by Garystrat » 11 Oct 2021, 07:49
Hi Ian,
I think it’s pretty straightforward in that it depends on how comfortable you are with DAWs and how you intend to use it, if you’re simply looking for “tape recorder” style functionality with benefit of using plugins for recording guitar to BT, then something like Garage Band will probably suit you.
But if you are looking for a little more functionality and actually working with optimisation of tracks, multiple tracks and shared settings by using buses, the simplicity can often be limiting and quite frustrating.
A lot of people are often put off by what they perceive to be complications of using advanced DAWs, I have never gone along with this concept as all DAWs work pretty much the same at a basic level and with a more advance DAW the opportunities are there to do thing in a more logical way and have better feature sets. Sure, there is a learning curve, but once you start to get to grips with one or two of the basic principals everything starts to make more sense.
A good example is buses, this simply means you can setup tracks with things like FX effects on them and send say the signal from your guitar track to bus track where those effects can blended and returned again to your guitar track. The advantage to this is that you can use those same effects on multiple instrument tracks without needing to put an instance of it in every track (a sort of template track), another advantage is that you can use the slider on the bus track to blend in the level of combined FX effects in the bus track independently. This is just scratching the surface, the power of a really good DAW is an investment if you are serious about the recording side. It’s really not that difficult as there are many tutorial videos on the internet, the biggest challenge can be knowing what you want to do in terms of a recognisable description to be able to look it up.
I would also recommend having a look at Ableton Live “Intro” (about £70.00) this has a really good interactive setup guide on how to get started, I switched to this from Logic Pro and have gone through an upgrade path as I started to use more of the advanced features. These features are mostly there in other DAWs, but I tended not use them because they were implemented in a more complex way and with many there was a fiddle factor. Whilst it does it doesn’t look the same as other DAW layouts, particularly in the way it handles plugins, it’s all very logical in use use and has a good interactive messaging describing what everything does as you hover the mouse over the controls, they also have online tutorials. There is a free demo, so you have little to lose!
Hope that helps.
Best regards
Gary