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Topic: DAW for dummies (Read 4934 times) previous topic - next topic
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DAW for dummies

I am a musician interested in doing a sort of crash course in DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION. I want to get started in understanding digital music. But most of the blogs and threads I have come across use a lot of Jargon which goes way over my head. What I would like is a sort of course in DAW for dummies starting right from the scratch with basic things like editing mp3 files and then slowly and steadily moving on to more complex things. I have downloaded Audacity and I am about to acquire CUBASE 6 LE.

would really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.

DAW for dummies

Reply #1
I am a musician interested in doing a sort of crash course in DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION. I want to get started in understanding digital music. But most of the blogs and threads I have come across use a lot of Jargon which goes way over my head. What I would like is a sort of course in DAW for dummies starting right from the scratch with basic things like editing mp3 files and then slowly and steadily moving on to more complex things. I have downloaded Audacity and I am about to acquire CUBASE 6 LE.

would really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.



Audacity is more than enough to get your feet wet with DAW technology. Focus on it until you know why you need something like Cubase.

The best way to learn  audio editing is to do some simple little projects that are meaningful to you. Take two songs and make them into one file. Butt them together and then take them apart. Learn how to cross fade them. Make a file of someone speaking slowly and rearrange the words. Then do it again with them speaking faster. Learn how to hide the edits. Take a noisy recording and make it more understandable and stuff like that.


DAW for dummies

Reply #3
Presenting a third point of view here with the short advice to forget Cubase and go with both Audacity and Reaper.

The learning curve of any DAW as a novice is vicious. So unless you need to know Cubase to be able to share and work on projects with others by next week. The skills you will aquire through a lot of Reaper and some Aucadity will translate well to other DAWs in the future should the need arise.

You should follow the tips from Arnold B. Kreuger and start small on Audacity. Getting the feel for how digital audio is edited and then progressing to Reaper when you comfortably can record tracks and have the grasp of basic editing skills. The videos that Juha posted along with the Groove 3 Reaper tutorials and the Reaper forums will get you across the finish line i no time.

If you know someone that has any skills around DAWs you should try to learn from them as much as you can even if they are using any of the other multitudes of DAWs that are available. Once you have gotten the hang of recording and playback in reaper you would benefit from looking deeper into VSTs and experimenting with other VST effects than the Reaper ones. Bear in mind that some VSTs are almost as convoluted as the DAWs themselves and just as expensive. You might be spending a fair amount of time just googling terminology you don't know. But very much of it is very easy to pick up and put to memory and you can soon advance to more in depth tutorials. The money you have saved on Cubase could go towards purchasing some VSTs once you have mastered your DAW.

DAW for dummies

Reply #4
It also depends on what kind of music you're interested in, but in any case, you should learn some basics. One of the first things would be learning the difference between audio tracks/signals and MIDI tracks/signals.
Understanding audio tracks and the related editing is relatively simple, but when you start composing electronic music you need to deal with MIDI and with MIDI (virtual) instruments, which makes things a bit more complicated.
But once you get the basics it all starts to make sense and at that point it's all about just mastering the specific tools (programs, instruments, effects...) which are all slightly different between each other.

In terms of software to experiment with, I second Reaper.
Another program which is slightly less known, but IMO gives you a good visual overview of what's going on, is Traction.