An interesting viewpoint on the future of music production tech

[jerrythek]

This showed up in my inbox today, and I thought it was a well-written and interesting perspective. Those of us who have been in the trenches of music tech for a long time often decry the dumbing down of our tools, but the author raises some good points.

 

Is the DAW heading towards extinction?

 

Jerry

[ElmerJFudd]

Hmmm. Yet he doesn’t offer much insight on what a disruptive product might be. Other than that it would be easier to use and be less expensive. 
 

I don’t believe it will be hardware - common consumer hardware like desktops, laptops, tablets and phones dominate for all digital creation.   For there to be a shift - something ground breaking about the machines we all have access to would have to happen. We’ve already seen good sounding   audio interfaces drop below $100.   And stock plugins that install with the DAW have improved ten fold. 
 

Software - software moves fast, and there’s always a developer innovating on graphic user interface and ease of use. I don’t see any one “BOOM” event on this. But a gradual rise in popularity of an app with a new workflow. Similar to what we saw when Ableton Live and Presonus Studio One managed to  scratched out a good chunk of the market to the detriment of old players like Avid, eMagic/Apple, Motu, Steinberg.  
 

Dumbing down of software for audio production - perhaps AI would be the key factor.  Sing a song into a track, select a style of music and all the loops for bass, rhythm, harmony get auto generated, auto mixed, and auto mastered.  Then everything will really sound the same.  

[Anderton]

The digital camera analogy is flawed. Digital camera sales have NOT dropped by 87% since 2010 - there are more digital cameras than ever before, and more being sold every day. The difference is they come with smartphones attached

 

Overall, I would have found the article much more interesting if it had been oriented about what might come after the DAW. First, I think we can assume that whatever it is will have to be able to record multiple tracks of audio and edit them (otherwise, what's the point or recording?). That can take multiple forms. For some, an MPC is a DAW replacement. For others, Push + Live is a DAW replacement. Or maybe BandLab is someone's DAW replacement. Google and Microsoft would love it if you used cloud apps, and maybe not even have local storage at all.

 

I don't always see dumbing down as replacing, I see it as making something more accessible. When you had to develop film in a darkroom, I didn't do photography. Now I do a lot of photography with my dumbed-down iPhone. Ditto video editing. Back in the days of dual Panasonic tape decks and switchers it was a PITA. Now video editing programs make it easy. Portastudios didn't wipe out tape, they WERE tape. They just made tape more accessible.

 

DAWs made powerful multitrack recording far more accessible than 2" 24-track tape, online music collaboration sites make creating music with others more accessible than DAWs.

 

Sure, DAWs will mutate into something different than their present-day implementation at some point. But the whole "extinction level event" strikes me as meaningless. Regardless of what happened to dinosaurs, birds and alligators are still around. They didn't throw in the towel and say "wow, T Rex doesn't exist anymore, guess we should just roll over and die too" - they adapted and survived. 

 

I think the much bigger change will be about music distribution and rights. The old model is virtually gone, and a truly new model hasn't replaced it yet.

 

[RABid]

I think the DAW is changing a bit, but it is not going away. There was a move towards complexity, trying to create a DAW to do everything. Built in instruments, autotune, compression, software emulation of channel strips, everything depends on the DAW. I see more and more YouTubers doing more on hardware and then using the DAW to finalize. I like this approach. Less worry about what happens to a sound when Apple updates an OS and changes the rules. More intimacy in the sound creation process when you have hardware with knobs and sliders to tweak and explore. I think a lot of people are tires of using MIDI/knobby interfaces to connect to a computer based synth. Nothing beats a well designed piece of hardware. I've also notice that no one in my list of electronic music providers mentions Pro Tools anymore. Most seem happy to do the entire process in Ableton Live. When you think about it, Live today is probably better than Pro Tools was 15 years ago when it was on top.

[Anderton]

55 minutes ago, RABid said:

Nothing beats a well designed piece of hardware.

