Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: DAWs

By Shamus Posted Sunday Sep 27, 2015

Filed under: Music 35 comments

“DAW” stands for Digital Audio Workstation, and is a somewhat sloppy term used to refer to all the various programs people use to make music. It’s sloppy, because the term “audio” can efer to a lot of non-musical work. Or it could be the program you use to mix all the sounds of the real-world instruments you played with your fleshy human hands. Or it could mean – as in my case – the program used to make all the instrument sounds, map their notes, and mix them together. In any case, for our purposes here when I say DAW I mean “the thing I use to make a song on the computer”.

In the past few entries I complained about Magix Music Maker, my DAW of choice. Several people suggested I give LMMS a try. I did, and now I’m really conflicted.

Automation is a process where you can program effects into the song. Perhaps you want a lowpass filter that gradually fades out as the song starts, which creates the effect of approaching the music from a great distance. (This is a famous example.) Or maybe you want a strong low-fi filter to apply to some parts of the vocals and not others. Automation lets you do that. Or maybe you want to duck the volume down on your keyboards for just a split second every time the kick drum hits, which is the effect that gives a lot of electronic music its “pumping” feel. That’s automation, and LMMS has incredibly powerful automation tools.

In contrast, the automation tools in MMM are so rudimentary they’re not worth using. They’re complex, fiddly, and can barely do anything. Also – and this is really important – the automation controls are completely disconnected from the music and can’t be edited in bulk. So if I decide I want to add a 10-second intro to my song, I’d need to painstakingly re-position or re-map all of the automation points. Ugh. Forget it.

I’d just jump to using LMMS full-time, but the piano roll – the thing no-talent hacks like me use to place notes because we can’t play a real instrument – is shockingly bad. Just look:

My eyes hurt just trying to read this.
My eyes hurt just trying to read this.

The background is black and blue and dark blue. And then on top of that are your blue and dark blue notes. And then the horizontal line that marks your position is a dark grey line on a black background. And then to complete this circus of un-readability, there’s this constant wall of grey grid markers. No matter how far you zoom in, or how coarse you set the note grid, the program insists on having vertical grey lines every ten pixels or so. Even a simple arrangement like the one above is hard to follow, and a busy arrangement of small notes is pure madness.

With regards to instruments, each program has its strengths. MMM has fantastic sampled instruments. Viola, cello, violin, electric guitar, piano, harp, and a dozen others. I mean, it’s rubbish compared to having a real band or orchestra sitting around waiting to do your bidding, but for canned instruments they’re amazing. I didn’t realize how good these were until I started fiddling around with the alternatives.

LMMS is much better with synthesized instruments. Do you want something electronic? Nintendo-ish? Some strange vibrating, wobbly, echoing, note-bending fantasy instrument? LMMS is way ahead of anything MMM has to offer. And since I favor electronic stuff, this really should be my platform of choice. But then I open up that piano roll and… ugh.

Anyway, I haven’t mastered LMMS well enough to coax any worthwhile music out of it yet.

But to show you how nice the Magix instruments can sound, here’s a track using mostly orchestral instruments:

I’m really happy with how that turned out. It might be the first one I’m really proud of. It sounds like it was made by someone who knows what they’re doing.

Here’s the track map, for the curious:

The green lines are the automation controls. They just adjust the volume of the various instruments. If I added a couple of measures to the start of the song, I'd have to manually drag all those little corners one at a time, which is the OPPOSITE of 'automation'.
The green lines are the automation controls. They just adjust the volume of the various instruments. If I added a couple of measures to the start of the song, I'd have to manually drag all those little corners one at a time, which is the OPPOSITE of 'automation'.

ALSO:

A few people mentioned they wanted to download some of my older tracks, but couldn’t. Soundcloud limits you to 100 downloads per song for a free account. I’ve upgraded to a paid account, so you should be able to download anything you want from my collection. If not, I means I forgot to check a checkbox somewhere. Let me know and I’ll fix it.

 


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35 thoughts on “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: DAWs

  1. Ellery says:

    This is your best work yet. Thank you.

    1. Benjamin Hilton says:

      This track really makes me think of something you might hear in the background of a rather somber episode of Firefly.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Second.

  2. Radio Silence says:

    Shamus, what would I need to pay you to compose music for me now and then?

  3. LazerBlade says:

    I would definitely say LMMS. Why? Because your difficulties with LMMS can be tweaked out, while MMM is fundamentally limited. You can fix the piano roll by downloading a new theme, (or tweaking the theme XML files, I don’t know if there is a good set of themes compatible since v1.0) and you can find some equally good orchestral soundfonts for cheap, free, or legally quagmirous.

    I totally am not biased from having been on the project team and having made most of my own music (including my Good Robot submission awhile back) with LMMS.

