Ishaant Nandu

Which DAW to pick- an opinionated guide.

If you just read this trying to learn music production, and don’t know what is a DAW, just use GarageBand on a mac or Bandlab on anything else.A digital audio workstation (DAW /dɔː/>

Let’s dive IN

1. Garageband (FREE)

You might’ve played around with this app on a iPhone or something, but on a Mac, it becomes an amazing beginner tool for music production. I’d recommend this to neophytes.

Rating- 8/10 Pros-

Cons-

2. BandLab (Freemium

This is the most EASY daw that even a grandma can use. But if you want anything except for a couple of Drums and a piano, YA HAVE TO PAY

Rating- 6/10

Pros-

Cons-

3. Reaper (Technically Free)

OK so to be honest, it is a great daw. It costs $60, but it will give you a forever unrestricted free trial. The only problem is that the workflow is weird. Only use would be on non-debian based Linux Distros like omarchy. But it has no prebuilt instruments so be ready to rely on these.

Rating- 7/10

Pros-

Cons-

4. Waveform Free (Recommendation)

It’s a GREAT free DAW, which ships with nice plugins. It has no limits or caps for a free tier of a DAW and doesn’t seem like a free tier. If it didn’t have it’s crazy MIDI capabilities or amazing plugins, I’d recommend Garageband. The workflow is kind of weird but takes 5 mins to get used to. But there is only one synth, and no other included instruments, so be ready to use these. Also it is compatible with Linux Debian-based distros

Rating- 8.5/10

Pros-

Cons-

5. Logic Pro

This is the DAW of my choice. Likeusing it is very similar to GarageBand, so you can learn GarageBand first and then use Logic Pro. Unlike some cough ^overpriced apple products^ cough, this one is amazing. There are so many stock instruments and plugins that are AWESOME, along with the crazy audio editing fetures, that I rarely use external plugins. The only feature I would like Apple to implement is per-note pitch in the MIDI roll and better MIDI editing.

Rating- 9.5/10

Pros-

Cons-