 

My hope is that somewhere down the line, MIDI 2.0 will open the door for a universal, well-designed piece of hardware that is to music production as Mackie Control was to traditional studio emulations.

 

My dream for virtual synths is a piece of hardware that kinda looks like an OB-8, and can load the various MIDI 2.0 profiles (with scribble strips) to adapt itself to different virtual synthesizers. It would be like having a bunch of old school analog synths with knobs, except that it would be one controller, with substantial overlap (e.g., filter cutoff would have a filter cutoff knob, with a button to step through responses) so you wouldn't have to learn a completely new controller every time. Whether I was adjusting the HP filter on some subtractive synth, or an emulated E-Mu Z-plane filter frequency, I'd use the same control.

 

The icing on the cake would be the vastly improved controller resolution, so the controls would feel like they were analog, and the sound would be smooth and continuous. We're not there yet, but I think we will be before too long...

 

 

[dmitch57]

That article kind of glossed over the fact that the extinction level event already happened. DAWs were the impact event. If a Grammy-winning album can be recorded at home using Logic (e.g. When We All fall Asleep), that's a pretty good indicator that up-and-coming musicians aren't scrambling to book time in professional studios to get their work heard.

And the key technological advance that made this possible was simply the development of desktop computers that could do in software what used to require a rack full of Pro Tools HDX hardware. Or before that, a 48-track analog tape machine and a room full of racks and a mixer that cost as much as a house. All of that stuff is still used, but not (for the most part) by the musicians and producers who make the music we listen to every day.
 

I'd call that somewhere between an "impact event" and an "extinction level event". It already happened.

[jerrythek]

I agree that he lobbed the ball out there without really offering any tangible ideas.... but I like how it could be a catalyst to discussion.

 

My view on current DAWs/tools is the complexity to set up sounds/effects/routings is still very difficult. Strides are being made with loadable channel strips and such, but it's all still built on a complex system that is just being given recall. The advent of things like one-knob effects that are complex underneath, but are all tied together into one control are interesting, and while those that know how things work want to see and control all the underlying widgets, for others it may be a perfectly good tool.

 

I'll give an example from my development past: with the Korg M3, there were certain controls in the sequencer/sound/effects environment that were modulate-able, but a lot of other things were only able to be controlled/automated with MIDI Sys. Ex, which could be recorded, but it just showed up as a packet of info that could not be understood or edited. In the M3 Xpanded update, I worked with the engineers to represent all that info in the language of the parameters of the instrument. I convinced them that if we already had names and values on screen for parameters, it wasn't important how it was recorded or handled internally, just represent to the user the same names and values that were already being used. It was an elegant system in its simplicity, and I thought a real breakthrough in what they now call "user experience". See the screen on the left of the attached file.

 

I think of the time when more and more of the difficulties in setting up and editing things in a DAW get this type of more human interface adaptation. While I don't have the answer, I think the current design of objects needing to be routed together using the design of a mixing board, while a perfectly good design, could be re-imagined. So maybe not an extinction-level event, but a real stride forward nonetheless.

 

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, jerrythek said:

I convinced them that if we already had names and values on screen for parameters, it wasn't important how it was recorded or handled internally, just represent to the user the same names and values that were already being used. It was an elegant system in its simplicity, and I thought a real breakthrough in what they now call "user experience". See the screen on the left of the attached file.

 

Ah, the M3...what a great keyboard. Anyway...

 

You were just (as usual) ahead of your time MIDI 2.0 can pull parameter names and such from devices, and put them on screen in a human-readable form. So at least in theory, you won't need an editor/librarian anymore, or deal with things like sys ex. 

