blocks are really super-easy to use and it's a very neat and tidy interface.

Also - since each Block is its own timeline - each Block can act like a Scratchpad in Studio One.
(But instead of sitting at the end of the main timeline, it has its own Bar 0 to X.) And since you define what part of each Block is used/played back on the main timeline, you even have a lot of additional freedom even within each individual Block.

Example: annoyingly enough, Reason still doesn't have multitake-recording for MIDI. But as a workaround you can set up any number of repetitions in any Block you choose to use (for whatever reason) and this may never affect your song-arrangement in any way, even though the same Block is used multiple times throughout the song.

(I had started a thread about Blocks some time ago here: viewtopic.php?t=539287)


edit: fixed typos and otherwise seeked to clean up the mess I made...

[robertorodrigo]

I work with Live 8 since 2008, mainly to hardware sequencing and audio multitrack recording. I firmly believe in stick-to-one DAW reasoning, but I guess all of us are different in our brain architecture. FAst learning guys will take advantage of getting new tools, but for some of us it could slow down creativity

[VOODOO U]

Utilizing multiple DAWs isn't some superhuman feat. It's not hard to become fluid with multiple DAWs. If that seems like hard effort, that's a shortcoming and oh well too bad for you (speaking in general).
The benefit? I can only speak for myself and that is it freshens me up so I end up writing differently. Translation: i avoid routine which leads to stagnate and redundant output and yes that's my own personal shortcoming; i get bored easily.
As a guitarist, it's like picking up a new ax. I love what i got but when i pick up a different ax that i like it tends to give me this surge of enthusiasm which can produce awesome output.
Same with VSTs. When i find a new VST i like it inspires me to write.
I just found out about the VK-1 Viking and it got me going for hours.

[BONES]

Regardless my point remains, you complicated your life moving to a DAW your partner doesn't use, I'm not knocking you for it, but you have to concede that it would make much more sense if you both used the same DAW.

Which is exactly why I know what I'm talking about. Of course, the plan was that we would both move to Studio One but he was involved with a couple of other side-projects at the time and they were all using Cubase so he didn't make the transition when I did and it hasn't happened since. And it's not like new music is the only thing I do. That's only 6 or 7 songs every couple of years. I work on 20 different things a week, 100 different songs over the course of a year. If I had to be switching around for all of them, I'd probably just give up and go back to Cubase, which seems to be a lot more stable than it was at version 9, when I was using it full-time. Of course, anything I send him I send as a Studio One file so he can do all the work converting it, so that's no problem for me.

I'm "fluent" in Logic, Reaper and Bitwig, because I was testing them with the intention of switching when I didn't see DP or Live moving forward with MPE, but I really only know DP 100% and Live around 80.

You're doing better than me. I owned a full license of Bitwig for 6 months and never felt like I could do anything with it, beyond the very basics. Every session was a battle, nothing felt intuitive. To be fair, that was coming from Orion and my experience with Bitwig definitely made it easier to get my head around Cubase. Simple things like getting used to having to double-click in the piano roll to create a note, instead of just clicking and dragging. If you've used Orion's piano roll, every other piano roll is a punish.

[Yorrrrrr]

In Bitwig you just had to use the pen tool (hit and hold the number 3) while single clicking and dragging. Or just switch the tool to the pen (hit 3). A double click to enter MIDI notes is with the pointer tool (1). Bitwig piano roll is really good, especially in version 6.

[machinesworking]

I'm "fluent" in Logic, Reaper and Bitwig, because I was testing them with the intention of switching when I didn't see DP or Live moving forward with MPE, but I really only know DP 100% and Live around 80.

You're doing better than me. I owned a full license of Bitwig for 6 months and never felt like I could do anything with it, beyond the very basics. Every session was a battle, nothing felt intuitive. To be fair, that was coming from Orion and my experience with Bitwig definitely made it easier to get my head around Cubase. Simple things like getting used to having to double-click in the piano roll to create a note, instead of just clicking and dragging. If you've used Orion's piano roll, every other piano roll is a punish.

To be fair I once switched to Logic from around 2000 to 2007, so that one is relatively easy to relearn. Bitwig is also enough like Live to get around in pretty quickly. I'm still kinda amazed that it didn't click with you? I think it has the best laid out commands of any DAW I've used, everything is dead easy, P for pencil, L for launcher, etc. etc. My only complaint with it is no decent step sequencer, and mediocre multi monitor support. It's a CPU pig but computers are so powerful these days.

