Drack
10-29-2008, 05:21 PM
I've been trying out free demos of a lot of DAWs .. FL, SONAR, REAPER, Live, Tracktion, even Cubase (because an old sound card came with an old Cubasis demo).
From working briefly - just an hour or two - with each DAW, one thing that strikes me is that the most intuitive functions that most of these DAWs perform work with recorded audio, not MIDI.
I've composed music in the past, but on much simpler programs. Specifically, I used notation in Noteworthy Composer, and the tracker method in Modplug Tracker. It seems any time I try a DAW, it's offering so much that the simpler input methods - say, midi via mouse or typing keyboard - are not straightforward. Those DAWs that offer notation often do it inconveniently.
The easiest DAW for midi that I tried in my brief stints was FL Studio. Nice point and click piano roll. I especially liked how you would *hear* the note as you placed it, and hear the other pitches as you dragged the note around. There are some weird things about FL though - Why do tracks default to step sequencer, even when a melodic instrument is loaded and when that very track has piano roll in other patterns?
This isn't to say that I won't record any audio, but the only instruments I'm proficient enough not to embarass myself in a mix would be clarinet and to a lesser extent, piano. But aside from a little audio, most everything I plan to do revolves around midi and VSTis for the instruments.
Which DAW is the easiest from the viewpoint of simple MIDI editing? I do have a MIDI keyboard, but input using that seems to be about the same across the board, record and quantize.
I really haven't considered Reason for two ... reasons. First, the demo just used half of my screen. I'm not a dual monitor guy, I use one huge widescreen. For a DAW to use half of that just feels cramped and wasteful. Second, I plan to use VSTis, and Reason does things differently.
From working briefly - just an hour or two - with each DAW, one thing that strikes me is that the most intuitive functions that most of these DAWs perform work with recorded audio, not MIDI.
I've composed music in the past, but on much simpler programs. Specifically, I used notation in Noteworthy Composer, and the tracker method in Modplug Tracker. It seems any time I try a DAW, it's offering so much that the simpler input methods - say, midi via mouse or typing keyboard - are not straightforward. Those DAWs that offer notation often do it inconveniently.
The easiest DAW for midi that I tried in my brief stints was FL Studio. Nice point and click piano roll. I especially liked how you would *hear* the note as you placed it, and hear the other pitches as you dragged the note around. There are some weird things about FL though - Why do tracks default to step sequencer, even when a melodic instrument is loaded and when that very track has piano roll in other patterns?
This isn't to say that I won't record any audio, but the only instruments I'm proficient enough not to embarass myself in a mix would be clarinet and to a lesser extent, piano. But aside from a little audio, most everything I plan to do revolves around midi and VSTis for the instruments.
Which DAW is the easiest from the viewpoint of simple MIDI editing? I do have a MIDI keyboard, but input using that seems to be about the same across the board, record and quantize.
I really haven't considered Reason for two ... reasons. First, the demo just used half of my screen. I'm not a dual monitor guy, I use one huge widescreen. For a DAW to use half of that just feels cramped and wasteful. Second, I plan to use VSTis, and Reason does things differently.