    Of course, you are the artist and may simply need more experimentation before you can say which one ultimately lends itself better to your creativity.

    1. Lanthanide says:

      As a long-time reader (DMotR comic 1), I have to say Shamus does have a bit of a habit of making things sound much harder / more limited than they really are.

      Case in point about the piano roll, where clearly the solution is a new theme. Similarly for picking out the best graphics card, it’s really not that hard, just go here and find what suits your budget and won’t hold back the rest of your components: http://www.logicalincrements.com/

      1. Retsam says:

        The existence of solutions, even relatively simple ones, for problems doesn’t really make those problems invalid. There might be a way to mitigate the terribleness of the default piano roll by installing a new theme… but that doesn’t change the fact that the default theme is trash. The fact that someone else has put significant effort into detangling the mess of meaningless acronyms and non-sequential numberings that is the graphics card market doesn’t negate the point that the graphics card market is a complete mess.

        Plus, Logical Increments has only existed since 2013, and most of Shamus’ posts on graphics hardware seem to be from about 2008. And, besides, Shamus’s complaining is fun.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Pretty much this.Also,Lanthanide negates the ease of finding such “easy solutions”.Logicalincrements is just one of the multitude of sites that offer such advice,and which one am I to trust?So it just switches the “which graphics card I want” question to “which advice site do I use to help me”.

      2. Cuthalion says:

        I’ve used LMMS a little bit (just like Shamus at this point), and I did not know you can get other themes. I’m not surprised; I just didn’t know you could do that. I wouldn’t expect Shamus to think, “clearly the solution is a new theme,” either.

  4. Cuthalion says:

    I tried LMMS quite awhile ago and remember the drum pattern tool and the video gamey synths being really neat!

  5. David says:

    I normally don’t really like the genres you compose in, but I actually liked that piece. I’m not sure how you should take that.

  6. 4th Dimension says:

    That is a nice one, but it does have a problem to my music uneducated ears. About a minute in electronica and instruments start clashing quite noticeably, so much that even I noticed. Unless you deliberately intended to create a music symbolizing discord, I think that part needs to be touched up.

  7. Scott Schulz says:

    Lovely theme in the cellos at the beginning, and I would have liked a recap of that towards the end. Someday Shamus will stumble upon sonata form, and then what we will do?

  8. Adalore says:

    A very different work. It sounded completely unlike your other work until 2 minutes.

    I likes it.

  9. Hermocrates says:

    the piano roll ““ the thing no-talent hacks like me use to place notes because we can't play a real instrument

    You say that, but I can play piano and yet I couldn’t come up with a composition even half as interesting as yours. Don’t sell yourself short!

    If you don’t mind me asking, what are your thoughts on FLStudio? I saw you tweet about its installer trying to get you to buy even more plugins, so I thought that meant you had it but, going from this and the last post, I guess not? It has a lot of what you’ve been wanting: good piano roll, comprehensive automation, aesthetically pleasing interface; the pro version also comes with a lot of good synths, and there are plenty of free acoustic instrument samples/soundfonts lying around (some even included with the program). Or was the installer trying to get you to buy even more plugins enough to turn you off of Image-Line entirely?

  10. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

    Re: “famous example.”

    Yes. I definitely came away from that video thinking about the fade in on the intro…

  11. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

    As for the piece itself, I rather liked it in a movie or game soundtrack sort of way. Your image suggests space travel, but I thought more mountain river -at least for the first third or so. After the drums came in, I lost the travel imagery, and started envisioning something more like a time-passing montage, which I guess still fits with the title.

    The repeated theme runs to long without variation, and the differences in the accompaniment aren’t enough to overcome that. A bridge between the opening theme and the later embellished version would probably help.

    Overall, it’s something to be proud of, but as you say, still amateur work.

  12. LadyMoonHawke says:

    As a fleshy musician with a real-world instrument, I really enjoy your work. It’s very cool and different; modern but not so challenging as to be impossible. Keep it up!

  13. Da Mage says:

    This is by far the best you’ve made, I really enjoyed it.

  14. Csirke says:

    The song is pretty cool. The beginning reminds me a bit of the Talos Principle soundtrack, like this, or this.

    By the way, did any of the Spoiler Warning crew play the Talos Principle? It’s an awesome game, and has a pretty cool story too. Though I’m not suggesting it would work for Spoiler Warning, because, well, it’s a puzzle game, not that interesting to play “expertly”. But I do recommend it for you guys to play, or anyone else :)

  15. Felblood says:

    LMMS is the first real DAW I worked with since way back when fussing with Anvil and Audacity was considered a good idea, so getting another perspective on it’s shortcomings was really great.

