Digital Audio Workstations+ #

Ableton Live #

Ableton Live isn’t very stable (lacks plugin sandboxing), has a mediocre piano roll, makes modulation a bit of a pain. Its main feature is its popularity, as there is a ton of educational content, great hardware support, and a fair amount of Ableton specific plugins. As the name implies, it also works pretty well for live recording, and has the best audio stretching and quantization, meaning even if you play slightly out of time it’s easy to fix.

lil’ aside: Ableton makes organizing VSTs a tad awkward, so you should know it will follow shortcuts in the folder you set as your VST plugin directory.

How To Ableton Like a Pro (YouTube)

Bitwig #

Bitwig is basically Ableton Live but with some added features, and it’s more stable. Bitwig also has ‘The Grid’- basically a little built in modular synth system. It’s not like VCV, as it’s a bit lower level but it can still be used for Generative Music or doing complex routing, like fading between effects. It also has really easy to use modulation, basically letting you drop an LFO, envelope, etc. onto any parameter of a VST or built in device.

FL Studio #

Fruity Loops Studio is a great DAW. If you’re more into hand arranging than recording your MIDI controller for writing songs: FL Studio is perfect. The piano roll is so damn good that it will make you hate the piano roll in everything else. Unfortunately, hardware controller support isn’t as good as Ableton, the UI is a bit cluttered, and audio quantization just isn’t there… well? sorta. There is a paid plugin for pitch correction that kicks the ass out of everything else because it’s built into the already awesome piano roll.

If we’re being honest, FL is where most EDM producers get their start with a pirated copy. I’m not condoning the piracy, but I’m certainly not about to judge if you want to try before you buy. It’s a damn nice DAW, and if I didn’t have hardware that works particularly well with Ableton, I’d probably use it.

Reaper #

Reaper is incredibly feature full and probably technically the best DAW but its user interface is pretty bad and requires a lot of menu diving, to the point where in my opinion it’s totally unusable. It does offer the ability to view what you’ve put into your piano roll as actual sheet music and It’s hugely customizable, with multiple user-facing programming options- ReaScript and JSFX. If you’re already a highly technical user and don’t mind getting your hands dirty with code, need a sheet music view, or want something with incredibly low CPU overhead, Reaper is probably your best choice.

Garage Band #

Garage Band [TODO]

ProTools #

ProTools [TODO]

LUNA #

LUNA [TODO]

VCV #

VCV isn’t really DAW, so lacks good ways to do automation and complex sequencing, at least without workarounds. For generative music, it’s still probably your best bet. That said, you can absolutely make awesome tracks in it, though they really need to be performed and recorded live. This means you may need to do multiple takes if you accidentally mess something up while playing.

For good performances, you’ll probably want a MIDI controller with a lot of knobs, which can be expensive or large. Ideally this could be done via banks of knobs that can be changed in hardware (like the Behringer BCR2000 and X-Touch Mini or Faderfox EC4) but this has also been reported to not work totally smoothly.

VCV may also lead you down the path of Eurorack or a hybrid Eurorack and VCV setup, and that is stupid expensive.

Reason #

Reason [TODO]

Bespoke #

Bespoke [TODO]

Renoise #

Renoise is a neat combination of a modern DAW and old school trackers. This means there is no classic piano roll, but instead the notes are entered as text into a vertical display. Usually raw samples of audio are used as instruments, and this lets you do neat things like specify a sound to be played backwards, be rapidly rolled, panned per note, etc. Generally, trackers are associated with a few specific genres- most notably Chiptune and Jungle

OpenMPT #

Deflemask #

Deflemask [TODO]

Sunvox #

Sunvox [TODO]

available for free on desktop, paid on mobile

Audacity #

Audacity, like VCV, isn’t a DAW. It’s really just an audio editor. It’s free and open source, and while the UI isn’t great, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything better for doing quick edits or recording in a few clips. Full songs could be made in audacity, but it’s not made for that.

Oscistudio #

Oscistudio [TODO]

Blockhead #

Blockhead is an audio editor/DAW still in pretty early development, but supporting some really cutting edge features. See the developer’s twitter for examples. It really supports some audio editing ideas I haven’t seen anywhere else. Even if it’s not to the point where you can make it your main DAW, it’s worth looking into just for inspiration.