Dawless a thing?

[CyberGene]

Browsing through YouTube synth videos and other forums I see many people promoting the idea of going dawless (or rather DAW-less) which is to make music without a computer (hence without using a DAW) and instead use dedicated hardware, sequencers, groove boxes, drum machines, etc. which is supposed to be more musically involving and inspiring compared to scrolling through computer menus and tweaking some knobs and sliders on a screen with a mouse. While I agree it makes some sense, whenever I listen to music of people who are DAW-less, I hear an endless loop, it's good for a while but, to be frank, it just becomes boring because how long can you listen to the same sequence, even when you tweak it a little? And I just can't see what's so wrong with using a DAW. How come a DAW is not our friend but is seen as an enemy? Am I too old or something? 🧐

[nursers]

Well Dawless was a thing for millennia - if Beethoven, Sinatra and Springsteen managed, I think it's still an option  

[D. Gauss]

57 minutes ago, CyberGene said:

  whenever I listen to music of people who are DAW-less, I hear an endless loop, it's good for a while but, to be frank, it just becomes boring 

indeed.  very boring this one is.  they shoulda had a DAW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z_Oey8

 

[CyberGene]

23 minutes ago, D. Gauss said:

indeed.  very boring this one is.  they shoulda had a DAW.

 

OK, point taken 😀 When people speak about DAW-less, they usually don't mean bands of musicians recording in professional studios. It's almost always about bedroom musicians creating music at home. And while on the Beatles page, well, they didn't use a DAW since they had a team of engineers who acted as a DAW in the studio for them with all the multi-track recording, overdubbing, effects, sound processing, console automation, mixing and mastering duties and whatnot, so you can hardly say the final product that you bought from the music store was created by these four guys counting on "1, 2, 3, 4" and recording it into a tape recorder themselves, right 😀

 

P.S. Here's something from Wikipedia:
 

Quote

On 22 December, Martin and Emerick carried out the difficult task of joining takes 7 and 26 together.[91][93] With only a pair of editing scissors, two tape machines and a vari-speed control, Emerick compensated for the differences in key and speed by increasing the speed of the first version and decreasing the speed of the second.[15] He then spliced the versions,[89] starting the orchestral score in the middle of the second chorus.[91] Since take 7 did not include a chorus after the first verse,[48] he also spliced in the first seven words of the second chorus from that take.[94] The pitch-shifting in joining the versions gave Lennon's lead vocal an otherworldly, "swimming" quality.[34][95]

During the editing process, the portion towards the end of take 26, before the arrival of the reversed Mellotron flutes and siren-like trumpet blasts, was faded out temporarily, creating a false ending. On the completed take from 15 December, however, the swarmandal and other sounds were interrupted by the abrupt entrance of the coda's heavy drum and percussion piece.[83] Martin said that the premature fadeout was his idea, to hide some errors in the busy percussion track.[94] Among the faintly audible comments over the coda, "Cranberry sauce" was taken to be Lennon intoning "I buried Paul" by proponents of the "Paul is Dead" hoax,[96]a theory that contended that McCartney had died in November 1966 and been replaced in the Beatles by a lookalike.[97][98]

Shortly before his death in 1980, Lennon expressed dissatisfaction with the final version of the song, saying it was "badly recorded" and accusing McCartney of subconsciously sabotaging the recording

Sounds like they would've loved to use a DAW, wouldn't they?

[DeltaJockey]

I think this trend is just harking back to the days of the 70's. I cut my teeth on analog step sequencers and CV's. But I agree with you. I embrace DAW's and in fact all hardware too.

When it comes to those endless loops on those little modules etc. I think it's the workmen, not the tools. It's a bit lazy to churn out a 5 min loop with a bit of a melody and call it a song! I remember spending day upon day perfecting and tweaking. When progressing to computer sequencers in the 80's, the days turned into months. But it was my sound engineering which became more sophisticated not the protracted effort because it was software.

