In our recent survey How Do You Control Your DAW? we asked the community about your preferences when it comes to how you interact with your production software of choice. The results largely confirm our assumptions and it’s interesting to see just how much variety there is when it comes to DAW control.

Firstly, when it comes to choice of input device we see the frontrunner is the trackball. However that doesn’t mean that the mouse isn’t the most popular choice, a point we’ll return to.

Streamdecks are as popular as anecdotally we thought they were and although only included for completeness, it was a specific choice of one of our panel in the original article which inspired this survey back in 2022 when we surveyed 14 working audio professionals on their choice of pointing device, the choice of graphics tablet and pen was far more popular than we expected it to be, though still of marginal popularity compared to more mainstream choices. See the results below:

Because we wanted some detail on which type of mouse people were using the format of the question split mouse use into three, allowing trackball to be the most popular response overall. However when combining the three mouse types together it is as expected the most popular choice by a large margin. What is interesting is to plot this total for mouse use against trackpad and trackball use, as shown below:

Control Surfaces

The widespread adoption of affordable Eucon surfaces with the S1/Avid Dock combo and the success of SSL’s UF8 and UC1 mean that for many DAW users the keyboard/mouse combo might not have the dominance it once did, and considering the risk of RSI associated with prolonged keyboard and mouse use the inclusion of any alternative to only using a keyboard and mouse is probably a good thing. After all, variety is the best way to protect yourself from RSI.

The expectation, given the makeup of our audience, was that Eucon surfaces would be the most popular and indeed they were, but not by as much as we might have anticipated. We would be interested to know exactly which non Eucon surfaces people are using. We’d expect to see SSL and Softube well represented.

An important point is that people clearly use more than one method to interact with their DAW - A user might use an S1 and Dock but they will inevitably use a mouse as well. To what extent people do this is indicated in the results below. While we don’t have more granular data here, one thing is apparent, any assumption that most people only use keyboard and mouse isn’t supported by these numbers.

DAW users lose a lot of functionality if they don’t use an extended keyboard. This is reflected in the results to this question with over 75% favouring a keyboard with a number pad:

Monitor usage confirms that two is the most popular number of screens. As a single screen user I can’t imagine why people would want more than three screens but each to their own… I completely get why post mixers would use three monitors though.

Our last question was about RSI and given the anecdotal evidence I’d have expected more in the yes category. The fact that it’s just below 25% is still a cause for concern though, nearly 1 in 4 is a lot and given the number of options out there at least there are plenty of ways to vary our working practices and avoid the repetition which puts the ‘R’ into RSI.

Do any of these results surprise you? If we run this survey again in the future is there any information you’d like to see gathered next time?