 

The mixing board thing has always bothered me, because we aren't constrained by hardware, yet the designs follow hardware paradigms. I presented a design to Cakewalk at one point with curved faders, so they would have a longer travel (particularly handy with a mouse scroll wheel that allowed for precise, small steps), with other channel-related controls (mute, solo, etc.) inside the fader's crescent. You wouldn't have to follow the crescent shape, you would click on the "fader" and drag up or down. A "narrow view" would show a series of crescents, while the expanded view would show the other controls. The panpot expanded if you clicked on it, so you could see the panned position easily, but if you needed to adjust it you had more resolution. Needless to say, this was rejected as being too weird. It probably was...

 

I also proposed several other aspects. One was a video game paradigm, where you would start off with something that did pretty much what an ADAT did. Then you could move on to other levels, or create an interface optimized for specific functions. For example, if you're in the editing stage, you don't need any recording-related controls. That idea became "sort of" adopted as the feature Cakewalk calls Lenses - not quite what I had in mind, but a step in that direction.

 

But I also didn't see why an overload indicator had to be an LED. Why couldn't the entire fader flash red? And have a "hold" option so it would stay red, in case you looked away for a moment, and missed that the "LED" had lit briefly? I think there are a lot of ways the "mixer" could be more functional.

[Anderton]

Or maybe the future of music production tech is working with an engineer. Has that every been tried before? 🤣

[Anderton]

I've told this story before, but...I think a lot of any problems for beginners trace back to the computer. When Sony owned Acid, they asked me to write up a quick set of instructions on how to transfer a finished Acid song to an MP3 player they had just released. "It'll only take you a few minutes, we just want 3 or 4 steps."

 

So I handed in a document with over 20 steps. They were upset. "We told you to keep it short! We only wanted 3 or 4 steps!" I told them I'd be happy to re-do it if they could advise me on which steps could be taken out. It turned out ALL of them were essential, and most of them dealt with navigating within the computer. 

[ElmerJFudd]

3 hours ago, Anderton said:

I've told this story before, but...I think a lot of any problems for beginners trace back to the computer. When Sony owned Acid, they asked me to write up a quick set of instructions on how to transfer a finished Acid song to an MP3 player they had just released. "It'll only take you a few minutes, we just want 3 or 4 steps."

 

So I handed in a document with over 20 steps. They were upset. "We told you to keep it short! We only wanted 3 or 4 steps!" I told them I'd be happy to re-do it if they could advise me on which steps could be taken out. It turned out ALL of them were essential, and most of them dealt with navigating within the computer. 

Remember when 286s running Windows hit the workforce.  Teaching older employees how to use a mouse…

 

Now while you’re getting the hang of that input device - let me explain how to create a track, set input and recording levels, then find where fx inserts are, the importance of signal path, the concept of compression, define the parameters and how different settings achieve what you may or may not be able to hear depending on your previous experiences with sound and music.  

[ElmerJFudd]

iPhone Pro Max DAW Edition

[RABid]

4 hours ago, ElmerJFudd said:

Remember when 286s running Windows hit the workforce.  Teaching older employees how to use a mouse…

 

I was playing in a band, using a computer/sequencer for drum, bass, and extra keyboard parts. Remember it well when we could move from DOS to Windows and I could start using a mouse to program sequences. I was happy to learn how to use a mouse.

[Mike Kent]

The complexity of a most DAWs is a problem. How difficult is it for people learn how to use them? I like to think I'm a music technology expert (I admit I'm not a recording expert by any means) and these powerful tools are often a hurdle to me. I own Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Cakewalk. I certainly use them, each for their own strengths. But I use Garageband about 2/3 of the time and I select it for its simplicity. It's just faster to do the most important things (recording, overdubbing, basic editing and mixing).

 

I hope that the next major event is a breakthrough in simplicity. I have a feeling that DAWs will get simpler, perhaps through a combination of AI technology, MIDI 2.0, networking, online collaboration, and almost certainly some components I can't see or imagine yet.

 

That said, easier tools, even if they are equally powerful, will not necessarily equal good music or good production. Not everyone can be a great musician, good recording engineer, and good mixer. Technology helps and makes everything more accessible. But it doesn't replace, creativity, talent, and time/experience. Maybe some component of the future of DAW might be education. Youtube has certainly had a massive impact on availability of training. There's a How To video for everything.

