Is Your DAW Making You Lazy?

Digital Audio Workstations are wonderful things.

They’re one-stop shops. They have every processor and synth patch you need to produce your next track.

But given so many choices, do you end up choosing none? Have you stopped critically listening to your audio, and just resorted to laziness in your productions?

Patch Laziness

In one of the Home Recording show podcasts, Ryan Canestro was talking about how he could hear popular synth patches, or Garage band loops, in other people’s productions.

Do you throw a generic loop into your mixes? Do you select a preset synth patch without changing any part of it? How many do you think are doing the same thing?

The amount of choices we have in our DAWs isn’t boosting our creativity. It’s making us lazy.

With so many choices, there are two things that go through your mind:

1. There are so many patches, nobody will notice which one you use. It’s bound to sound cool to others.

2. There are so many synth choices, and so many parameters to work with, you’re just too lazy to change it.

Either way you look at it, you’re going to end up with a preset patch that everybody else has used. Don’t settle for sloppy seconds. Take the time to find the right synth, and then customize the patches for your needs.

Template Laziness

Logic has this seemingly cool feature when you start the program.

It allows you to create a session filled with whatever you need to do. If you want to create electronic music it will create a session filled with beat machines and software synths specific to that genre.

The same thing goes for us singer/songwriters. Just fire up the singer/songwriter template and it will create lush vocal sounds and clean guitar amp settings.

I think it’s rubbish.

You don’t need a software program to tell you what kind of sound you want for your voice. You don’t need to fill up your session with different synths that you might not even like. Explore those templates to begin with, but focus on learning the ins and outs of your software.

Don’t just go for the same old setting when you want to create a song. Know where those sounds are, and how to insert the patches and loops you want to use, but don’t make your productions sound exactly like the last one you made.

EQ Laziness

All those

Every mix is different. Every instrument won’t benefit from the same EQ setting.

Sure, it’s handy to use EQ guidelines to know where to look, but slapping on a preset EQ setting is just plain lazy. Rather, learn to spot muddiness, know where to reduce boxiness, and learn to recognize frequencies instead of relying on presets. Those DAWs are great for producing music, but they can’t do the critical listening and mixing for you.

DAWs are Great, but Don’t Get Lazy!

Simply put, it’s easy to get lost in all the possibilities your DAW has to offer.

With so many choices, you will undoubtedly just choose the one that’s provided to you. Try to push past that.

Use those patches and presets, but create something original from them. We don’t need to listen to the same old Garage band loops or software synths. Just a little tweaking goes a long way towards a truly original production.

Image by: kirainet

If you liked this post, share the love: