I’ve been in search of the perfect DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on iOS since I started hitting limitations in GarageBand. Honestly, I’ve barely completed any music since I left GarageBand and headed into the sea of DAWs on the iOS App Store.
I’d completely come to the conclusion that the DAW for me was just not out there, and the closest I was going to get was GarageBand because let’s face it, Logic Pro really looked like a pipe dream.
So you can imagine my surprise when I heard the announcement that Logic Pro was finally coming to iOS and for real!
I’ve been putting off this post because I really didn’t feel a lot of inspiration for music creation nor that I’m anyone who has enough experience to throw out my opinions on the subject. What knowledge do I bring to the table? Well not any music theory that’s for sure. What I do bring is someone who loves doing what I do which is nothing close to normal, I’m sure.
Having said that, I’m going to step outside of my comfort zone and write down my experience of finding the right DAW for me.
My journey started with GarageBand, a brilliant starting point in my opinion; it’s fun, easy, and plenty of information out there with the help of YouTubers like Pete Jones and The Garageband Guide. Never did I feel like I wasn’t a true musician because I was using GarageBand on iOS when it came to great content creations like these guys.
However, it wasn’t long after finding my feet that I started hitting limitations. GarageBand is great for recording in your own instrument, and playing with the instruments included, but finding my space in the ambient genre and essentially the Electronic Music genre, GarageBand really started to cause some serious frustrations.
Some of the things I found limiting where the amount of external effects, the lack of a drag and drop of audio files, and the auto normalisation and compression when exporting your finished track. These three things where at the height of my frustration. By this time I’d really started getting into exploring external plugins for effects and GarageBand only gave me four! With me also field recording and wanting to use these in my music, the painful way of importing these where seriously causing me to scream.
Now recently I’ve seen some plugins come in, particularly by 4pockets, that could make some of these gripes a little more doable, but I’ve hesitated to explore it. I suppose I’ve just not been feeling inspired to HAVE to do SO many workarounds! Not to mention the fact that these plugins will take up my very few external effects! Either way, these plugins were more recent and were not available at the time I decided to close GarageBand and hit the app store.
Armed with a boat load of information and many voices in my head telling how I should make music I fell into the endless pit of recommended DAWs. This led me to the big superstar Cubasis, which is all well and good in theory, it has a wealth of info out there to really get you going, and if you encounter an issue, you can usually find help on it relatively easy.
Cubasis has an effects limit at 8, however you can use sends which can give you an extra slot here or there. I didn’t find this limit a problem at all, however Cubasis hated my LaunchPad midi controller! Every new track I’d have to remember to change a particular thing, so it didn’t double record every midi note, and if I didn’t, I would have to go back in and select every single double to delete it (a real pain).
Because of the endless recommendations for Cubasis, I really did try and stick it out, but I just found no inspiration within it. I think I really feel in love with the inspiration you get from GarageBand and all its interactive instruments. Creative blocks could easily be thrown out by opening a random instrument and just playing around with it.
With GarageBand it was like walking into a studio with all these different instruments that you can pick up and play around with, without any fears of breaking anything because you have no idea how it works. Cubasis on the other hand was like walking into a stark professional studio where I was too scared to touch anything for fear of a “Oi, don’t touch that”, plus I felt like I needed to bring my own instruments to the party. Needless to say, I spent months and months trying to make this new relationship work.
Now I probably need to backtrack a little because I completely forgot that before I really got started with GarageBand, I’d actually done a bunch of research on which DAW was recommended for iOS. I’d gotten the message somehow in my head that if I wanted to make music GarageBand just wasn’t the professional way to do it. So this had led me to one of the most recommended DAWs, BeatMaker 3!
What to say about BeatMaker 3? I don’t know where to start, from the first time I opened it I freaked out, it just wasn’t newbie friendly to me. The only DAW I’d ever used was Logic Pro many years ago and recently GarageBand, so BeatMaker was so confusing. It’s really designed around beat making (obviously) and that really wasn’t my style. Why I even purchased this app was beyond me. Over the years, I’ve tried it a few times, but every time it was like mixing oil and water, it just wouldn’t work for me.
