Best DAW software for music production in 2022 - Home Studio Build pt. 11

so let's talk about Daws now you all know that I have grown up using Pro Tools I went from tape to Pro Tools to be honest it was liberating for me because as a guitar player predominantly I was always very envious of keyboard players who could edit their midi Pro Tools came out in the 90s and I could edit my guitar playing in the same way that keyboard players could edit their midi it was huge it was a big big deal being able to get in there and like move a snare drum around and it was for the longest time the only game in town now I've grown up using it meaning it's second nature to me I know all the shortcut keys I can move around really really fast without even trying now there are three levels that they do they do a 9.99 artist model which has up to 32 tracks that you can do it and that's basically you know ten dollars a month there's a studio version which has I think 512 tracks which is 32 dollars 31.99 and then for those of us like myself that run HDX systems it's a hundred dollars but you get 2058 tracks or something like that don't quote me on it but you get more tracks than you could ever deal with I mean to be honest 512 is more than I've ever used in my entire life but I suppose if you're doing a film scoring session and you want to make every single thing and you want the ability to be able to move from track to track just by scrolling down or creating groups then yeah there's probably people at a very very high level professionally in the film composition world and film scoring world that probably Love Unlimited tracks 2 000 tracks in my world is unlimited um now Apple have logic and what lots of people love about logic is 199.99 that's 200 dollars that's it it's a one-time payment I don't know if they charge for upgrades but as far as I know they don't so two hundred dollars and you get it all in and there's a lot of people that absolutely love Logic for that reason Studio One they have multiple ones they have the artist version which is equivalent to obviously the artist in Pro Tools and that's 100 bucks 99.95 there's a professional which is 400 the 399.95 then there's the PreSonus or PreSonus sphere which is a 15 14.95 a month or you can buy it yearly at 164.95 now FL Studio you may remember as fruity loops and when I first started out it was a standalone software that could edit things really really really well Ableton did the same kind of thing that was a standalone software now they have four different versions they have fruity which I presume is the entry level which is 99 they have the producer version which is 199 the signature 299 and then the all plug-in Edition which I'm assuming comes with all of the plugins they do for 499. digital performer is something you may remember if you're like my age group if you're a gen xer or you will remember the digital performer for the longest time was the scoring platform every single guy and girl that I knew that was scoring and doing huge Arrangements used digital performer it might well be still the same one it's 495 and I still think for a lot of people in that world it's an industry standard it has been very very well known for all of the ability it had for printing out scores for for controlling midi you know yeah I'd still get people sending me stuff that they've mocked up in digital performer Cubase of course is massive many many people in Europe that I work with use Cubase before any other Daws growing up in the very late 80s and 90s it was a leader in midi sequencing it was insane and from they still come from that basis of really being incredible in that world so many many people who work on EDM and stuff like that love it but for instance Christian Cola a great friend of ours who does metal production uses cubos so it's now doing really really well and has been for many years in audio editing as well as all the mini stuff so it's a very very flexible software a very very flexible Daw they have three levels they have the elements of 100 bucks 99.99 artist 329.99 and the pro version at 579.99 so it's very comprehensive Ableton Live Now live is something that a lot of EDM producers I know use because you can manipulate sound in such a unique way you can take a dog bark it and turn it into a snare drum I've heard all kinds of stuff my friend Chris Lake took a piece of like a Marvin Gaye song I think it was like a whoa slope and took it made it a kick made it the snare drum made it the Shaker made it this made it to that you can manipulate sound so dramatically using live the live standard is 449 life Suite is 749 so many many of you use Reaper and of course our good friend Adam Steele is a Reaper user so we're going to talk a little bit about that with Adam now there are many many Daws out there I do not want to feel like we're neglecting anybody on this bit wig is something that comes up a lot I actually was lucky enough three or four years ago to go to Berlin and go to superbooth and meet the guys behind bit wig there and had a great conversation with them um that's something that's bundling with lots of other softwares because it has an amazing ability to do arrangements and things and it's huge many people like it um so bitwig is one to look out for reason of course is very very popular and again another Standalone software that I remember using inside of my Daw so you can check that out of course there's new Endo by Steinberg as well there's so many other ones please let us know what your Daw is and I'd love to know more this is a perfect opportunity for us to have a conversation about our Dows below and of course wanting to know a little bit more about what computer you use to use a PC to use an apple what operating system are you running it on so what we're going to do is we're going to reach out to people who use these particular Daws and ask them reasons why they use them hi I'm Adam Steele and I am a Reaper user I've been using Reaper for almost 15 years at this point it's something that's been a part of my life almost half my life it's something that I rely on every day it's incredibly powerful it will run on just about