    I really should find some better orchestral instruments for this thing.

  16. Dude says:

    Magix etc are limiting tools that serve well for learning things, but once you start running into restrictions as you have been in the past couple of posts.

    Shamus, I highly recommend you check the demo for Ableton Live Suite out. Also download a couple of free synths (they’re called vsti instruments) as sound generators if you feel like Ableton’s own instruments are lacking (which you will feel, since the demo ships with a gutted number of presets to play with).

    I think you’ll cotton to its session mode of song composition very well, since you already have that Minecraft block approach down. It also has your traditional left to right arrangement view you’re used to laying tracks down in Magix already, just in case. I’ve been composing as a hobby for years upon years, and in my experience, Live has some of the best tutorials and manuals I’ve seen for DAWs across the board to get you started, and I know quite a few DAWs (Cubase, Logic, Sonar, Presonus Studio One etc).

    (And if you don’t like the default grey color scheme of Live, it has a number of themes to change the scheme. You can even make/download your own.)

    1. djshire says:

      Live Suite is really expensive for what you’re getting if you’re not playing out live. Cubase or Studio One would be a better choice.

      1. Dude says:

        Hence, demo version.

        Live is completely worth the price for the tools it provides, in my opinion. Other DAWs have been playing catch up to it for almost five years now. Cubase and Studio One are great if you’re primarily interested in recording according to me. For someone like Shamus who likes electronic music above all, using those traditional DAWs like Cubase is like using a mouse-keyboard control scheme for the Arkham games. Functional, but lacking. Live is the Xbox 360 controller (ie, more suited to loop based experimentation).

        1. djshire says:

          I agree on Live being great for loops and samples, that’s what the engine was built for. But Suite is $749, Standard is $449. Neither is a good choice for someone who wants value from a DAW purchase and isn’t doing anything live.

          Another one that Shamus could look at: Bitwig. Made by a former Live person. Way more for way less ($299), plus he can code things to work how he wants them to (you can change the controller API code).

      2. Chris says:

        I find Cubase really confusing. Ableton is great. Dead simple UI, and it’s so incredibly easy to build complex, layered processing chains that make the CPU cry. The included instruments are pretty great. The drum machine is pretty much the best one out there IMO, and Operator is fantastic. Analog is a perfectly serviceable 2 OSC VA, and Sampler is great. Sure, the presets are terrible, but it’s best to move away from presets as quickly as possible anyway.

        1. I tried to learn in FL and nothing seemed to make any intuitive sense. Tried ableton and immediately knew I would never go back

          1. Chris says:

            I started on ScreamTracker with absolutely no concept of meter or scale. It’s a wonder I ever produced anything remotely listenable. Though I do rather miss setting tempo in hexadecimal and using executable binaries as waveforms.

            1. that last part sounds awesome!

              1. Chris says:

                It was! You could feed any kind of file to ST, and it would treat it as audio. Most of the time you’d just get a burst of static, but every now and again it would produce something very interesting. Back in high school, a friend and I composed an entire track centered around this really harsh but really cool rhythmic noise that IIRC was DOS 6.22’s command.com.

        2. djshire says:

          Cubase was born of old MIDI arrangement programs of yore, back when computers were something that was just starting to appear in the home of non- government, military, or educational. There’s a lot there, and it can be very overwhelming for a first-timer.

          I started on Logic after screwing around with it for many hours (and many trips) at Guitar Center. I’ve had it for years and still don’t know half of what it can do. But its great for someone like me who uses MIDI a lot, has great built-in plug-ins, and has easy-to-find solutions for everything vs newer DAWs that haven’t been around that long.

  17. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I've upgraded to a paid account

    And thus,youve officially moved from “dabbler” to “amateur musician”.

    1. Felblood says:

      So, how does this level up system work in music?

      Is it like DnD where he can just multiclass into Bard, and it’s not a big deal, or is it more like the DBZ/MLP model where he is basically ascending to a completely different tier?

      Presenting Alicorn Princess Super Shamus Two! May all kneel before the sickness of his jams!

  18. MadTinkerer says:

    BOSCA CEOIL FOREVER

    Well, okay, maybe not “forever” (In fact, I already have Music Creator 6 on Steam), but it’s the best DAW for complete beginners that I’ve used.

  19. This song seems a little unbalanced as far as the eq. This might not, and probably isn’t your fault, but the fault of your speakers

    Ex: hipothetically speaking your speakers might have really weak bass. This means that when you try to add a little bit of a bassline, you turn it up to a level that sounds good to you, but when somebody plays it on say, a speaker system with normal bass, the lower frequencies take over.

    If you are thinking about doing this more, I would invest in a good pair of speakers with a somewhat flat response curve. You can get some cheaper ones for around $100

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