In terms of Reaper, that was shear persistence, oddly enough I hated the single click drawing of notes in the MIDI editor in Reaper, spent some time getting rid of it, coming from DP and Logic I want to choose a pencil tool to draw notes and I want left click and drag for selection. In the end both Live and DP got MPE so my fears of them going the way of the dodo were unfounded, so all the Reaper knowledge just meant getting some money from being hired to help people with their Reaper setups, and a copy of Logic to open up old songs with.

I would likely have stuck with Bitwig had I not had writing partners that use Live, but even then, I would likely just stick with DP and be done with it.

As far as I know the only DAW that offers a similar system is Digital Performer with its Chunks.
But Blocks are really super-easy to use and it's a very neat and tidy interface.

I'll be quite honest I have Reason, but since I already use DP, and Live occasionally I just use it as the VST3 Rack, I mean I pretty much always rewired it into DP when I used it years ago so nothings changed that much. DP's Chunks are essentially separate Sequences, with their own plugins even if you want. You can use a virtual (V-Rack) of plugins that is addressable by any Sequence, and use the "Song" window to arrange sequences in a timeline, but the planning involved in that means most of use don't use it like that. The Song window mostly gets used by people scoring films for Large Projects and easy replacements of parts that directors whimsically decide to change at the last minute etc.

It sounds more like Blocks looking at some youtuber using them are super concise easy to use containers for for parts of a project, not really that similar to Chunks, which are more like complete sequences. The downside of Chunks is that the way to use them quickly without doubling up plugins in each Chunk is to put everything in a V-Rack but the caveat to V-Racks is that plugins in a V-Rack only can use MIDI automation, not plugin/host automation. Mostly OK, but some plugins don't really use MIDI learn that effectively and work well with plugin automation.

[tweakbench]

Very cool to see Bitwig so far up, and Reaper! wow.. I need to update my test bed

[jens]

It sounds more like Blocks looking at some youtuber using them are super concise easy to use containers for for parts of a project, not really that similar to Chunks, which are more like complete sequences.

Nope, as I said each Block is a complete timeline that goes from bar zero to bar n - you could theoretically have a different song with a completely different set of tracks and plugins on each of the 32 Bocks - but that wouldn't be very practical at all; for starters as all of them would share both the same tempo-time and time signature and they'd also share same total number of tracks which you'd have to constantly scroll back and forth through because each Block doesn't even have its own scrolling position for the track-headers not to mention individual track-height settings.

Well, you could theoretically at least have one Rack-row per Block, but anyway - it wasn't made for this at all... I was just saying that in an attempt to explain what it is (and isn't).

where it excels at:

even with just a single Block it could/can be trememdously useful.

Say you have a single eight bar long section/sequence (consisting of a number of tracks) sitting in a Block. You could have these eight bars looped for a whole song in the main timeline and then there just add some little snippets for variations here and there throughout the song (and perhaps mute parts of the Block ocassionally (you can do that in the main timeline, even though you can't change the content itself there)) - these snippets could just be a bar or maybe partly even just half a bar long and maybe you'd add vocals in the main timeline too - and nobody would probably ever notice that it's basically just the same 8 bars repeating over and over again.

In the main timeline you would see immediately and very easily where exactly your variations are. In the Block you could tweak/change the section or add tracks and it would immediately affect the whole song.

This of course is just one example - it's extremely flexible. The same Block could also have 16 bars which consist of two different variations of basically the same 8 bar long sequence and you could sometimes use the first 8 bars, sometimes the second and sometimes all 16 throughout your song - but at that point you probably would be better off using a second Block, which at any point you can easily do just by copying the clips over (or of course cutting and pasting them instead).

It's funny - even though it's such a brilliantly simple concept basically no-one ever gets it who hasn't used it themselves - and even those who do use it sometimes haven't really fully grasped its power and versatility it seems.

And I kind of bet this post of mine won't manage to improve this one bit.

[BONES]

I think it has the best laid out commands of any DAW I've used, everything is dead easy, P for pencil, L for launcher, etc. etc.

Launcher? Are we going into space? I don't need no fuckin' launcher and that was the problem - It just wasn't made with my needs in mind. I find the best way to learn any new application is to take an old project and try to re-create it in the new software. I took one of the songs from our most recent album and tried to remake it in Bitwig. After almost 4 months it still sounded like shit compared to the album version I'd made in Orion. To be fair, the original was made using only Orion's native tools, so I was determined to do the same in Bitwig. Bitwig's default instruments, in particular, were rubbish, which was a big part of my struggle with it. It wasn't until after I'd abandoned Bitwig for Cubase that we really started to get into 3rd party plugins. But once they released v3 with the grid, I knew I'd made the right decision. It was never going to work for me so I've never regretted dumping it.