[UnderGroundGr]

If something has limitations(going dawleess) you must be more creative than to use a DAW, to make something interesting. So it depends to the person that use all of these and not to the hardware...

I use logic pro but i would like to have something like zoom R8 to record...

[Stokely]

It's pretty easy to be boring on a DAW, or sequencer, too...ask me how I know!  I've  done a bit of workstation/hardware sequencing but mostly I've used computers, going back to 1989 or so on Opcode's Vision....later Performer, Voyetra (dos), Cakewalk and others into the era of DAWs.    It's pretty easy to play a few bars, loop and....you're in a boring corner despite the power of the software.

So I agree it's on the composer not the tool.

That said, I love software instruments and effects, it's still mindblowing to me that all that power is on dropdown menus...where it used to be tons of cables and midi settings and patch changes, sysex etc.   I'll certainly never go back despite the fact that I have some good hardware (that I use live).  The convenience factor is just too huge, and it doesn't hurt that (IMO) software can sound amazing too, especially when you get into Kontakt libraries and such.

[Delaware Dave]

Life's good for me....  and without a DAW.

[GovernorSilver]

If I want to find electronic music on Youtube that I like, avoiding videos with "dawless" in the title is quite effective.

 

More time enjoying quality.  Less time spent on stuff to complain about.

 

I have nothing against making music/recording music without a DAW, fwiw.

[DovJ]

I am working nearly-DAWless.

 

I sequence my keyboards, synth, drum machine and sampler with a Squarp Hapax. I record analog sounds (guitar, voice) as clips on my Blackbox sampler, which I also sequence with the Hapax.

 

When it’s all solid, the audio is “played” by the Hapax through my XR18 mixer as audio interface into Cubasis on my iPad. I do mix in Cubasis with plug-ins, but even there I am relying as much as possible on 2 control surfaces. I don’t like mixing with a mouse, and like to “twiddle knobs” as I use my ears to get to the sound I want.

 

I am not making “electronic music” at all. My songs lean mostly toward progressive rock, if anything. There are no loops!

 

Is that “DAWless?” Not completely. I’m using the DAW for recording and mixing, but not at all for writing and arranging. Could I be completely DAWless? For sure! I could mix on the XR18 with its effects into a pair of channels on the Blackbox sampler. I’ve considered that long and hard, but decided against it in the end. The DAW offers too many advantages for mixing, including much more malleable and sophisticated effects.

 

That said, I’ve eliminated the DAW for most of my creative process.

 

 

[Reezekeys]

What gets the job done with the fewest barriers to one's creative flow? It's going to be different for everybody, I think. I might be naive but my aim is to have gear that doesn't get in the way when I have an idea to put down. There are probably some with enough experience on a particular DAW that they can fly around it without thinking. Not to mention that they might need the more advanced feature set a DAW can give you that a simpler hardware box can't. It could depend a lot on the style of music being done too, since it's the loopy stuff that's easier to do on hardware boxes imo. Hell, that's what some of these boxes are built for!

[Reezekeys]

3 hours ago, Dr Nursers said:

Well Dawless was a thing for millennia - if Beethoven, Sinatra and Springsteen managed, I think it's still an option  

 

Very true, but imo I think they would have taken advantage of the tech if it was available to them (they probably wouldn't have needed or wanted Autotune though!)  🙂 

 

You can use the tools we have today to polish a turd or polish a gem. I hear way more of the former, sadly. Now get off my lawn!

[Theo Verelst]

Just as well: being musically creative before the time of tape recorders, or playing an instrument without the (current) digital technology, getting a vinyl record deal without digital streaming media. Sound not like these people are going to be the next W. Carlos because of their wise choice in any sense. Or that deep academic sound, music or mixing knowledge will come from deep signal analysis accompanying sound engineering, rather a realization that messing about with given analog synthesis elements gets pretty uniform a little after the uniformity of sample monging is clearly recognized fact.

