Using DAWs

In this series of posts, I reflect on some of the highlights from one of my university courses, Technology in Music Education (TME). To see my reflections from other classes, click here.

My first face-to-face class for TME (Week 1B) focused on Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). Our lecturer concentrated his efforts on the basics of GarageBand, although he admitted that he didn't actually use GarageBand and said it was for noobs. But anyway.

During the lecture we went over the basics of recording, including looking at the difference between recording with mics and MIDI, as well as how to edit loops and quantise recordings. As I primarily work with Logic, I spent a lot of the lecture trying to work out how to use similar features.

One interesting point that the lecturer made was that most DAWs are very similar, and so once you learn how to use one, you can transfer most of your skills across. One of the main exceptions is Ableton, which has a very different visual layout, and thus can be confusing.

From an educational perspective, it's clear that GarageBand is extremely user-friendly and has huge potential to allow students to create music in a variety of interesting ways. The enormous loop library can keep you entertained for hours, and because the majority of the loops are in MIDI, students can customise them and use the loops as a springboard for their own work, rather than as the catch-all for sonic potential.

However, GarageBand certainly has its limitations. Last semester, while recording my Popular Music Studies assignment, I made use of a number of features on Logic that are not enabled on GarageBand. One of the most simple and useful was the crossfade tool, which you can automatically add to the end of every audio track you've created, so that it fades out smoothly. I actually discovered that this was the standard way to clean up your recordings when I was at Jungle Studios recording with my band. The engineer would quickly add crossfades to every track after they were recorded.

Also, this guy below, Mitchel Pigsley, is a total legend. He taught me how to do a lot of things in Logic that I wouldn't have been able to work out myself.