DAW Basics

The recorder holds sound on parallel tracks, so you can record drums on Monday and vocals on Friday and play them back together.

The sequencer holds instructions instead of sound. It remembers which notes should be played and leaves the question of how they sound to the instrument.

The mixer brings all of it together: level, panning, effects, and one stereo signal out.

Keeping them apart is worth more than it sounds. "I hear nothing" is three different questions. Is there anything on this track at all, is this track sending notes to an instrument, and is the fader up with the output going to the master? Ask them in that order and the answer takes twenty seconds instead of twenty minutes.

The timeline reads in two languages. Clock time in minutes and seconds is what you want for anything tied to picture. Musical time in bars and beats is what you want for everything else, and it only exists once the project has a tempo in beats per minute and a time signature.

That choice reaches further than the ruler at the top of the screen. A delay set to a dotted eighth follows you when you change the tempo. The same delay set to 375 milliseconds stays where it is.

Over the timeline lies the grid, and whatever you move snaps to the nearest line. That is useful, and it is also why programmed parts sound stiff: real players sit systematically just before or just after the beat. Quantise is usually a percentage for exactly that reason. At 100 percent the note goes all the way to the line, at 50 percent it moves half way and keeps half of what you played.

Audio is the result. Numbers describing air pressure, thousands of measurements per second, so playing it back gives you that guitar, that room, that day.

MIDI is the instruction. A MIDI track holds messages such as "note 60 on, velocity 92" and later "note 60 off", plus pedal, modulation and pitch bend. Velocity runs from 1 to 127 and says how hard the key was hit, not how loud the result is. The instrument decides that, which is why a hard note on a good piano plugin gets brighter as well as louder.

What that buys you is what you can still change. On a MIDI track you can move a note, fix its timing, and swap the whole instrument for another one. On an audio track the performance is fixed and you are editing sound.

An insert sits in the path. The whole signal goes through it and what comes out replaces what went in. Use inserts for anything that shapes the signal itself: EQ, compression, saturation, gate. Their order is not cosmetic, because each device works on what the one before it handed over. An EQ before a compressor means the compressor reacts to the filtered signal, so cutting the lows stops it ducking on every kick. The same EQ after the compressor shapes what the compressor left behind.

A send copies the signal to a return track holding one effect, while the dry original carries on untouched. Use sends for reverb and delay. Ten tracks sharing one reverb sound like ten things standing in one room, and ten separate reverbs sound like ten different rooms, which pulls a mix apart. Sharing also costs a fraction of the processing power.

Sends are post-fader by default, so pulling a track down takes its reverb with it. Pre-fader taps the signal before the fader and keeps the effect level independent, which is how you build a separate monitor mix for a singer.

A bus is a collecting point. Send every drum track to a drum bus and one fader moves the whole kit, and one compressor on that bus makes the kit breathe as a single instrument. The master is the last bus in the chain, so anything you put there touches everything.

The order inside a track is the same in almost every program: input, inserts, pan, volume, output. That explains a classic confusion. A compressor is an insert, so it reacts to the signal before your fader, and pulling the fader down does not make the compression gentler.

Two delays stack up. Plugins need time to calculate, so every modern DAW asks each one how much it needs, adds it up per track, and delays the other tracks to match. That is automatic delay compensation, and without it tracks that belong together drift and thin out.

Compensation works by delaying things, which cannot be done to something happening right now. That is why almost every DAW has a mode that bypasses it while recording, and why heavy processing on the master belongs after the recording is finished.

The second delay is the buffer between your audio interface and the computer. A small buffer is quick and works the processor hard, which you hear as clicks and dropouts. A large buffer is stable and slow. The habit that solves it: small buffer while recording, large buffer while mixing.

Render writes the whole mix, or a selection of it, to an audio file. It is also how you make stems: one file per instrument group, all starting at the same zero, so anyone can line them up in any program.

Bounce replaces a track with the calculated audio. The MIDI and the plugins are gone and sound is what is left.

Freeze does the same and keeps the door open. The program plays the calculated file from then on and keeps your MIDI and plugin settings, so you can unfreeze and carry on.

Four reasons to reach for one of them. Processing power, because a frozen track costs almost nothing and twenty of them will run where twenty live synths will not. Safety, because plugins expire and computers get replaced while audio stays audio. Collaboration, because the person you send it to does not have your plugins. And deciding, because as long as everything can still change, you keep changing everything.

The file you save holds no audio. It is a list of instructions: which files exist, which parts of them you use, in what order, with which plugins at which settings. That is why you can cut, move, shorten and stretch a clip back out without ever losing anything.

Two things follow. Never move or rename the audio files a project points at, because the recipe then looks for something that is no longer there. And a non-destructive project is not a backup: save numbered versions and keep a copy in a second place.