And the lack of email a bulwark against distraction…no HN helps too.
I understand why people like DAW’s.
And understand why I like dawless. For about $150, I can have the best Yamaha engineers could do in 1992 built into a roadworthy housing.
Integration is only a matter of 1/4” TS cables, DIN MIDI and 120v AC.
Or to put it another way, the QY gear is mostly software. Dedicated hardware gives it devoted user interface.
The UI doesn’t have to try to be like the UI of my mixer or my effects boxes because it is not purely visual.
The UI doesn’t have to compete with my mixer for space in my visual field because they both live in three dimensional space.
But those are my reasons.
One is the dedicated configuration. I turn on a 36” power strip and everything is ready to go in less than a minute.
An important part of that is everything is ready to go every single time. There are no patch Tuesdays. No semantic versioning.
The process is rock stable except for how I change it.
A second affordance is that I can make tradeoffs around the specific capabilities I think I want.
An example is my 1980’s Yamaha QX5 sequencer will record Sysex. Ableton Live Lite — came free with my first controller — won’t.
It is an upgrade or finding another daw or running another piece of software and managing sysex outside the daw. The QX5 was fifty bucks and has a well engineered interface because Yamaha knew what it was doing.
I don’t care that the UI is dated because so am I.
A third affordance is dawless means line level audio can be the dominant signal path. That makes it easier for me to reason about my setup.
There are a some of this is just what works for me caveats.
Mostly I just want to put on headphones and make noise because it brings me joy. I am not trying to make an album and if a song comes out of it that’s just a bonus.
I am doing it all on the cheap. The $999 for Ableton’s top package represents a lot of gear I would rather spend money on.
I’ve fallen into the Turing tarpit enough times to know what mine looks like. Mine looks kind of like a daw.
And since I don’t have to remember how I mapped three days ago because it seemed like a good idea, hardware uses less of my RAM.
