Music Production: A DAWnting process

Everything is software or app based these days. If you just type in the words ‘music production software’ you will come across at least 10 major software programs which everyone claims to be ‘industry standard’. These software programs are called DAW’s i.e. Digital Audio Workstations. In this article I will provide you with some sort of beginner’s guide or my method to madness about navigating a DAW as a beginner or an intermediate producer who wants to switch to another DAW. All the DAWs are similar in basic features, functionalities and purpose, so it doesn’t matter what you have chosen to be your mode of torture! Once you familiarize with all the major elements everything else will fall into their respective places. 

Lets divide the process in 4 weeks. That will give you ample amount of time to familiarize with the GUI of any DAW and every company offers a more or less 30 day trial period with their software. Its next to impossible to fit every aspect of audio engineering in a crash course of 4 weeks which is bound by a word limit. To counter that I will introduce some industry jargon which would make your research simple and give you quick results. So lets dive in.

Week One:

We will deal with the absolute basics in this week. Start with importing a drum loop. You can take any loop but I would suggest drum loop as it has at least three distinct elements i.e. kick-drum (bass drum), snare-drum and hi-hats or cymbals. Start by locating the cut, copy, paste functions in the program. Don't worry about the keyboard shortcuts, just focus on editing the drum loop into any number of small or large bits. Now that you have familiarized yourself with the editing options, go ahead and arrange the edited drum sounds into your desired loop or beat and check it with the metronome if its in time. Only caution to take care is that the level meters shouldn't cross red! Once you are comfortable with that, open additional audio channels and make sperate channels for all the drum elements and keep making beats. Yay, you are making beats in a software. Go ahead, save it.

If you are in for a small challenge, try to find out the effects panel and fiddle with equalization, reverb, delay, echo units. Beware of the feedback on the delay function it might distort the signal if cranked too much. Fun times lie ahead! 

Week Two:

If you haven't given up yet, kudos. This week we will focus a little bit more on audio effects. Its time to introduce a melodic element to your beat. Import any bass line or synth loop in a separate audio channel and get into the dark art of compression. Experiment with the threshold, side-chain and other compressor parameters. Once you get comfortable with the effects or FX section it's time to get familiar with automation. Automation involves automating specific parameters of a plugin to affect the audio over a period of time. Try to automate delay times or eq frequencies for some fun! 

Week Three:

You are a true warrior for hanging out in these dangerous waters until now. This week we will take a look at MIDI. Every DAW has some basic instruments like piano, strings, bass, horns and some synthesizers. To trigger those instruments to play specific notes or chords we have to send midi information to these instruments. Open an instrument or midi track. Import a piano or some synth and get drawing some notes. Just like audio, midi channels also have FX like arpeggiators, sequencers, modulators. Go ahead and experiment with those. Fun fact, you can also automate them.

Week Four: 

If you are on week four and still find it interesting, congratulations! You are in for a wild ride. This week we will look at the bare basics of recording. For beginners, input signal is something that is coming in the computer like your guitar or synth and output signal is something you are hearing or will go out of your computer. Input signal should always recorded in green levels, avoid red levels unless it's a creative choice! Make sure your audio input channel corresponds to the channel on your interface. Some microphones need phantom power to record a good signal. Microphone should be a at least 6 to 8 inches away from the source to get a good signal. Go ahead and record any instrument you have. Check for the pre-roll times in the metronome settings. After recording you can follow the same procedure as week one to get more interesting results.   

This is just the tip of the ice-berg. Music production is an endlessly creative process whether you want to make a million dollars by making a track for any pop icon or just want to make bleep-bloop noises as a hobby. I hope this article serves as basic primer for your music production adventures. Keep experimenting and making noise!