Hybrid is 100% the way to go. Being a DAWless purist seems like a weird cult to me. I love the tactile experience but why wouldn’t we record it all into the DAW? Some people get silly about this. Thanks for being reasonable.
And the majority of effects pedals are digital too. When you can get as many instances of any effect pedal as your cpu can handle instead of paying $2-500 for a single one it doesn't make financial sense when you can get a midi controller and map those controls to it.
@@donnydarko7624 true. I wish more DAW plugin effects allow for midi mapping. That is one thing that’s nice about the hardware - having the human performance aspect to it - turning a knob instead of drawing an automation line with a mouse. But for some effects like reverb - I might not be changing a lot along the way, maybe just how much is mixed in, so that works. But yeah, in the box effects overall are so much more reasonable and sound just as good 99% of the time.
@@michaelkonomos Ive never noticed any vst's where you can't midi map parameters to something. I mean you usually need to route it through the daw's control mapping interface like macros or whatever though
I have a Polyend tracker and an Elektron model samples with Reaper as a DAW and despite the limitations I learn better ways to use them and try my best to make sure I'm not just buying things for the sake of buying things.
Gear for creative speed and live perfomances. DAW for non-linear workflow and production value. I have 2 problems - 1. Multitrack transition automation Gear-To-DAW (think octa slider, no such easy thing on DAW) 2. DAW setups are tedious, but as long as you actually put yourself within some constraints, it does work.
I just about lost it when I saw the UDO super 6. That synth is *deep*. I went for the desktop version and use it with a Novation 49SL Mk3. Also works GREAT with ableton!
I really hate creating in the DAW, seems to take me a lot longer than creating the basic track on a Digitakt, using the DAW to add a few (stereo) tracks and to polish the final product!
Man I had the udo super 6 and ended up selling it. I hope it serves you, but unfortunately in my case it was like a constant love/hate relationship that ended pretty fast lol..
I fully agree with the hybrid approach. It took me a while to get there and I initially dismissed the Digitone & Digitalt combo because I wasn't able to make complete songs on them. So I took a long and rewarding detour with the MPC One and made about a new song per quarter, which was record speed for me. But then the MPC started to feel like a daw in a box and I felt like I was crazy not to use the DAW I already purchased separately. Enter the Syntakt - it's sort of the best of Elektron, and it's not trying to be a DAW, it's more of an instrument. And suddenly I've made a song about once per month! But I miss samples. So I briefly got the Digitakt again only to feel limited, the second time, by its mono sampling. I use samples for textures, atmosphere, and maybe the occasional acoustic snare, and perhaps most importantly, for lush pads. And that's where the Digitakt falls short. It can't sample a lush synth pad since it will disregard all the chorus juices and sum the sample into mono. It makes me sad. And you can't resample a drum loop for glitchy textures for the same reason. So, I'm currently exploring the SP-404 MKII instead for my sampling purposes, with the Syntakt still doing 80% of the work. We'll see how it goes. But one thing is certain: the DAW is always the final destination!
@@henryhicut Glad my ramblings are helpful. 😊 Looks like you did pick the Digitakt though - and countless of other gear! Did you try the SP-404 MKII yet?
@@sinewaymusic haha yeah ;) haven't tried it yet but it looks pretty neat for that job.. I recently switched my setup to overbridge mode to be able to do some more in depth mixing and editing inside Ableton. So no actual need for the SP at the moment but for a compact live setup it might be great to play stereo stems alongside the digitakt doing the one shot work ;)
@@henryhicut checkout the korg electribe samplers too, or rathet sample players. you can't sample directly into them but they are affordable and powerful, or maybe the blackbox, or polyend play
Agreed! I’ve basically never not had a DAW as part of my pipeline and there are some things it does so much better than DAWless. On the other hand DAWless is usually more tactile and fun for me so combining both is the move! Great setup by the way!
Thank you for introducing your setup. I'm just too busy and exhausted from work to even plugin cables so my setup at the moment is battery powered. Yamaha Reface CP (for noodling), notebook (writing down ideas), Deluge (for realizing ideas from noodling) and headphones.
Everything very nice but those Presonus monitors are such a crap. Your beautiful Elektron machines would sound very different through some decent ones.
Good stuff! Thanks for sharing your setup. I just picked up a Digitone, and I'm still learning that. I haven't even touched Overbridge yet, but the easier integration is one of the reasons I grabbed it. I love my Deluge, but getting stems out of it is a bit more work. I have Eris monitors as well. They're great foe the price, but have a hiss / noise floor that occasionally tempts me to replace them. Definitely not as exciting an upgrade as adding some pedals to my setup would be, haha!