 

T

[KuruPrionz]

The music itself is the Art, or not. 

DAWless isn't a single thing by any means. The variations are endless. I'm not opposed to it, just another way of doing things. I do like twisting actual knobs, I wish more software creators would simply put faders in their interfaces or at least that option. I don't like knobs when using a mouse. I suppose I could get a larger desk and add a MIDI controller with knobs on it. Maybe someday. 

 

I prefer a DAW for a variety of reasons. One is physical space, I can have EVERYTHING in one small computer. Another is running audio and MID cables, the "spaghetti monster" is simply bypassed by dropping plugins into your DAW or you could get complicated by adding patch points and reconnecting things simply by stretching imaginary cables in place with a mouse. 

 

It's easy to do fun stuff with clips on a DAW, reverse them, stretch them, shrink them. Audio clips will change pitch as well as tempo, MIDI clips will just change tempo when you stretch or shrink. Both techniques allow interesting sounds to be made quickly and accurately. I've had fun stretching/shrinking MIDI clips, dropping a soft synth in, converting to audio and then stretching/shrinking again. You can get lots of sounds out of software drums that way, quickly and precisely. You can also be "precisely imprecise" if that is your current inspiration. 

 

I'm not doing DAWless currently and see no reason to change since I'm getting things done and enjoying the process. Everybody else can do whatever they like, works for me. 

 

If any of these ideas seem tedious, imagine Beethoven writing all the parts for the 9th Symphony on paper, having those papers printed so all the musicians can play to the written notes and getting everybody to play it properly. DAWless or DAW? Both are very simple and fast by comparison to "the good old days".

 

[Tusker]

6 hours ago, CyberGene said:

While I agree it makes some sense, whenever I listen to music of people who are DAW-less, I hear an endless loop, it's good for a while but, to be frank, it just becomes boring because how long can you listen to the same sequence, even when you tweak it a little? And I just can't see what's so wrong with using a DAW. How come a DAW is not our friend but is seen as an enemy? Am I too old or something? 🧐

 

All of us could use a template for creativity: some kind of basic recipe to reduce our options so that we are not paralyzed. As authors we fear the blank page, as painters we fear the blank canvas and as musicians we wince at the empty DAW template. Hardware products (like the Roland TR series or the Moog DFAM) can address this fear, allowing you to build and store basic patterns and then combine them into songs. This limited structure is a valid weapon against writer's block. I applaud those who use such limitations to get their creativity going. These are some of the people who are celebrating their DAW-less freedoms.

 

But could there be more flexible templates for creativity in music writing? Daw-less writing can be so limited as you point out ...

 

I have found two in addition to the AABA and related song structures. Both are anchored in human experience and tradition, working effectively and subconsciously across a variety of audiences. They are well explained by the always helpful Ryan Leach.  (No connection. I just love his contributions to our learning.)

 

These templates are the period form and the sentence form. DAW-ful musicians can use such tools to break writer's block without hardware.

 

Hoping this helps ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Anderton]

My solo live act was DAWless for many years, based around Ensoniq ASR grooveboxes. Later I added Reason and now, Ableton Live - but I consider that more of a musical instrument than a "DAW" because I use it solely for real-time operation.

 

So that's the crux of it to me: DAW is a recording studio, DAWless is more like creating a live performance instrument. DAWless doesn't have to be boring, it depends on what kind of musical instrument you construct, and the degree of real-time sound manipulation you can do. And of course, the person making the music has something to do with it

[JamPro]

I myself hear an awful lot of boring music, including music played-by-living-people-in-a-romm-together, made in DAW software, and made by a bunch of synth modules without a DAW.  And as well, there are lots of exciting and interesting pieces of music made using all these methods.  I absolutely love Brian Eno's Music for Airports, which was totally produced in a studio before sequencers and DAWs were available.  I spend huge numbers of hours trying to play the piano live, and making go-nowhere ambient synth sounds using a DAW - Indeed, I sometimes eagerly use a Sequencer AND a DAW (clearly the worst way to make music according to some "experts") in the same production.