Stepping back to our original timeline (which was after Cubasis), had me finding Audio Evolution. A very interesting DAW with some serious potential but for me personally I could never get into the interface. It’s UI just had too much of a Windows feel and its internal instruments (whilst good) were just seriously unorganised. I’ve opened it quite a few times because in theory it seemed like it would be brilliant for me, and I really wanted to support this developer, but every time I tried to make music in it, it would always flop, and I’d find myself completely dismayed at my inability to learn the app.
This brings us to Nano Studio, another DAW I’ve no idea why I purchased because it’s all about the MIDI and not audio. It looked like a good option for me until that little audio issue kicked me in the face! Needless to say, I didn’t find out if it had any other issues, it simply got pushed to the back of the line.
Finally the last edition to my DAWs is N-Track, it seemed to have everything I wanted. I’m not sure of the limit of audio effects, but I’ve not hit any limits yet. Its internal instruments are more fun and inspiring, even though not quite to the GarageBand standard. Drag and drop works like a treat making my audio easy and efficient to add in any track, and it does not auto normalise and compress on export. So why am I not excited and doing back flips? Besides the fact that it’s impossible for me to do back flips, I just haven’t been able to get excited about it. Sure I’ve managed to finally finish and post a music piece to YouTube, but most of it was an old project exported from GarageBand.
I’ve slammed my head against a few walls within it, like learning how to rearrange tracks was a serious head smasher! I think I read the manual about 5 times, goggled more and, only because my partner helped me google, did we finally find a post on n-tracks forum that finally explained it. Another frustration is recording midi from a AUv3 drum app, in GarageBand I’d simply add it, press record and then using the drum pads within the drum app it would be record into GarageBand. I figured this was standard because all the other DAWs from memory did the same thing, but in n-Track this was not at all the case. To do this I had to google madly again until I found a workaround that would probably take another whole post to explain.
I’ve also not been able to get the MIDI learn to work with my LaunchPad, not that that was a big deal as I’d only done MIDI learning in Cubasis. MIDI learning is a whole swag of learning of itself, so needless to say I didn’t have a burning desire to repeat it for a DAW I still wasn’t sure about.
At the end of the day I’d honestly resigned myself to either making n-Track work for me or figuring out how to work around GarageBand’s limitations. Fact is that there is no perfect DAW, there probably never will be because we all have so many different needs and desires, but I was hoping for something a little closer to perfect.
This brings us to the current celebrations! The announcement of Logic Pro on iOS. Some incredibly exciting stuff that looks wonderfully promising, but is it going to be for me? I’ve no idea at this point because in theory there has been a few DAWs that should have worked wonderfully for me, but they didn’t.
Am I excited about trying it? Hell Yes!
Whilst I’m not excited about the subscription module, I also get that there will be tons of work being done, so at this point a subscription probably makes sense. If there wasn’t a subscription, then I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d have to buy it again in a year or so with all the updates and upgrades going into it. That being said, a lot of companies make subscriptions a big NO for me, so here’s hoping that Apple does an ok job with Logic.
Whist I was lost in GarageBand, I really felt like a musician, like I had something to offer the world. I didn’t feel like I shouldn’t be making music because I don’t know music theory in any shape or form, and it didn’t stop me from creating music I was proud of.
Leaving GarageBand on the other hand has completely dashed my self-esteem. For the last year or more I’ve not felt like a musician, I’ve felt completely out of my depths and have worried on many occasions that perhaps I’m just not meant to be one.
Until the Logic Pro announcement my experience was leaving me inclined to avoid opening any DAWs. I’ve really gotten to the point that I don’t want to wrestle with so many bits and bobs, I just want to make music and enjoy doing it. I don’t want it to be a chore or a pain! So after all said and done, which one would I open to try making something with? I’m leaning towards none, maybe considering GarageBand again, but it really is so limiting… but then again, making limited music is better than making none.
Fingers crossed that Logic Pro lives up to the hype! If it doesn’t, then it’s back to the drawing board to see what I can make work for me.
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