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Thoughts About DAWs?

3 years ago1,453 words

I wonder whether I should change which music composition software I use in the same way that I switched over from Flash to Unity!

Well, this is frustrating. I spent the weekend feeling genuinely excited about starting this work week by experimenting with the dynamic music system idea I wrote about in the Weekly Update... but the program I use for composing, Sibelius, has some quirks that meant it'd be difficult to export only the parts that I wanted, and I spent all morning looking for a way around that only to learn that the version I have doesn't support it. Ugh.

I've been composing music now for almost two decades... which is a horrifying thought. I'm old! But it's always been a private thing that I've largely figured out myself; I've never been part of any music scene like a band or whatever, or even a community of other composers. I never had a formal music education either, and I've only had a handful of piano lessons many years ago (and some recorder lessons in primary school, but they hardly even count).

I started trying to make my own music after being gifted a huge, physical book about how to make games in my mid-teens (the contents of which would be comically outdated these days; the idea of it being a physical book definitely is!), which recommended a (free?) Microsoft program called 'DirectMusic Producer' to make midi music. I had essentially no knowledge of music at the time though, and the stuff I produced from fiddling around was horrendous (it's included at the end of ∞ this album ∞, if your naughty ears need a good punishing).





That was an extremely basic and clunky (and horrendously ugly) program, though, so I vaguely remember looking around for alternatives, and experimenting with a couple of other seemingly similar programs, including one that was at the time called "FruityLoops Studio". Seems that's still around and in use, though they're calling themselves FL Studio now to seem more cool. From what I foggily recall of it, it seemed overly technical and I couldn't be bothered trying to figure it out.

I had my first piano lessons not long after, and somehow stumbled upon the notation software Sibelius around that time. I can't remember how or where I found it. The previous programs all used that midi-track-based editing system, which always felt off-puttingly technical to me, detached from how I perceived music, whereas the sheet music notation that Sibelius used was more aesthetically and cognitively appealing to me; it made more sense to me.




I've been using that ever since, largely out of familiarity. Why fix what's not broken?

But it's not without its problems. It crashes often for no reason, and there are a lot of things I have to use hacky methods to try to work around. It's a program primarily meant for music layout - any ability to play music is a kind of bonus feature - so for some recent dynamic music attempts I've had to switch back and forth between it and Audacity, and even then the results I slowly get are hardly elegant.

I suppose it's like how I used Flash for years, largely because I stumbled blindly into it as a teenager, and stuck with it because it's what I knew. I kind of had to switch from Flash to Unity because Flash died - and there was never any money to be made from it - but there's been no strong reason forcing me to move on from Sibelius, so I just haven't.

I vaguely knew about a modern competitor to Sibelius - made by some of the original Sibelius devs who were stupidly fired by a company that acquired their business or something - called Dorico, so I thought maybe that'd be the way to go for something new but not too dissimilar... but I just watched most of this obnoxiously long video about it:




...And bleh, I don't know. I like the thought that Sibelius can export sheet music videos I can show and pdfs of my piano pieces that I can play from - those are important to me - but I feel that a lot of the features of that are aimed at people who play in - or compose for - physical orchestras and the like, who know stuff like which segment of the orchestra pit the flugelhorn players sit in and such. That stuff isn't important to me; I don't intend the stuff I write to be played by real people (except my piano pieces by me, but I'm not overly fussy about the notation with that).

From what I gather, professional composers for media ranging from indie games to Hollywood blockbusters use programs called Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs, and I've felt for ages that I'm behind, or out of the loop, or something, for not using one. They probably offer a lot of extremely useful features that I'm currently trying to achieve with workarounds, for all I know!

Apart from the familiarity with Sibelius, I've always been put off even dabbling with DAWs because I've been under the impression that they're more the sort of thing DJs or 'producers' and 'artists' of EDM or rap or whatever would use; too technical and dissimilar from the more Classical-inspired way I prefer to compose, more focused on subtly tweaking the timbre of notes than just their layout, which isn't that important to me.

But I suspect all video game composers - of the sort of music I aim to compose myself - do use them, and I probably should myself. Where do I start, though?

I did some cursory googling, and saw a handful of programs - Logic, Reason, Cubase, the aforementioned FL Studio - mentioned by several different sources, but they didn't all agree on what's best. Or the websites I saw seemed catered to the 'producer' or performer types for whom whether or not to carry a verification dongle on their tours was an important point of consideration, who likely have very different needs to myself anyway.

Plus price is a concern; none of them are free, or cheap. Sibelius uses a subscription service, and currently I'm paying something like £10 a month for it. Not too bad. But one that I checked the site of, Cubase, offers three licences at £499, £284, and £85, and while I doubt I'll need the kind of advanced features some pro 'producer' type might need, I don't know enough to be sure getting the cheapest would suffice.

I also feel like I don't have the time to bugger around with several trials to find what works best - I still haven't decided on which computer to get for this reason! - but... I don't know. I mean, the switch from Flash to Unity wasn't easy, or quick, but it was definitely worth it, though in that case I knew exactly what to switch to, which isn't the case here.



I know that some people have mentioned in comments on this blog which DAWs they - or indie devs they follow - use, so do any of you have any thoughts or suggestions? (What does Toby Fox use?!?)

Ideally I'd want something that has features like:

- Music notation like Sibelius, not just the midi track like that first ancient program that I used.

- Some way to export that notation as videos or pdfs - or at least to integrate with another (not costly) program that can - if possible.

- A way to select instrument sounds without too much fiddling around. I've dabbled with 'soundfonts' in the past (when working on Taming Dreams and such), but these days I use Sibelius' built in virtual instruments, meaning I don't have to configure anything about how the instruments I specify sound at all. I can just add a piano, and get the same consistent sound between all pieces with no work on my part. Ideally I'd want to build my own set of virtual instruments that I could use across all pieces, but this is probably the biggest aspect of DAWs that's unknown to me; I don't know what other people do.



I'll keep looking myself, but I thought it'd be worth posting here to see if any of you have anything you can share!