 

So for me what matters is whether I like the music, not how it was made.   

[Stokely]

Where being "in the box" really shines for me...when I want to pull up a prior session.  No patch changes (or even patch saving) on gear, no sysex, no sample loading, no multi-timbral modes, and no audio patching of any outboard compressors/fx/eq...and of course, if on a non-automated console you have to pull all those settings up.  I went through all that in my brief time working and before that learning (ok, always learning) in midi-driven studios.

That said, my "studio" looks pretty much like a boring home office (because it is) with the exception of some guitars on the wall and my midi controller!    There is definitely a vibe being in a purpose-built music space surrounded by gear that I find inspiring.  Heck I remember the smell of the "synth lab" in college, with an ARP, memory moog and a bunch of other vintage gear    And no it wasn't from the prior musicians, thankfully...more like....circuits!

 

...and of course, one might argue that if I actually got to a finished state, why pull up a prior session...that maybe doing all that work would be motivation to get things done!  And you'd have a point, but then ears can only go so long in mix sessions, and in that area (mixing) I find it very handy to get exactly and instantly back to where I was before.

[Docbop]

I follow a couple DAWLess people on YT for awhile and the stuff I heard was make of loops and beats created in the moment, but it also kept evolving it wasn't stagnate. They'd do live shows I don't know all label but I'm guessing like Trance music or EDM that evolves over the course of the show.  

 

It's music I get into for short periods of time then lose interest and go back to Jazz, Funk, and HipHop. 

[MathOfInsects]

This feels like like a language trick masquerading as an aesthetic. If you're looping, that looper is a digital-audio workstation. 

Just use all the technology available to you in the way that makes you the best musician possible. We don't owe anyone any less.

 

[ProfD]

A DAW is just another composition/recording tool.  No different from an electronic KB full of sounds. 

 

Regardless of the tools and methodology, it's up to talented musician(s), composers and songwriters to make some happening music with it.

 

Listen to any great piece of music written and/or recorded and look/listen for the common denominator.  

 

Hint...it has little or nothing to do with the technology.😎

[CyberGene]

I agree with most of you. And I really don't care who used what tools to create music, I only care if I like it.

 

A particular angle I wanted to highlight though, but somehow forgot to mention, is people put "dawless" either in the video title or in the description which is what bothers me because I really lack the hidden message of why it's important to mention it. I mean, people don't put "dawful" in the title. So, somehow dawless crowd thinks it's important to mention it. Does it make it more difficult to produce dawless music, hence listeners should give more bonus points? Or is dawless music assumed to be better, more real, something else?

 

I really appreciate how most of the greatest music has been created before there were DAW but that doesn't mean dawless is better because those people might have used DAW-s if they had them. The question is, if today you have access to any music tool you find useful, hardware or software, why do you have to act in a partisan way and somehow denounce one or another?

[GovernorSilver]

2 minutes ago, CyberGene said:

 

 

A particular angle I wanted to highlight though, but somehow forgot to mention, is people put "dawless" either in the video title or in the description which is what bothers me because I really lack the hidden message of why it's important to mention it. I

 

There's no hidden message.  It's a deliberate tactic to attract viewers who are specifically looking for videos labeled as such - a target demographic if you will.

 

I started avoiding YT videos with "dawless" or "jam" in the title once I realized I was not part of the demographic.  

 

That said I have found a lot of electronic music on YT that I do like, regardless of whether a DAW was incorporated.  But we all have our individual tastes.

[DeltaJockey]

I have to confess, I didn't realise making a point of defining it as DAWless was a thing! I don't have any such defiance or rebellion about hardware OR software. If it is talented and creative and I like it, then all well and good. I'm more interested in it being FLAWless

There does seem to be a human condition which argues that if it's easy or enjoyable, it's not good for you. DAW's provide a less cramped interface, so some may feel that is too easy, and you need to work harder for you productivity.

