DAWs are a wonderful modern invention when it comes to recording and mixing, but sometimes they may not be the best way to capture ideas.
In The Moment
You have an idea and you want to get it down fast. You need as few distractions and as little inertia as possible. The obvious thing to do in a modern studio is fire up your DAW. However, even with the simplest of workflows that means opening up the DAW, if you’ve made one then opening up your favourite template. If you haven’t then setting up a session with the tracks and I/O set. If you want to use a VI then inserting that, setting the tempo and then hitting record.
That all sounds pretty reasonable. On a good day, things couldn’t be simpler, but some days aren’t good. Far too often you find yourself tripped up by something, often it’s a silly thing, but it’s still enough to derail the creative flow.
Overkill
I recall someone telling me some years ago that most people who installed the entire Microsoft Office Suite used it for a few personal letters and shopping lists. It’s the same with many applications; Final Cut to make a short home movie, or Photoshop for a small editing job. DAWs are no different, often we fire them up to do little more than get a simple keyboard or guitar part and vocal down. In others words we use DAWs as sketch pads.
A Simpler Way
We often see adverts for modern audio products that offer to make things faster or easier. I’d like to suggest that there’s another thing to consider, especially in the ideation stage, and that’s simplicity. I’m becoming more and more convinced that we need to find ways to simplify our creative workflows, otherwise we end up trying to use printing presses instead of sketch pads to try and get our ideas down. In doing so we get bogged down by the technology and another idea is lost.
Stripping Things Back
I found myself in just this situation recently. I needed to get a lot of sound ideas down fast. It was as simple as find a synth sound, come up with a melody, record it and save it to a file.
As I considered a workflow for this, I thought that the DAW option was perhaps not the best way to go. Instead I fired up Audio Hijack, the cool audio application from the team at Rogue Ameoba. It offers the option to create simple audio workflows, or complex if you wish.
All I needed was the VI so I could play it, hit record and save the file. I didn’t need a click track, I just needed to play live and get the ideas down. Within minutes I had over ten ideas recorded to files. I just kept knocking them out. It was, in fact, librating.
Then I had a list of audio files I could open and listen to, all recorded in high quality.
Of course, Audio Hijack isn’t the only thing that can capture audio on a computer in such a simple way, it just happens to be the one I use, and it’s pretty quick at making a workflow. You can even save the set-ups for each time you open it. It is far quicker AND simpler than firing up a DAW, which in many cases is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
What If?
It’s likely those files may be enough for what I was trying to do, but what if I need to take them to something more polished, or more complex?
The good news is that modern DAWs, in fact most of them out the box, allow you to time correct and pitch correct the audio. There’s even tools to separate the audio if you’ve recorded, for example, a guitar and voice and want to take them to seperate tracks for futher treatment. For example, the excellent tools from HitnMix
So, should you get a killer idea down and need to add other instruments, then it’s not that hard to do it anymore. You can time correct loose audio to a grid, or if you wish, have everything follow the loose audio, now there’s a nice idea. Melodyne makes quick work of creating tempo maps in several DAWs.
Summary
I’d like to suggest there’s often a stage before the DAW, for some it might be using the audio recorded on their phone, or an equally simple audio recording app on their computer.
Sometimes we put the cart before the horse and do a lot of the stuff we should be doing post-idea beforehand. Whatever tool you choose, consider that making a DAW the first choice may be counter-productive and reduce your creativity.