What Digital Audio Workstation, (DAW), Do I Use?

I do not believe that there is anyone in the music profession that can tell you what DAW was used to record a music project or song. If there is I, want to talk or maybe meet with him or her. No DAW by itself is going to make your music sound better. How your music sounds starts at the source. Great source material makes great sounding music. After all, its all about the sound.

This article is not about comparing one DAW to another or comparing features. Its simply about what DAWs I use and why. All the DAWs I speak about here are great tools for creating music of any kind. Again my set-up is a 2012 Mac Pro 12 core 3.47 running 10.14.7 OS and 128 gig memory. Two TB SSD main drive,  Eight TB SSD for samples, one TB SSD for temporary things, and four TB SSD for recording. I also use a SAS array for recording when track counts get above 100. (How many tracks do you really need? Track count is another subject.) My graphics card is a NVIDIA Quadro K5000 with four 2560 X 1440 displays. The OS is also streamlined for best performance. Things like mail, calendar, maps have been removed to stop these items from using resources that are not required for music production. Using the Activity Monitor in the utilities folder helps determine where you computers resources are being used. Trust me when I tell you that there is a lot of shit that goes on in the background that has nothing to do with making music. Eliminating the unwanted make things run more efficient. The more efficient your system, the more you can do.

PRO Tools

What an incredible piece of software. Pro Tools is the industry standard for music production and used all over the world. My current version is 2023.12. Version 2024.3 is available but I have not had any luck running it with third party plugins. It runs great with the supplied plugins. Let be be clear that version 2023.12 and 2024.3 are not supported with my system. That being said, 2023.12 is running great on my current system.

Only about 20% of my clients ask for their project to be mixed in Pro Tools. If the original project was recorded in Pro Tools then I do use Pro Tools for the mix. (Mastering is another subject that I will talk about in an other article.) If you want to know the features that Pro Tool provide, I suggest you goto the Avid web site and check it out for yourself. Their web site can give you the latest and greatest information.