anything as well I mean I've got this steam deck here I just ran Reaper on it MacBook Reaper PC Reaper my Raspberry Pi can run Reaper and you don't need any special copy protection to run it either um if there is a 60-day trial but after that if you need it for some emergency it will just keep working it's incredibly stable and can run hundreds of your favorite third-party plugins vsts Logix they use all that kind of stuff um they've always been ahead of the curve as well things like folders that Pro Tools just got Reapers had forever the scripting that you can do is super powerful I actually have my copy of Reaper hooked up to a dynamount which is kind of a you know the the robot arm that can move your microphone around in such a way that it can send signals move the dynamount separately and then just keep repeating with a script and that's all in built if you don't like the way it looks you can change the way it looks with themes you can change anything if the keyboard bindings don't work for you you can change it to work better for you you can change just about anything if it isn't ideal and if it is ideal I run it pretty much stuck then it's also super fast because it takes all the best bits of all the other Daws like little things like the folders were originally kind of borrowed from Cubase there's a little neat trick where if I want to record on like 10 different drum microphones I click arm record on one and go across them all and they just do it those nice little things that the developers have got that's cool we should do that that's cool we should do that too they're all in there and it works for me much like an analog desk on a screen super useful can't live without it hey everyone I'm Sanjay C I use Ableton Live these days but I didn't always I actually made the switch from logic to Ableton Live when I started my YouTube channel I did it because I wanted a fresh new approach to making music something that got me out of my comfort zone here are a few things I love about Ableton and some tricks you may not know Ableton can be used in a traditional timeline view for recording but there's also something called a session view which makes Ableton really unique and session view is great for jotting ideas or even creating full performances with controllers you can record audio straight into Clips or even drag in a sample record in your midi part and it's going to keep looping everything add in some drums foreign you can combine different clips into different scenes and then trigger them while Ableton keeps everything in time session view is so powerful you don't need to be intimidated by it just try it it's so good for experimentation and creating music fast Ableton has a great way of managing its own stock plugins instruments and effects and a really effective way of grouping them and then creating custom controls to automate everything Ableton has a lot of tricks up its sleeve and there's tons of tricks you can learn from my channel hey Channel plug here's a quick one you can take any sample let's take the sample of chords remember this was just an audio file we can ask Ableton to convert this into a midi Harmony or Melody since these are chords I'll choose Harmony and let's see what it does and now we have the midi notes extracted from that audio sample magic simpler is another super easy and Powerful way to use your samples just drop in a sample Ableton can chop it automatically by transient and then you can play the chops on your keyboard let's record that in listen in the end the doll that works for you is the one you're most comfortable with but it doesn't hurt to get out of your comfort zone every now and then and give something new a try like Ableton Live I have been in love with Cubase I have been let's call it marriage to Cubase since the late 90s or something I started out with an Atari and Cubase synced to two adats so I was doing all my midi work on an Atari and that's how I got to know Cubase later on I even worked at another Studio where they had a very very early hard disk recording on an Atari Falcon 8 track hardest recording with uh Cubase audio Yeah and then I switched to PC to Windows 98 I think and that's when I started using Cubase VST and I have tried other Daws but I always came back to Cubase and these days and for the last 15 years all the three control rooms here at Cola killer studio and also our mobile rigs are fully Cubase and Cubase only and you know what back in the days I couldn't afford a Pro Tools Rick and all the professional Studios were like ah you got Cubase poor you but you know know what I have always been very happy about that not only is Steinberg and Cubase stronger than ever today and especially over here in Europe a lot of people a lot of musicians use Cubase these days so it's very easy to work together it has always been a wonderful bridge between what used to be professional audio editing software like Pro Tools and soundscape and and Sonic Paris and all those programs we have already forgotten and the more Creative Media oriented world and programs like logic and others so Cuba has always been a bridge between those more creative programs for making music and professional audio editing Suites in between I could do anything basically and that's what I've always enjoyed about Cubase I have never looked back and these days everybody's using Cubase and Cubase is what I recommend both for musicians and for Studios Cubase is great thanks bye bye hey guys it's AJ from Hazard sound here I've been using reason here in the studio for over 20 years well actually since the 90s because it started its life out as rebirth which was a software emulation of the famous Roland machines such as the 808 909 and the tb303 as a user of many Daws here in my studio reason has always stayed as one of my main Music Creation tools it has a ton of features that I love and it just keeps getting better and better after every upgrade so let me show you reason and a few of my favorite features so reason is divided up into browser mixer rack and sequencer windows with the control panel down the bottom it also has a cool tutorials window to help you get