Great video. I’d wager that the large majority of DAWless setups eventually find their way back to a DAW, unless we are recording to tape, or really only jamming/performing without event revisiting. An early welcome to Portland, hope the move goes smooth, and perhaps I’ll bump into you at Control Voltage.
Great approach Daniel, over time I've done very similar but ATM I have settled with Monome Norns, Cassette machine and ipad running Garageband! The possibilities are endless with this setup but also very streamlined. I agree adding a DAW into the setup as and when needed is really helpful, I don't always use it but it's there when I need it. Hope you're good, stay well my friend
Love this very clear walkthrough. I keep coming back to Ableton as a midi brain, sampler and audio mangler as well as a performance tool but the immediacy of my DAWless work is so pleasing. I’m still finding the right balance - partly thanks to your inspiration!!
Thanks Mark!! And for folks like yourself coming from the software side of things, it’s always fantastic to see the excitement about getting out of the box and into a more “instrument” based space
Hi! What will you be upgrading the Minilogue to and why? I own one myself and not being able to play extended cords is the one thing that makes me consider replacing it.
When you say "Hybrid" a true Hybrid setup is actually when you are using both Hardware and Software Synthesizers. Not really any different for Hybrid Mixing that utilizes both DSP effects plug-ins such as UAD, Waves in conjunction with outboard analog gear. I have both a Hybrid Mixing and Hybrid Production setup as I utilizes both plug-ins and hardware. I own 5 Hardware Sound Modules racked mounted in my Argosy Console Desk that are connected to my MOTU MIDI interface. I record the hardware synth midi tracks in Studio One and also use soft synhs such as Spectrasonics Keyscape, Native Instruments Komplete, ANA.. I own a Roland Integra-7, Roland Fantom-XR, Yamaha Rack MOTIF-ES, E-MU Proteus 2000 and E-MU MO Phatt. I have the left side of my Argosy desk full of analog outboard such as Micpre pre amps, Compressors.. that I use for both tracking and Hybrid Mixing. I also use a combination of Waves plug-ins, T-Racks for mixing. I actually came off of Hardware sequencing myself as I just gotten rid of my Akai MPC 5000 as I moved away from hardware sequencing and workstation keyboards. I still have my 20 year old MOTIF ES6 keyboard sitting in the closet that will soon be put up for sell while I have the rack mount version of it that replaced it.
i'm not trying to be the party killer here, but many of these devices are technically a DAW on their own. so instead of using a DAW on a generic purpose computer, this configuration is basically using multiple daws in a micro-service architecture. it's hard to go truly 'dawless' when most of these devices are quite smart and completely capable of operating as a full fledged audio workstation on their own.
Thanks for the comment! I would argue that the Elektron boxes are far from a DAWs-in-a-box, in the way that something like the Deluge or the MPC One/Live can function. Key things being: lack of an audio arranger & general device interface (see the MPC devices referenced) Either way, I’m using my DAW to complete tasks that aren’t achievable with the other sequence-capable devices in my setup: capturing long-form streams of audio to capture ideas for writing sessions.
You mean a MIDI Sequencer? A true DAW hense the name is built around audio editing and recording. Majority of DAWs today started off as MIDI sequencers before audio recording, editing and mixing was a thing. Protools when it was Digidesign was really the first true DAW. MOTU actually provided the hardware interfacing at the time. Portable hardware DAWs started popping up such as digital mixers that had hard disk recorders or tape recorders. The industry standard of all time hardware MIDI sequencer was obviously the Akai MPC s as virtually every Hip Hop Producer at the time used them to sequence all their soun modules and keyboards hooked up to them as they didn't use them strictly as drum machine's. Now that computers gotten better and latency has improved over the years, the use of hardware sequencing in recent years have declined now that Majority of the music industry sequences midi in a software DAW.
@@eman0828 In my experience, it goes way beyond that. THE CMI Fairlight sampler/sequencer from 1979 was a full blown DAW, with a digital display, sampler, sheet editor, sequencer, wavetable editor, everything. The Commodore 64 which came out in 1982 and was super affordable, also had so called 'Trackers" from the mid 80s. Atari STs had built in midi ports and were perfectly capable to sequence and control hardware instruments. The Commodore Amiga had excellent .MOD trackers (albeit on 4 channels by default), by the early 90s you could use the completely free FastTracker II on PC, with up to 32 channels, in stereo, with 44khz mixing, 16 bit samples, with all kind of effects, envelopes, everything. Entirely Free. The latest incarnation of the these trackers is Renoise. "DAW"s such as ableton started to appear in the early 2000s, and by 2010s was the breakthrough, when they started to surpass the capabilties of multi-million dollar studios. Now you can use your smartphone and run a full blown DAW there (for $30) such as Nanostudio 2, which is suprassing the capabilities of the 1979 CMI Fairlight in every imaginable aspect by a magnitude of 1000x. And the Fairlight CMI price was $120k back then (inflation adjusted it would be even more ridiculous today). The 80s trackers on home computers such as Amiga, Atari, etc were way more sophisticated and advanced than an Akai sampler.
