Just curious - what DAW do you use? ...and why do you like it for guitar recording, mixing, etc?

I wonder if Sonar will open my 1999 projects ;). I use to love it being my first DAW so I may check it out again.
 
FPFL said:
Cool Edit Pro was my first DAW and will always be a favorite memory. That bouncing between multi and single track made a lot of sense to me. This was Windows 98 / NT4 era folks!
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Yes! Me too! Cool Edit Pro was fantastic. I use Cubase now, I felt like it was the next closest thing.
 
FPFL said:
Cool Edit Pro was my first DAW and will always be a favorite memory. That bouncing between multi and single track made a lot of sense to me. This was Windows 98 / NT4 era folks!
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Oh man - this took me back! Forgot all about Cool Edit!
 
tobafett said:
I use MOTU Digital Performer. Mostly because it is what I learned on a long, long time ago. It is great, and I do find it easy to use.
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I’ve used DP since it was called Performer, and was a MIDI-only sequencer, long before anyone could do digital audio production on their Macs.

I’m up to date (about 11.3) and though it doesn’t have native support for Dolby Atmos, Ginger Audio’s SPHERE and Fiedler Audio’s Dolby Atmos Composer let me use my 7.1.6 speaker system. It’s still powerful for an old workhorse.

(Though I’ll be moving on if they don’t get their immersive audio act together soon!)
 
randyman said:
I’ve used DP since it was called Performer, and was a MIDI-only sequencer, long before anyone could do digital audio production on their Macs.

I’m up to date (about 11.3) and though it doesn’t have native support for Dolby Atmos, Ginger Audio’s SPHERE and Fiedler Audio’s Dolby Atmos Composer let me use my 7.1.6 speaker system. It’s still powerful for an old workhorse.

(Though I’ll be moving on if they don’t get their immersive audio act together soon!)
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Out of curiosity, what are you doing with Atmos tracks? Are they just for your own enjoyment (not that there's anything wrong with that)?
 
I’ve used Reaper for years. Love it, especially how customizable it is.

Higher degree of customization = better ergonomics = more efficient interface = faster sessions = easier to maintain inspiration through the whole process
 
Dave Merrill said:
Out of curiosity, what are you doing with Atmos tracks? Are they just for your own enjoyment (not that there's anything wrong with that)?
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The game plan is to go commercial. I plan to play live with a 5.1 surround system; I’ve already got the speakers. My Atmos work can be readily exported to that surround format. That’s one of the great things about Atmos … your master tracks are compatible with a plethora of playback configurations.

I plan to release work on platforms that support Atmos, like Apple Music and Tidal. I know from experience that immersive audio on headphones doesn’t hold a candle to 14 speakers in the room, but there are interesting results when mixing for Apple’s Spatial Audio.

I also do film music; I recently spent nearly a year working on the score for an indy film called Small Potatoes, with Blythe Danner and Amy Stiller (Ben’s sister). It will premier in August at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

That soundtrack is in stereo, but the ability to deliver in surround and Atmos is certain to help my marketability for future film and television work.

And in terms of my own enjoyment … it’s an absolute mindf*ck to work in immersive audio. It took me a while to get the system together, but it feels like a breakthrough … an earthquake in my art. It’s incredibly inspiring – really, a dream come true. I was working in quad back when I was a student in the mid-’70s, so I’ve long had a thing for the spatial component.

Here’s a (bad) panorama of my current studio configuration; the rear four speakers (and a few more synths) are off camera, behind me. I’m using Klipsch’s Atmos speakers, which bounce the height channels off the ceiling, rather than being mounted in the air. It works surprisingly well, and lends a great diffuse quality to the mix.

front atmos.jpg
 
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We use most of the major DAWs here at our studio. However, we prefer Universal Audio Luna. In our opinion Luna, when teamed with UA’s plugins, produces the most analog sounding recordings.
 
Daveporter33765 said:
We use most of the major DAWs here at our studio. However, we prefer Universal Audio Luna. In our opinion Luna, when teamed with UA’s plugins, produces the most analog sounding recordings.
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Have you had any stability issues with Luna? Maybe it’s just because I’m on a windows machine, but I had to give up using Luna due to extreme instability. I’m talking like I would import 30 audio tracks, try to add an SSL 4k channel strip on each and the project would immediately crash. I know UA has a history of treating windows like a forgotten step child though, so maybe it’s better on Macs.
 
haloll said:
Have you had any stability issues with Luna? Maybe it’s just because I’m on a windows machine, but I had to give up using Luna due to extreme instability. I’m talking like I would import 30 audio tracks, try to add an SSL 4k channel strip on each and the project would immediately crash. I know UA has a history of treating windows like a forgotten step child though, so maybe it’s better on Macs.
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We have been using Luna since it was first released and have never experienced instability issues. As you may be aware, Luna is a public bata on the Windows platform so there may be issues until the non-beta release version for Windows is available.
 
Reaper for many, many years. It does literally everything I want it to do, the learning curve is very gentle, and I appreciate their incredibly generous business model. The product is free to use for 60 days. After that, it'll nag you and you should buy it, but they won't disable it or give you a hard time if you need more time to decide on it or to afford it. Then, when you do buy it, not only do you own that version, but you own all the updates through the current and next major versions. They don't make you use iLok or any other garbage. And your license file can be used on multiple computers without any authorization BS--they just ask that you only use it on one computer at a time. Of all the music software I own, it's the one I'm most happy with and the most happy to pay to update when it's needed.

In terms of my use case, I use it for writing and recording my solo stuff; I've used it for small-time commercial stuff (jingles, theme songs for podcasts, etc.), and I even used it for a live-looping thing I did with a laptop for a little while. Generally, I'm recording guitar from Axe-FX and Helix, and then recording MIDI drums from a Launchpad X or keys from an Nektar 88 key controller.

I know that every DAW has its fans, but if there's a thing you want to do in a DAW, I feel very confident you can do it easily in Reaper. Things that took a ton of clicks in Pro Tools are like a drag and drop in Reaper. And if you want to know how to do it, there's a very good chance that Kenny Gioia (https://www.youtube.com/@REAPERMania) has made a video about how to do it.
 
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normanaj said:
I wonder if Sonar will open my 1999 projects ;). I use to love it being my first DAW so I may check it out again.
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I’ll bet it will. I recently opened a project from like 2007 and much to be surprise it opened fine except for the plug-ins that were no longer installed.
 
I want to buy a avid s1 control surface and avid dock

I think the 2 daw that is most compatible is Pro Tools and Cubase

so I think to buy Cubase PRO to go with the avid s1 and dock
 
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