started in the browser you can easily see the instruments and effects Etc that you need and it also comes loaded with a heap of sounds to get you started creating music one of the reasons I like reason over a lot of other doors is the mixer it's based on and even looks like the famous SSL mixing console complete with input gain section compression and gate EQ insert effects and of course the famous stereo bus compressor next I like the flexibility and open routing of the reason rack it allows you to virtually stack instruments effects utilities and players in the rack and Patch them all together however you want like in the real world reason has gone through many changes since it came out and when the reason rack plugin was released it increased its flexibility here in my studio exponentially it meant that I can now have all the reasons sounds and effects that I love in other doors that I might be working with with clients Etc without interrupting my creativity reason has a great sequencer with pitch correction and also with the combinator you can combine any devices to create your own instrument and effects and build your own plugins I would definitely recommend reason to anyone as a complete music making machine thanks for watching hi guys Danny Byrne here I'm a producer mixing and mastering engineer based out of La I've been a logic user now for over 13 years and while I do use Pro Tools FL Studio and Ableton regularly logic is by far the best for me when it comes to speed inefficiency especially while mixing so I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite features now and I hope you liked the video so easily one of my favorite features about logic is take folders if you've never seen take folders before then you're used to comping things sort of like this what I have here is nine takes of a verse These are vocals if you haven't heard of take folders before if you haven't used them before then your comping process might look something like this and then once you get to this point you need to clean up all the lines you have to make sure all these tracks connect you have to draw your cross Fades appropriately make sure none of these breaths are cut off no double breaths are happening it's a pretty tedious process to comp vocals on most Daws but what I love about logic is that they've thought ahead and they've made a feature on this Daw that's called take folders so what you would do is highlight all your vocals or whatever you're comping right click go down to folder and right here pack take folder here at the top is a representation of the master comp so if you look up here at the top as I highlight another one of these tracks you'll see it changes so at the top it shows you your main comp and the process has become much simpler and bonus feature if you look up at the top anywhere that there that you have this line it already draws a Crossfade in for you automatically so another one of my favorite features about logic is called Flex time and other Daws or other applications call it elastic audio and if you don't know what that is it basically simplifies the process of editing the timing of notes or beats or whatever event you have in whatever audio region you have so rather than talk too much about it I'll just show you how it works here I love the way logic does it it's so intuitive so highlight your drum track command f is the hotkey you'll see this little hourglass pop up click it it'll analyze the track and give you transient transient suggestions and generally for editing the timing of things you want to zoom way in so you can see the grid lines and I'll show you how fast this is click drag click drag you can just do it visually let's say for the purposes of this song we want the drums really locked in in time we want it dead on to the to the grid it's not always what you want but let's just say that that's what we want on this track I do this all by hand generally too you can do it automatically but I find I get better results if I do it by hand take the extra time and do it I highly recommend it okay that one's locked in I'll give you a borrow pre-roll and you'll hear it boom my name is Chad genderson and I'm a producer and songwriter out of Los Angeles I write and produce for Universal music group as well as a bunch of different bands but today we're going to feature a band out of Texas called Messer these guys are going to be featured on a Daw that I've been using for about 20 years so it's a digital performer it's got little tricks and and things that I love about it it's a very musical Daw in my opinion and we'll get into the sequence and show you guys some stuff so one of the big things that uh I love about DP is just after using it for 20 years it's kind of like a second skin for me I want to be able to create and just do what I want to do with it and I mean I started out with these guys I think it was DP 2.4 like back in 2001 or two maybe or something like that it was it was crazy there's kind of a cool thing that digital performer has called chunks and chunks is the ability to basically so say you're looking at the screen here and you have like your entire sequence in here right and it's mixed and it's automated and you've got all this stuff going on you can actually save this to a chunk and open it you can literally have and do Automation and different plugins and all this other stuff uh so say you have a radio edit of this song so we do a radio edit we do a shortened version we do the 10 the 60 whatever for placements it's really cool because then you can switch to a different chunk you can have different processing plugins and what's really efficient about it is that digital performer references the original audio files so even if you put this down and arrange it differently on a different chunk it'll all kind of reference the same stuff so it's super super efficient and you can have I mean with a modern computer or even I think mines of 2012 like cheese grater fairly old in Tech but I can have almost unlimited chunks in a sequence okay so uh one of my cool tricks with digital performer that I love so much and I hope they never like change