They are really very different. In some regards Studio One's Arranger is more powerful, in others Reason's Blocks though - personally I by far prefer the latter (due to the kind of music I make) - here's a quick overview:

Sorry I couldn't read this this morning, I had to get to work. But I've read it through now and watch three more YT videos and all I can say is WTF? This looks to me like a total workflow killer. It overcomplicates things that should, ideally, be kept as simple a possible. It has functionality from Studio One's Arranger Track and Patterns but where the Arranger Track and Patterns are tools you use inside the main arrangement window, Blocks seems to create a whole new timeline that you have to switch between all the time. It seems to be answering a number of questions that nobody who knew what they were doing would ever have thought to ask.

To be fair, I feel mostly the same way about the Arranger Track and Patterns. Both seem like good ideas until you actually try to use them, when you realise you are just moving the work to another place and if you simply did it all in the main window, you'd get it done faster, with less fuss. And Studio One is so good for that.

I really can't emphasise enough how important keeping things simple is to my work. Over the years I've been able to refine and refine what I do to the point where it's just about as minimalist as it can be and the work I've produced has just got better an better as a result.

It's so tempting, so easy, to add another plugin to solve a problem in a mix but if you take a moment to think about the root cause of the issue, you'll get a better result from addressing that directly. e.g. I used to use EQ on every channel to get my mixes in order. These days I probably only use it on one track in 10. Instead, if a synth bass need more bottom end, for example, I'll play with the filter and envelopes to generate more low frequencies. If a hi-hat needs more top end, I'll turn it up and use the filters in Battery to damp the lower frequencies or find a different sample that sounds the way I need it to. By keeping everything as simple as possible issues become obvious and an order of magnitude easier to deal with, while your end product gets better and better with each useless piece you cut away. Blocks seems like the opposite of that.

Nope, as I said each Block is a complete timeline that goes from bar zero to bar n - you could theoretically have a different song with a completely different set of tracks and plugins on each of the 32 Bocks

Can each Block have it's own tempo? I assume you could automate the tempo in the main arrangement but it might be cool if you could just add other songs (projects) as Blocks and organise your whole set in a single arrangement. That's kind of what I'd hoped to be able to do in Studio One' Project page but it turned out not to be the case. Lining up your songs in set order was such a simple and obvious feature in my M1, O1/R and Trinity, I can't believe no DAW offers the same functionality.

Say you have a single eight bar long section/sequence (consisting of a number of tracks) sitting in a Block. You could have these eight bars looped for a whole song in the main timeline and then there just add some little snippets for variations here and there throughout the song

In the main timeline you would see immediately and very easily where exactly your variations are. In the Block you could tweak/change the section or add tracks and it would immediately affect the whole song.

Yeah, Patterns in Studio One. You can also assign probabilities within patterns in Studio One, which makes them even more powerful

It's funny - even though it's such a brilliantly simple concept basically no-one ever gets it who hasn't used it themselves - and even those who do use it sometimes haven't really fully grasped its power and versatility it seems.

Sorry, but I don't see it at all. It seems to me that you're just making a lot more work for yourself for no actual benefit. I tend to keep my MIDI clips in useful chunks so that I can move them around easily at any time. If it starts to get confusing, individual clips can have their own name but I've never had to do that. Once I'm happy with the arrangement, I' "glue" them together into a single clip, knowing that it's no effort at all to cut them up again later to move things around if I want to make changes. Early on I tried to use the Arranger Track and Patterns but I didn't find that they gave me any extra flexibility and I pretty much always ended up just moving thing around in the timeline. After a few tries I gave up on both things.

Thanks for taking the time to explain all this, I really appreciate the effort.

[Bunny_boy]

Surely This Daw, using This Plugin, is all you need

[jens]

Yeah, Patterns in Studio One.

How so? I thought patterns were a different kind of (as compared to the piano-roll) per-track MIDI-sequence? Reason has something similar - the Drum Sequencer which als has a probability setting but which is entirely unrelated to Blocks.

[jens]

It's funny - even though it's such a brilliantly simple concept basically no-one ever gets it who hasn't used it themselves - and even those who do use it sometimes haven't really fully grasped its power and versatility it seems.

Sorry, but I don't see it at all. It seems to me that you're just making a lot more work for yourself for no actual benefit.

You are proving my point (that I failed to make myself understood) right there.

[fatprice]

Well, feel free to educate me, then, because in the video I skipped through on YT this morning,, it looked like exactly the same thing to me.

