Digital Audio Workstation. Simpler, more powerful.

Adam Condell

The modern Digital Audio Workstation is the modern musician and producers best friend. Now days it has culminated in providing the functionality of a full recording studio all being managed by one PC. This has made music writing more accessible, much clearer and quick to compose and arrange and dramatically reduced the overhead cost of recording radio quality music. Over the years development has allowed for even the most modest system to be used for quality recording and writing. A majority of design flow for modern GUI are legacy functions design for seasoned producers to come to terms with editing digitally.

Midi -Arrangement and Development

In 1990 PG Music released Band-in-a-Box which was an interactive midi sequencer and computerised sheet music arranger for Atari PC systems. It's was a popular program among mid-level arrangers and composers. It provided a simple interface including a virtual keyboard which could display the notes currently being played as well as highlight the notes in different colours based on the instruments playing those pitches. The inclusion in later releases of sheet music arrangement and input was an amazing leap for home and hobby composer. For some this method of writing provided a substantial source of income. Being used to program midi sequences for live theatre performances, accompaniment for stage musician and dance acts. The quality of the sound left something to be desired but the interface and method of input were mechanics that were soon to be replaced.

Guitar Pro by Arobas Music. Followed in a similar vein, only its focus was...guitar! It reach its climax in 2006 with Guitar Pro 5 which was cross OSX and Windows platform, with formidable instrument simulation, including orchestral sounds, full drum kits and various other "Real Sounds". This was a powerful boon for musicians who primarily played guitar and had little background in piano style input. Its primary input was via guitar tablature, guitar fret number written on the string line it was to be played, in linear sequence It also featured fully notated, sheet music scoring, similar to Band-in-aBox. Such notes could be written and converted into either format of representation with a simple "View Mode" selector. Many impressive visualisation features such as note highlights and the many ways to display the arrangement sequence made Guitar Pro popular enough to have vast online libraries of virtually every popular band in the past 50 years. Even classical compositions were translated into its format. These and many other software programs such as Aurelia were milestones in the representation of midi data.

Wave Editing and Sequencing - Popular Alternatives

One company that opened up another angle or digital music software was Propellerhead Software. They began in 1994 with a program call Recycle, which was a module used in conjunction with Cubase's DAW suite. It was a simple yet powerful wave editing and slicing tool. Slicing refers to cutting up a track for use in midi and audio sequencing. It featured a clean interface with a lot of options for crafting and altering wave samples quickly. The inclusion of graphical interaction with wave files gave users a more interactive and responsive way of editing. Being able to visibly see and contort portions to match up with time code was a real push for mixing and sampling and quoted popular tool for sample heavy bands such as Sneaker Pimps.

Following this in 1997 they independently developed the ReBrith RB-338 step-sequencer. It featured an interface a kin to that of a physical analogue sequencer with a lot of easy to use and complex dials and button to keep users visually and audibly entertained for a long time. The thing that made it a really popular product was the fact that everything worked. In a time where digital instruments were relatively basic and constrained by the power of the systems Propellerhead made an accessible and usable interface for use by general population rather than exclusively for professional producers.

The Modern Digital Audio Workstation

Since the early 2000's many audio production programs focused on the number of features they had and the powerful and quirky functions that made them stand out.

Industry giant Cubase set many standards for the amount of individual features available. This was to the dismay of casual home users who found their hands on a copy of their software. It was truly daunting how many windows, buttons and settings there were. To the point where it was almost a hazard to reliably use it.

FL Studio took on the challenge in an interesting and fun way, making professional audio production far more accessible to personal users. Using toggles and old school step sequencer switches and simplified the interface whilst maintaining the quality audio engine and programmable features of their professional counterparts. Either it was a tactic to lure home users in or they later had to adapt as later version began to appear similar to the traditional DAW interface and now works on the same model as many other DAWs.

The current industry preference is probably best represented by Ableton Live. Its main visual interface is incredibly simple yet very powerful, it relies on interface and mouse and keyboard interaction that have been refined over 20 years and is designed to be as intuitive and responsive as is possible. Featuring 2 distinct modes of composing and able to link these two mode together gives the program a depth of its own. The evolution of virtual instrument plugin elements means that they could focus primarily on the interface and purely making sure external components would work well with their engine.

With these many of the former interface and graphical limitation tested and refined or the year much of audio production seems to have reached an apex. Currently numerous touch screen applications have been developed as toys to tinker with but with the advancement of mobile computing power and the push for touch screen environment it's very likely DAWs of the future may find entirely new methods of interaction.