 

Thanks,

Mike.

 

[Anderton]

9 hours ago, SynMike said:

I own Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Cakewalk. I certainly use them, each for their own strengths. But I use Garageband about 2/3 of the time and I select it for its simplicity. It's just faster to do the most important things (recording, overdubbing, basic editing and mixing).

 

What's so great about GarageBand is that it DOES cover the most important elements of making music. I'd be willing to bet that most DAW users don't use even 20% of their DAW's full potential, but I think the conundrum for DAW manufacturers is that it's a different 20% for different people. 

 

I've always liked Live. One year they did a big update, Gerhard asked me what I thought, and I had to say that I felt embarrassed because I only used only about 25% of Live's capabilities and didn't need most of the new features. I thought he might be upset that I didn't dive deeper into the program, but instead, he thought it was totally appropriate that people could pick and choose what parts of Live work for them. He took it as a compliment, which it was.

 

That's one reason I've always thought the video game paradigm might work for DAWs, where you could start basic and unlock different levels as you learned more about it. Or, you could simply fence off portions of the program you didn't need to do a particular task. Most DAWs have function keys to call up different views like Mixer View, Editor View, Arranger View, etc. Maybe function keys should instead be about calling up environments instead of views, like Track, Compose, Edit, Mix, and Master. Again, sort of like Cakewalk's Lenses, but taken to a more streamlined level.

[David Emm]

Todd Rundgren (basically) said in KEYBOARD, "I learn whatever I need to know to do what I have in mind, but then I forget most of it because I'm off to the next project." I feel a little better about my pedestrian use of Logic in that light. I started with version 8, where they addressed several clunky, robotic aspects of earlier versions. Garageband never made the cut with me; I was always too enamored of Logic's lengthier effects strips to settle. Actually, IIRC, GB was still a tiny sketchboard affair when Logic v8 came out. Its much more refined now.  

 

I've been at it long enough that my only M1 conversion issues have been with a few Projects rooted in v9 or v10. I've chipped away at those like a side hobby, but my first move was to establish my templates. Spitfire instruments are making me rethink my devised performance space a lot. 

 

My use of Logic is laughably minimal, but hey, I started on Portastudios and ended up with an 8-track Otari behemoth for a while. After cleaning gooey tape heads for years, I still marvel at how easily I can whip things out. Not always quickly, but free of most of the procedural residue of earlier tech.

 

It is also the case that I have the mechanical skills of a poodle, so familiarity and repetition are highly important. Its almost a KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK PENNY scenario for me. I'm grateful for the means so I can just compose in a linear fashion. If more savvy Logic users saw how few macros I have set up, they'd laugh like hyenas. 🤯

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Anderton]

I will say that I have put a lot of effort to make a setup that's as quick and easy to use as possible. Routings are pretty close to permanent to two interfaces, all the inputs are named, my instruments are within easy grab range and there's a guitar rack for the ones that aren't, there are keyboards to the right (controller) and left (workstation) of where I sit, etc. etc.

 

I still spend a ton of time on mixing and mastering, but for getting ideas down and writing, this setup is faster, easier, and more productive than tape (or even a Portastudio) ever was. For me, the creation part is where speed really matters.

[Tusker]

I would guess that AI would be a big part of what he calls lean. A smart tool is one that thinks for you.
 

My dad thought it important that I learn to read maps and drive a stick shift. Both of those skills are largely extinct because we have tools that do that. We can expect that driving itself will be replaced by smart tools.

 

A lot of audio plugins are getting smarter already. We’ve all heard terrible mixes which have been izotope-ed to death but first Iphone camera was not awesome either. 

[ElmerJFudd]

39 minutes ago, Tusker said:

I would guess that AI would be a big part of what he calls lean. A smart tool is one that thinks for you.
 

