I was, this morning, pondering the fates of DAWs and my use of them. On one hand, I have a working setup and no desire to upgrade seriously; I’m not getting paid for this and I just want to make some music already. On the other, there may come a point where I want change my mixing or in/out structure, want to take advantage of some new technology, or I’m just sick of whatever bugs are getting in the way of making said music.

More or less my DAW fate will be dictated by what Cakeland¹ decides to with its product line.

If they upgrade Sonar 8 in such a way that it deals with some of the programming deficiencies, without loosing what works, I’ll certainly stick around with it; if they figure out what to do with Project 5, I’ll stick with that.

If they drive Sonar off the cliff, the question becomes what will I use for tracking, editing, and mixing? If they finally admit that they’re not going to anything with Project5, then what?

Live is all the rage and I’m sure and it’s a good VST performance host. But I personally have no conception of recording audio tracks into Live. I mean I know you can do it, but more, will it work for me?

I once again looked at the Reaper screenshots, and, yeah, I just can’t get behind that GUI. I know it’s skinnable and all, but there’s just something about the core aesthetic that I find ungainly. I’m sure if I used it and got used to it it would be fine, and I could strip it down, but why is everything so wide and squat?

So, like a lot of my musings, this is all academic. Cakewalk provides everything I need right now, I’m used to working with it, I’m rededicating myself to taking advantage of shortcuts, templates, fx-chains and using it efficiently. I don’t need/particularly want to drop vast sums money and time into my DAW. The occasional new plugin or soundware. But, I’m really beginning to like the idea of using last year’s tech. There’s just the whole, “if it breaks” thing.

^{1Cakewalk + Roland= get it? Yeah, it’s dumb.}

Chris over at AI threw down a little challenge for the weekend: write a track in 10 minutes. Soup to nuts.

I wasn’t able to really think about it because my girlfriend’s dad and step-mom were in town, as well as my cousin and yadda yadda. On top of which I had a web site crap out on me on Saturday and it needed to be rebuilt.

But I held off on listening to the other entries in hopes that I could get into the studio. It’s only 10 minutes after all. I wanted to avoid any influence, any hint as to how to approach it. Sure enough, Sunday night, late I gave it a shot.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. Not that I think that’s terrible, it just lacks imagination. Well, it just lacks, imagination among other things.

But more to the point, that there took me a little under an hour. It took 10 minutes for me just to get microTonic setup and pumping out a beat. (Even there I punted; it was a beat I was had been cooking several months ago when I was working on a lot more music than I am now.) Anyway, I didn’t get to anything close to a structure until about 20 minutes! Forget about breaks or edits.

So by the time I’m throwing down the trance synth you know I’m in trouble.

This tells me a few things:

My workflow, in absence of composing or just mucking around, is for shit. I’m forgetting all my keystrokes.

I work slowly. No, really, really slowly.

Finish up learning to play my “live” rig.