Yet another GAS thread - back to DAW?

[djst]

@CCMP

@djst, all the time spent on this thread you could’ve made a couple of tunes on Ableton by now.

Or better yet, I could have made them with the tools I already know how to use.

This thread turned out to be very therapeutic for me as I got to the core of it and why I’m doing this in the first place. I had a great conversation today with my music partner-in-crime and we are 100% aligned and committed to march forward with what we’ve got and to follow the three rules I wrote in the summary post about 4-5 posts north of this one.

[djst]

@CCMP

Seriously though, over the last 6 months I’ve seen you get the MPC, the MC101 and a few other things that I know and have picked up on and used slightly before you. Digitone springs to mind too.

It’s been interesting to read your long form and detailed descriptions/reviews, as it’s often been similar to what I think but I would never have the patience/inclination to write as thoroughly as you do.

Yeah, my constant search for new workflows have been both fun and distracting at the same time. The way I write is just my style, but for me, it’s a bit of a personal diary/log of my thoughts as they develop, so I don’t mind taking the time to write thoroughly.

@CCMP

With that, and with my own experience, I feel Ableton would suit you, and would be worth the time investment.

If my studio gets wiped out tonight, tomorrow morning I re-buy Ableton first, then an MPC down the line a little.
Those are the two environments I go to to make music these days. End of.
Everything else feeds in.

A good friend of mine, who is highly prolific musically, came to visit me last year when I had my first proper performance dawless setup… an Analog Rytm, A4, Novation Peak and a Keystep Pro.
I was having a lot of fun jamming through a 2kW rig in a warehouse, and learning, so it was all valid.
But my friend looked at what I was doing and said to me… ‘just get Ableton and thank me later’. (I paraphrase slightly, but that was the gist).
I resisted him at the time, thinking ‘I like what I’m doing here, I’m onto something and he doesn’t understand…’.
But, 16 months later, he was exactly right and, with hindsight, I should have embraced it sooner than I did.

I appreciate the advice and I know it’s sincere and borne out of a desire to pass on your wisdom, but I’m determined to stay on the path we’re currently in. It’s possible that you resisted your friend’s advice at the time because you weren’t ready to take that step, and it’s equally possible that I’m not ready. At this point, I have lost the appetite for ztrying a new DAW, because just spending time in a DAW in the first place reminded me about what I was trying to avoid. So instead, I’ll stick to the realizations I made earlier: I’ve never been more productive than I’ve been this last year with the MPC and as far as mixing goes, it’s good enough. And, I have a Reason 10 license, and hundreds and hundreds of hours of experience with it, so if/when we need to take songs through that final mixing stage, we’ll do it there instead and learn from that experience. It’s not that I don’t have a perfectly competent DAW in my toolkit already, it’s that I don’t enjoy using one as much as I enjoy hardware/MPC. Reason 1p is perfectly adequate for mixing, which is about as much I’d want to work on the DAW for my needs.

This isn’t to say that I’ll never try Ableton, but I’ll save that adventure for when I really feel the need for it, and that time isn’t now.

[license]

@djst

And the fun start the second you stop worrying about workflow improvements/problems and instead start making music.

This right here. I had a few moments recently where I was looming wires and moving things around, and I’d just stop and have a dumb little jam because I was having a great time. In the recent past I’d be like, ugh, I can’t do this yet, I gotta finish setting things up. But instead I was like, nah, let’s just keep going and record this. And I was suddenly aware there was absolutely no real need to finish setting things up, other than to make it tidy. It’s a higher priority for me to be happy and enjoy making sound.

[CCMP]

All good, and I respect your decision to stick to the MPC. I’ll continue to enjoy reading your ups and downs.

I have a similar dilemma of my own right now.
I have agreed to play some live shows in July, which will be my first gigs in about 5-6 years, and my first using my current style setup (coming from a mainly guitar band past).

I’m aiming to get my set up compact and powerful enough to present the music (and performance).

I’ve been torn between whether I should use Ableton/Push 2 as the centre, or go with the MPC… it’s been a circular process, but I’m now back to the MPC.
I have to keep telling myself that the only limitation is myself… the MPC is easily up to the task, I just need to put the preparation time in.