My dad thought it important that I learn to read maps and drive a stick shift. Both of those skills are largely extinct because we have tools that do that. We can expect that driving itself will be replaced by smart tools.

 

A lot of audio plugins are getting smarter already. We’ve all heard terrible mixes which have been izotope-ed to death but first Iphone camera was not awesome either. 

Some driving enthusiasts insist on driving a stick shift.  Greater control of the car.   Some people have a seemingly innate sense of direction from birth.  Spacial intelligence - visualizing space and direction through their mind's eye.  Most people have to learn this - using the stars, a compass, a map as a guide.   I wonder what having AI, robots, tech, etc. doing things for us means for us in the long run.  

[Anderton]

I've always driven a stick shift, and still do (although these days, I guess it's an anti-theft deterrent ). Part of the reason is increased control in snow and rain, but part of it is a closer association with the car - we work together to get the right RPMs at the right time.

 

I can see tremendous uses for AI, but not in the creative space. My favorite example is Voco (never released, sadly) which could scan narration, extract phonemes, and create words you never used that sound just like you. This would be so useful for dialog editing when you realize you should have used a different word - like cut and paste with a word processor.

 

Also, AI (or more correctly, machine learning) could learn to anticipate your preferences. When I comp vocals, I have definite preferences as to what gets cut, and what gets used. Machine learning could learn that over time, and eventually comp vocals the way I'd like them to be comped...at least for a "first offer."

 

If you're not familiar with this 15-minute keynote address I did last April about where tech is heading, I think you'll find it quite interesting.

 

 

 

[Tusker]

Craig, you mentioned my Izotope example! I feel like the geeky student who accidentally stumbled on a correct answer to the teachers question! 😀

 

Trackd and Soundstorming are ideas I would love to see become successful! Off to try them now ...

 

You make it all make sense. Thanks for taking the risks, on the bleeding edge. 🙏 🙂

[Anderton]

Wow, that's really kind of you. I guess you can tell I love my gig   

[jerrythek]

On 2/15/2022 at 11:18 PM, Anderton said:

If you're not familiar with this 15-minute keynote address I did last April about where tech is heading, I think you'll find it quite interesting.

 

 

 

As usual, you are on top of, and very clearly articulate so many of the things that I am barely on the verge of realizing...

 

I have always been a proponent of taking steps, and complicated processes that we do and turning them into parameters/macros/whatever... I so often in my early time at Korg pointed out things that users did that involved many, many steps and said "if it's a common process it needs to be a feature... it needs to be made simpler and more immediate." An obvious example was the sound designer's trick of manipulating sample tuning to change the pitch map/multi-sample break-points to achieve timbral variety. It became a slider onscreen called Pitch Stretch. Your observations about Machine Learning and Voice Recognition are the type of steps that I look forward to. I don't need to know every step of how to configure something,  i just want it to be done.

 

Your comments about everyone's 20% of a DAW is very valid... I've often thought of something that goes beyond visual skins to configure a DAW to be the tools and screens that I use most often. I have my own screen sets in Logic that I use when recording and then editing MIDI, which is something I do far more often than large audio-based sessions. It's only a toe in the water of where things could go. But figuring out how to configure things for a new user is still unclear to me. I can't know what I don't yet know about the tools, or even my processes when I'm less experienced.

 

Interesting to think about...

 

Jerry

[Anderton]

7 minutes ago, jerrythek said:

...figuring out how to configure things for a new user is still unclear to me. I can't know what I don't yet know about the tools, or even my processes when I'm less experienced.

 

This is something where AI could really beef up help. It could be more like Chat, where an AI engine could extract needed sections from the documentation. We're not at the stage yet where this can happen effectively, but we're on our way...think about the automated support "chats" on websites. For example, for help, you could type in "how do I change velocities of all MIDI notes at once" or whatever, and AI would tell you how to select all, and then give the keyboard shortcut to alter velocity.