this is uh their spectral effects what I like to do with this is I'll take like a lead vocal after comping after tuning I'll do that and what's so great about this thing is it's really wonderfully kind of broken in a way you'd have to use like maybe three other plugs to get this sound it'll pitch it down and and digital performer has uh this proprietary pitching algorithm called ztx they like licensed it it's this incredible algorithm it does polyphonic shifting and it if you want perfect that's it um but this just kind of has this ability to make like a low vocal or a low octave vocal just kind of sound a little bit kind of sucked out distorted compressed foreign and it kind of adds this like little roughness under it so now if I just solo this low vocal weather yeah I mean it's like I'm not exactly sure what you'd call it but it's just kind of one of those things that I love about this program and I pray that they never fix it because like I said I'm sure you could recreate it in a couple of different plugins or with some other outside plugin but it's just great with this one this is kind of a little secret weapon I have here I love this Echo man it's just this weird multiple ADT delay it just has an interesting interesting effect on vocals so if I like solo the vocals for you you can hear this see what I mean it's just an ultra short delay but a lot of times that I'll use that with anything that kind of needs space in a mix it helps give like width and depth and carves out room for the rest of your mix man sometimes when you're working in a DAW and your eyes get tired and you know you guys know what I'm talking about like 16 hour days um your ears aren't working anymore but you need to edit you need to use your eyes for Stuff uh digital performer has different themes you can literally kind of like preview a little bit like What's Happening Here on the bottom right I'm on the producer I'm on the producer setting because you know there's sometimes when it's just when your eyes need a break so you double click on this it changes the whole theme look at that boom it's green Tron yeah whatever that look is I think they even have like a wood grain see nice and classy so you know if you have nice people over and you want to bring out the China then you put on the wood grain and everybody just feels super comfortable you know what I mean the themes are are fun and now I'm going to change it back to my producer setting because you know okay now I can't see it I'm blind there we go I gotta have my glasses my shoes and my glasses so I'll have them hey my name is Joe Gilder from home studio corner and I've been using PreSonus Studio One for 12 years golly that's a long time I never intended to switch but I started using it just on the side just to check it out and it completely won me over I had used logic and Pro Tools and had no qualms with them but there was something about Studio One that made my life easier made my workflow faster and I couldn't look back once I tried it first thing that really won me over was the integration between mixing and mastering let me show you this is the song page this is the song that I'm working on with my band for a new EP and let's say I come in here and I make some changes to the vocal volume and the keyboard volume and then I save this okay stick with me next I'm going to open up the project that I've created for this EP so the song page is for recording and mixing the project page is for mastering when I open up the project page for this EP I get this window that says well looks like this song has been updated since the last time you opened this project file would you like us to update the mix and I say well of course Studio One thank you Studio One proceeds to go open that song render down the latest mix down and drop it in place of the previous one inside of that project page it's like having your own assistant in the studio that goes and renders all your mixes for you while you eat a sandwich plus you get a nice mastering Suite with lots of nice big meters as well the second thing that won me over to Studio One was this sneaky little editing tool I do a lot of drum editing and historically it would go something like this I would cut up the drums and I would slide this one back and then there would be a gap and I have to fill in the Gap right the tedious process but a lot of folks have been there Studio One made this a lot easier by holding down command and option I can just drag the underlying audio around as far as I want without the edges of this particular event moving so once I get it exactly where I want I can press X to Crossfade it I can see here that the snare went a little too far over so I can bring that back and also press X again to create a Crossfade and the third thing was how intuitive and fast Studio one was for me let's say I want to solo the drums in other systems I've had to do something like either just clicking on the solo button on each of the pieces of the kit or selecting them all and adding a group for them turning that group on and then pressing solo but in Studio One I just have to come to the bus that they're feeding into and press solo it'll automatically solo anything that's feeding that bus I can even just press the S button on my keyboard to turn solo on and off same for mute and also the same for record enable also there's a simple grouping feature in Studio One that means I rarely use like proper groups anymore if I want to take all of these faders and turn them up and down I just have to select them and move the fader and they all move together same thing with panning same thing with solo same thing with mute they're all just temporarily grouped while they're selected and as soon as I click away they're no longer grouped let me give you a bit of background about me and I started using Pro Tools in 1990 something I think it was 3.8 for those of you that are good at that so I feel like it was 97.98 quite a long time ago you've got to bear in mind when Pro Tools was around then it was the only game in town for doing the kinds of things that I loved and I needed and what I needed from Pro Tools was the ability