Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) : What are they?

In today’s World, who doesn’t likes music?

Alright, I didn’t knew how to phrase it until now, Today, amidst daily hectic routine and busy schedule, no matter how busy we are, still there’s always some time for music. (If you haven’t been listening to music, hit up! you aren’t leading a life) But very frankly, those awesome compositions you listen to aren’t composed off by making individual artist sit in studio, play the instruments and record respectively. I mean just imagine, that digital scratch! Do you really think that a man there is sitting there scratching and spinning up disks? No for sure!

This is when, these Digital Audio Workstations alias. DAW come into use! sounds interesting……don’t they? A complex and complicated name which sounds cool….a plenty of drivers and awesome graphics, certainly cool but what are they actually?

If you had been lately searching for some stuff on like “What the hell are DAW?…….or How they manage to produce music digitally??” you have hit right….go on reading!

A digital audio workstation (or DAW) is a computer program that is exclusively designed for the recording, editing and playing of digital audio files. A DAW allows you to edit and mix multiple audio sources simultaneously on a musical timing grid and to visually see how they line up over time. It also makes it easy to synchronize audio clips with each other based on a common tempo, meter, and beat.

whoa….that was the brief definition of a DAW, but…..Technically, a DAW is more than just the software running on your computer. It’s also the hardware: the computer running the software along with any special interfaces routing audio or other signals into and out of the computer….However for simplicity, let us just refer to it as software!

In professional recording studios and in home laptop-based studios, DAWs are the main software being used today…If you have seen any software such as garageband, Renoise, or FL Studio….you have already seen a DAW! :p

Within a DAW, it’s possible to apply effects to audio and control how these effects change over time. It ‘s also simple to remove any previously-applied effect from an audio clip. When you add and change effects in a DAW, it is done non-destructively. In other words, the original audio file on your disk is never changed: only the resulting sound in the DAW.

With today’s DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), they come standard with plugins that can make George Benson sound like Eddie Van Halen without needing to change genres! There are also third party plugins you can try before you buy to see if they do the trick for you. They are usually called “LE” for “Light Edition” that can be downloaded and installed without having to deplete your cash reserves or run up your credit card. So let’s plug that guitar into an audio interface connected to your computer and launch an amp simulator. Finally you have the wall of sound you could have never achieved in the past while mic’ing up an amp. As you tweak the plugin interface, switching out amps, cabinets and effects, you will come to learn something important.  It sounds like a digital amp simulator. Which may be what you are after, but I want to tell you there is another way to get that fat, warm, luscious, creamy, crunchy.

The advantage to recording this way is that you are recording your instrument dry, with only the color and tone of the tube pre being printed.  This will let you track the perfect take, but you are not stuck with the chosen amp simulator sound.  Once you blend your new recorded track in the mix you can now switch amps, effects and adjust gains, equalizer, and compressors. If further into the day, If the guitar appears to thin or to dark sounding, its a quick fix and you do not have to re-track the perfect take. This is called Re-Amping.

The introduction of Digital Audio Workstations certainly revolutionized the way music is produced. Not only it allows you to add effects, re-amp, change and blend your music the way you desire, but also requires minimal installation unlike Big studio’s thousand’s and thousand’s of buck…..