[jerrythek]

1 minute ago, Anderton said:

 

This is something where AI could really beef up help. It could be more like Chat, where an AI engine could extract needed sections from the documentation. We're not at the stage yet where this can happen effectively, but we're on our way...think about the automated support "chats" on websites. For example, for help, you could type in "how do I change velocities of all MIDI notes at once" or whatever, and AI would tell you how to select all, and then give the keyboard shortcut to alter velocity.

Sure, that works for specific tasks, or requests. I was talking about about possible ways of configuring the whole darn interface for the user. Companies I've worked at, and plenty of others have thought about an easy user interface, with a button to unlock the deeper depths, so the surface is not so cluttered/busy/foreboding. It's kind of that general direction, but likely broader/different/I don't know yet.

 

Using my Logic example, there could be a MIDI user layout/set of screens/tools, an audio recording/editing set of screens/tools, a song construction set, whatever... you get my drift. Maybe the Chat gets the process started: "HI this is Logexa, what do you want to do?" Me, "I want to make beats..." and so on... But it needs to be able to be refined as time goes on, and experience is gained.

[Anderton]

1 hour ago, jerrythek said:

I was talking about about possible ways of configuring the whole darn interface for the user.

 

Cakewalk sort of does that with their Lenses, but it's more like a modification of the same basic interface rather than a completely different interface. Sonar used to have a highly configurable interface, before they introduced the single-window Skylight interface. I did a couple interesting mods...one that looked like Sound Forge for editing waveforms, and another that stripped out basically everything except for the controls you'd find on an ADAT. One of the cool aspects of the configurability is that you could also change the menu options. So for example, in the "Sound Forge" editing interface, there were no menu items for MIDI editing, sync, recording, etc. 

 

In doing these custom interfaces, I was a little surprised at how much only a specific set of controls really mattered, and how you could just jettison the rest. It would be interesting if some company took this ball and ran with it beyond just offering different views.

 

And thanks for starting this topic

 

 

[jerrythek]

19 hours ago, Anderton said:

 

Cakewalk sort of does that with their Lenses, but it's more like a modification of the same basic interface rather than a completely different interface. Sonar used to have a highly configurable interface, before they introduced the single-window Skylight interface. I did a couple interesting mods...one that looked like Sound Forge for editing waveforms, and another that stripped out basically everything except for the controls you'd find on an ADAT. One of the cool aspects of the configurability is that you could also change the menu options. So for example, in the "Sound Forge" editing interface, there were no menu items for MIDI editing, sync, recording, etc. 

 

In doing these custom interfaces, I was a little surprised at how much only a specific set of controls really mattered, and how you could just jettison the rest. It would be interesting if some company took this ball and ran with it beyond just offering different views.

 

And thanks for starting this topic

 

 

Yes, that's the sort of thing I'm imagining... but the customer support, documentation and other things makes this so complicated for the company, I get that. I have to believe that the usability for the user has got to be great.

 

As another story from the trenches, when we (Ensoniq) first started distributing Emagic software, and launched Notator Logic 1.0, the software was not very complete yet, but the Environment was pretty fully formed. One of the (many) problems was you couldn't find the parameters for the click/metronome from the main Arrange Page. It was still buried deep in the Environment. Another case of things that aren't important for everyday use getting in the way of something more fundamental.

 

But I have learned many things about myself, one being I am many times too deep and tweaky (tweakish?) and like to go down rabbit holes that the average user doesn't. And as you mentioned earlier, there are probably many others who are equally tweakish, but their 20% is not the same as mine...

[ElmerJFudd]

When teaching young producers - they tend to not have an issue with tech concepts and use.  Tracking, sequencing, midi vs audio, sampling, time stretching,  leveling, panning, inserting FX and experimenting with them or watching a YouTube to see what knob does what.   

Where they struggle is signal path, routing, busing.  Finding the down beat, recognizing meter, chord construction beyond major and minor, creating progressions, rhythms and melodies from their own imagination rather than using someone else’s loop or midi pack.