They are really very different. In some regards Studio One's Arranger is more powerful, in others Reason's Blocks though - personally I by far prefer the latter (due to the kind of music I make) - here's a quick overview:

Blocks doesn't have an arranger tool in the first place i.e. you can't rearrange the song just by moving entries in a list up/down.

Blocks instead is simply enough a two layer system of a maximum of 33 competing timelines (one main timeline plus 32 Blocks). The first layer is the Blocks, which has a lower priority and any clip that resides on the main timeline has as the top layer the higher one; I.e. you can add clips on top of the (faintly drawn) Blocks layer. That way you can modify the Blocks-based arrangement simply by adding coloured clips on top of the faint arrangement base, which also makes it super-easy to visually see where you altered the Blocks-based arragement structure. If you change the underlying Blocks the clips that sit on the main timeline are not affected - and vice versa.

As far as I know the only DAW that offers a similar system is Digital Performer with its Chunks.
But Blocks are really super-easy to use and it's a very neat and tidy interface.

Also - since each Block is its own timeline - each Block can act like a Scratchpad in Studio One.
(But instead of sitting at the end of the main timeline, it has its own Bar 0 to X.) And since you define what part of each Block is used/played back on the main timeline, you even have a lot of additional freedom even within each individual Block.

Example: annoyingly enough, Reason still doesn't have multitake-recording for MIDI. But as a workaround you can set up any number of repetitions in any Block you choose to use (for whatever reason) and this may never affect your song-arrangement in any way, even though the same Block is used multiple times throughout the song.

(I had started a thread about Blocks some time ago here: viewtopic.php?t=539287)


edit: fixed typos and otherwise seeked to clean up the mess I made...

FL had this way before both Digital Performer and Reason… lol

[machinesworking]

It sounds more like Blocks looking at some youtuber using them are super concise easy to use containers for for parts of a project, not really that similar to Chunks, which are more like complete sequences.

Nope, as I said each Block is a complete timeline that goes from bar zero to bar n - you could theoretically have a different song with a completely different set of tracks and plugins on each of the 32 Bocks - but that wouldn't be very practical at all; for starters as all of them would share both the same tempo-time and time signature and they'd also share same total number of tracks which you'd have to constantly scroll back and forth through because each Block doesn't even have its own scrolling position for the track-headers not to mention individual track-height settings.

Yeah they still are subsets of a project if they don't have their own timeline and tempo. This seems to be the difference between Blocks and Chunks, Blocks are set up to work with a song, Chunks are more like complete separate songs, you can drag Chunks into other Chunks but for my and most users the use is more about setting up separate versions of the same song, a printed to audio version of a song with VI's etc. In the case of Chunks you can literally have every song in your repertoire with it's own time signature, VSTs, tempo, movie etc. in the same project.

For what it's worth the way I see people working in Blocks is far more elegant than anything you could do with Chunks in terms of dragging them into the open sequence, since it's the same as dragging an entire song into another song. If DP copied Blocks it wouldn't get in the way of Chunks. To put it simply most Chunks are Sequence Chunks, i.e. entire projects in the same project, with a slight (or long), delay when switching Sequence Chunks.

Blocks seem more like a subsequence which in terms of rearranging a song is a better idea, in terms of setting up a live show with separate songs or encapsulating versions of the same song in the same project file, Chunks.

[machinesworking]

I think it has the best laid out commands of any DAW I've used, everything is dead easy, P for pencil, L for launcher, etc. etc.

Launcher? Are we going into space? I don't need no fuckin' launcher and that was the problem - It just wasn't made with my needs in mind. I find the best way to learn any new application is to take an old project and try to re-create it in the new software. I took one of the songs from our most recent album and tried to remake it in Bitwig. After almost 4 months it still sounded like shit compared to the album version I'd made in Orion. To be fair, the original was made using only Orion's native tools, so I was determined to do the same in Bitwig. Bitwig's default instruments, in particular, were rubbish, which was a big part of my struggle with it. It wasn't until after I'd abandoned Bitwig for Cubase that we really started to get into 3rd party plugins. But once they released v3 with the grid, I knew I'd made the right decision. It was never going to work for me so I've never regretted dumping it.

I've always been amused by peoples reactions to Bitwigs plugins, I find nothing at all wrong with them, but to each their own I guess? A DAWs built in plugins are the least of my concerns, if they were I would be in Logic or Reason.

I still don't get why you would even choose a DAW that used Clips as a main writing tool, then be not interested in learning clips? IMO the Arrange pages of both Live and Bitwig are clunky compared to DAWs like DP, Cubase etc. You're probably in the best DAW for you for sure, Studio One comes across like a stripped down version of DP, Cubase, Logic etc.