 

It's like any passion, there were folk who once CD's came on the scene, made a point of hating vinyl, and vice versa

[DeltaJockey]

Just now, DeltaJockey said:

If it is talented and creative and I like it, then all well and good.

 

The music that is!

[KuruPrionz]

3 hours ago, CyberGene said:

I agree with most of you. And I really don't care who used what tools to create music, I only care if I like it.

 

A particular angle I wanted to highlight though, but somehow forgot to mention, is people put "dawless" either in the video title or in the description which is what bothers me because I really lack the hidden message of why it's important to mention it. I mean, people don't put "dawful" in the title. So, somehow dawless crowd thinks it's important to mention it. Does it make it more difficult to produce dawless music, hence listeners should give more bonus points? Or is dawless music assumed to be better, more real, something else?

 

I really appreciate how most of the greatest music has been created before there were DAW but that doesn't mean dawless is better because those people might have used DAW-s if they had them. The question is, if today you have access to any music tool you find useful, hardware or software, why do you have to act in a partisan way and somehow denounce one or another?

It's really no different than saying "Crunchy Peanut Butter" as opposed to "Peanut Butter" or "Creamy Peanut Butter". 

All three come out the other end more or less the same. 

 

Great music is great music, how it is made may be of interest or not but nothing changes that the music is great or not so great. Stuff is just stuff, what stuff you use is meaningless if you are great or if you are terrible. 

"It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools."

[DeltaJockey]

I guess we've all learnt that even if the musical creation is absolute rubbish, there's someone out there that will love it

[bill5]

17 hours ago, CyberGene said:

Browsing through YouTube synth videos and other forums I see many people promoting the idea of going dawless (or rather DAW-less) which is to make music without a computer (hence without using a DAW) and instead use dedicated hardware, sequencers, groove boxes, drum machines, etc. which is supposed to be more musically involving and inspiring compared to scrolling through computer menus and tweaking some knobs and sliders on a screen with a mouse. While I agree it makes some sense

I don't. As others have said or alluded to, making good music has nothing and I do mean nothing to do with whether you're "outside the box" or "inside the box." Anyone who believes otherwise I would dismiss right away as a pretentious fool, regardless of which "side" they're on. If people love the tactile feel of hardware at their fingertips and that helps them with their music, more power to them. If others would rather the cost savings and far greater multitude of options that software offers, more power to them too. Or somewhere in the middle or whatever. There isn't my way and the wrong way, and again anyone with that attitude deserves and gets little more from me than a roll of the eyes and immediate dismissal. 

[RABid]

For many I think it is just a new environment to trigger new creativity. For others, it is part of an endless quest to find a happy place in music. I've seen Youtubers go for DAW to DAWless to modular, back to DAWless, back to DAW, etc... and never get anywhere.

 

Bur for some, it is all about control. When I did DAWless 20 years ago it was on an Emu XL-7 and I was able to control 16 parts of a song, turning parts on and off, tweaking filter and volume, changing patterns, it was really playing the instrument. Now you do the same thing with Ableton Live and Push. Modern DAWless it is more about controlling every nuance of each part. With a Roland TR-8S I can control each individual drum that makes up a rhythm. Lots of budget instruments that give you total control of the bass line. Throw in a bit of modular for really getting out there, and run it through a fully synced effect to mangle everything. And when you find something magical you fire up the DAW and record stems.

[Stokely]

I've mentioned some of the things I like about being in the box, but one drawback--if you lack discipline!--is the endless tweaking that can commence after you record your part.  This can still happen with hardware if you midi everything up and sequence, but some of you mention recording your parts as audio (as I used to do as well) and that has the real benefit of being "done" with a part, you commit to a sound and move on to the next.  This is true of guitarists as well who can mic up their amp, or record direct and spend hours trying out cab IRs (*raises hand*)  Having the midi and the sounds in the computer makes for a strong temptation to continually "improve" things.