The return on this is getting to perform live and not have to worry about a laptop on stage, not that I’m fully against it, it’s more I don’t fully trust it or myself with all the variables in a real world situation.

It might all be different in a week, but I’m currently going with the MPC and looking forward to it.

[djst]

@CCMP

I’ve been torn between whether I should use Ableton/Push 2 as the centre, or go with the MPC… it’s been a circular process, but I’m now back to the MPC.

That sounds like fun! I have never done anything live, I’m definitely more of a producer, so I can’t advice. But I can see pros and cons of both. Ableton and Push seem to be optimized for live performances if I interpret the marketing material correctly.

If I were doing things live, I probably would gravitate a lot more towards Elektron, personally. I loved the DN/DT combo and had lots of fun jamming with them (at home). I liked how drums and melody were separated so I would swap in new melody lines while the previous drum pattern was playing, etc. Not sure how I’d approach a live performance using the MPC, but I’d probably want to bounce things to reduce CPU load, since otherwise that can become an issue. Just thinking out loud.

[CCMP]

There are quite a lot of live performance options on the MPC, mixing/muting, playing the pads, master fx, q-link assignments, etc… it’s no slouch.

But, I’m not using the MPC on its own. The current setup I’m working with is;

-MPC Live 2
-Syntakt (love this thing, it’s allowed me to combine my Rytm and Digitone into one space)
-Analog Four mk2
-Moog Sub37
-Arturia Polybrute

All hitting my Allen & Heath DB4 which provides mixing, fx and live looping.

By the time of the gigs I’m thinking I might have sampled what I need from the Polybrute, and maybe the Sub37 too or switch it for a Novation BassStation 2.

I’m spending more time organising the setup than I am making music at the moment, but it’s enjoyable.

[Suspect_Frequency]

@CCMP

The current setup I’m working with is;

If you had to cut 2 of the five pieces you listed, not that I’m advocating you do, but more of a thought experiment - which would they be?

Keeping in mind the ability to make keygroup programs from the synths etc…

[CCMP]

That’s easy tbh, and I already touched on it… I’d drop the PolyBrute and the Sub37 and transfer their roles into the MPC.

If I had to drop a third one, that would be more of a struggle… but, because of its form factor, the A4… I’d probably sample what I needed from it and make more use the Syntakt’s Dual VCO and digital synth voices.

It’s tough though because so much of the sound of the A4 is in its sonic movement/interaction… something that’s hard to catch via sampling.
Not that I think an audience would care.

[Dissofiddle]

Ha I was reading other comments and I wanted to add, regarding how in practice I use the digitakt along with my DAW :

• First way : like most people, I just jam with the digitakt alone in a dawless way and then record into my daw. In this case my DAW is only used to record and mix. When I do this, I mostly end up with songs that have an EDM structure (slowly evolving tracks, addind each instrument/sound one after each other etc).
• Second way : This is the opposite, I am basically working with my daw alone without the digitakt, and use the digitakt at the very end of the process. I start by creating a song in reaper, with basic drum programming and patterns. Then import drums samples and other one-shots in from my daw project in the digitakt, and then I recreate the drums pattern in my digitakt and improves them. I love this workflow, because it separates the song arrangement and composition (the DAW work) from the sound design and drum programming (the digitakt work). It allows me to take benefits of the elektron mangling power (probabilities, p-lock, ctrl-all etc) while helps me keep focus as I am not trying to do everything in the same time (programming an elektron box while programming in your daw is painful an quite unproductive). To resample in the DT, I use the additionnal outputs of my audio interface (scarlett 8i6) into the input of the DT.

Generally speaking, I would advice to separate the work on a elektron machine from the work on a DAW because it is very confusing to do both at the same time (unless overbridge sync works well and you keep it very simple)

[djst]

Thanks for sharing your workflow. There are so many ways to make music.

I never clicked with Overbridge. It just seemed to make the machines sluggish. Seeing the values of the knobs change on the Digitakt screen a split second later wasn’t fun. And then having to recreate all the careful p-locked panning once again in the DAW. It’d be nice if it could pass on an automation lane that you could bind to panning in your DAW.

[Dissofiddle]

Overbridge works quite well for me now. The thing is, overbridge works better with an optimized and poweful computer (low jitter, low buffer).