to edit audio quickly and effectively I do think quite frankly they got it right the first time when it comes to editing audio if you look at the screen here and I just flick between the two of this this look essentially has not changed and other people have adopted this look I mean I know it's pretty logical but a full screen just for editing a full screen just for mixing makes a lot of sense to me I've tried other Daws where they have like the editing at the top and then the mix below and that's all fantastic for some people but for my brain I need a dedicated place like this so if I decide to say let's just go through the bass and drums and let's just give it a listen foreign so it's just a little head you heard it you heard just kind of now I can just tab to the transient highlight the area and just push it back simple as that you can nudge it you can drag it back you can snap it to a grid it doesn't mean that it's gridded because what I often do with the grid is I use it as a reference point so if I want it to be behind or on top I just cut the audio file so that it lands in the position I want to be it's instinctive I've been doing this for years so I can edit super super quick and that capability was a big deal for me as a guitar player I would work with keyboard players who'd be programming all day and then just highlight in many and just quantize the whole thing so it was all perfectly in time and me as a guitar player was trying to play with a keyboard part and drum program part that was like dick like completely and utterly you know edited with with an inch of its life now I don't use Pro Tools as such to edit exactly I use it where I hear something wrong like I heard there and to me it is still incredibly intuitive for audio editing now it may have shortcomings in other areas but I spend most of my life not all of my life but most of my life working with Organic instruments so for me it's perfect for that so to reiterate for me the mix of you and the editing window are two separate things so I personally love the fact that I've got an edit window and a mixed window and I don't get me wrong I can stay on this window here and do both because of course you can access everything here like if I want to draw an automation for instance I can just go to volume here and draw in like this you know I can I can do fun things like clip game for instance if we go to clip gain here go back to waveform you'll see this note's pretty quiet it's a low note it's very very down so I'll just go in there and grab the clip gain and bring it up there you go it's fantastic for vocals clip gain so you see Lily's vocal here is very very dynamic so I could just go in and take sections like this just separate them and gain them up I could do this through the whole vocal one of the things I love with clip gain is actually going to the ends of phrase so if we just solo Lily on her own for a second bleeding lost my I love that oh the Earth at the end so I could just go in separate that turn it up and just put a nice big fat fade and now so I got a little cry I've exaggerated it so there's lots of great shortcuts in Pro Tools I can highlight a region I can press B and separate it out there are old school ones that I've known for decades which is like using the apple or command as it's now known it used to have an Apple logo on there for those of you remember back in the 90s and I can select all my tools up here if you go up to here you'll see I go apple one two three four and five so I go well even six and I can select all the different tools some people like the smart tool which is a tool that incorporates three of all four of those and you just position it differently on the waveform I don't I'm old school I don't mind using my left hand I know some people can edit and just do everything like one-handed with their right hand like this me I like the articulation of both things together it's a very very intuitive audio editing software and there's a reason why it's popular and it's predominantly based on that now obviously as a mixer it's fantastic as well so many huge huge albums have been mixed in the Box using Pro Tools now it doesn't mean that all of these other ones aren't also you know being used in that way of course they are it's just Pro Tools has been around for long enough and let's not forget it was so much further along than everybody else for quite a few years that it has established itself as a kind of standard now that always starts off some kind of fight when you would use the word standard but it is something that when you go to a professional studio a large format console Studio you will find Pro Tools in there it's not to say they might not also have logic sometimes Cubase of course which is incredibly popular in Europe but they will have Pro Tools in there because most not all but most Engineers will know it um again just to reiterate it's all about the audio editing capabilities for me so thanks ever so much for watching of course whatever Daw you choose and there's many and we're only scratching the surface can also be based on your computer logic of course is an Apple product so it runs on you guessed it Apple products where something like Reaper and many others are PC based and then of course a lot of the companies have versions for both platforms I personally predominantly use Apple products however I do own PCS as well we edit our videos on PCS my son has a gaming computer which is maxed out again a PC there's a lot of PCS in my life as well and I have no real opinion I just know Apple products so I use them and I love them but if you're a PC based person of course there are plenty of software Daws available to you on PC so thanks ever so much for watching hope you really appreciate it please leave us any comments and questions below and I'd love to hear what you think what Daw do you use and why do you use it thanks ever so much adios goodbye thank you foreign

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 13,101

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: 30Cv4seVB40

Length: 36min 22sec (2182 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022