@@neonvoid I'm fully aware of that but that is not a DAW. A DAW was based around audio recording and mixing when everything was recorded on analog tape and then the Sony DASH digital tape machine before Protools was a thing. You are getting digital samplers and midi sequencing mixed up with audio recording and mixing. A DAW was ment for recording linear audio, editing and mixing. A Sampler is an entirely different thing that's more of an electronic musical instrument.
Regarding the Octatrack, I can really, really recommend the manual, for everyone who didn't consider this, yet (like me, in my early OT days, hehe). It's comprehensive and it has a dedicated section with examples, explained in mostly enough detail to understand what is happening, how and why it is happening. It really boosted my understanding quite a lot.
Hybrid is 100% the way to go. Being a DAWless purist seems like a weird cult to me. I love the tactile experience but why wouldn’t we record it all into the DAW? Some people get silly about this. Thanks for being reasonable.
Agreed!! Best of both worlds for sure
And the majority of effects pedals are digital too. When you can get as many instances of any effect pedal as your cpu can handle instead of paying $2-500 for a single one it doesn't make financial sense when you can get a midi controller and map those controls to it.
@@donnydarko7624 true. I wish more DAW plugin effects allow for midi mapping. That is one thing that’s nice about the hardware - having the human performance aspect to it - turning a knob instead of drawing an automation line with a mouse. But for some effects like reverb - I might not be changing a lot along the way, maybe just how much is mixed in, so that works. But yeah, in the box effects overall are so much more reasonable and sound just as good 99% of the time.
@@michaelkonomos Ive never noticed any vst's where you can't midi map parameters to something. I mean you usually need to route it through the daw's control mapping interface like macros or whatever though
Being dawless makes perfect sense if you spend 8+ hours a day glued to a computer and hate your life as a corporate slave
I have a Polyend tracker and an Elektron model samples with Reaper as a DAW and despite the limitations I learn better ways to use them and try my best to make sure I'm not just buying things for the sake of buying things.
Love to hear that!
Gear for creative speed and live perfomances.
DAW for non-linear workflow and production value.
I have 2 problems -
1. Multitrack transition automation Gear-To-DAW (think octa slider, no such easy thing on DAW)
2. DAW setups are tedious, but as long as you actually put yourself within some constraints, it does work.
I just about lost it when I saw the UDO super 6. That synth is *deep*. I went for the desktop version and use it with a Novation 49SL Mk3. Also works GREAT with ableton!
That sounds lovely… I’ve had my eye on it since autumn and have been slowly putting aside funds for it
I really hate creating in the DAW, seems to take me a lot longer than creating the basic track on a Digitakt, using the DAW to add a few (stereo) tracks and to polish the final product!
Yeah exactly! I similarly never feel inspired by a blank slate when I open Logic, but I love it as a tool to use during the later stages
Man I had the udo super 6 and ended up selling it. I hope it serves you, but unfortunately in my case it was like a constant love/hate relationship that ended pretty fast lol..
Hahah thanks! I’m still hoping to get one sometime later this year
I fully agree with the hybrid approach. It took me a while to get there and I initially dismissed the Digitone & Digitalt combo because I wasn't able to make complete songs on them. So I took a long and rewarding detour with the MPC One and made about a new song per quarter, which was record speed for me. But then the MPC started to feel like a daw in a box and I felt like I was crazy not to use the DAW I already purchased separately. Enter the Syntakt - it's sort of the best of Elektron, and it's not trying to be a DAW, it's more of an instrument. And suddenly I've made a song about once per month!
But I miss samples. So I briefly got the Digitakt again only to feel limited, the second time, by its mono sampling. I use samples for textures, atmosphere, and maybe the occasional acoustic snare, and perhaps most importantly, for lush pads. And that's where the Digitakt falls short. It can't sample a lush synth pad since it will disregard all the chorus juices and sum the sample into mono. It makes me sad. And you can't resample a drum loop for glitchy textures for the same reason. So, I'm currently exploring the SP-404 MKII instead for my sampling purposes, with the Syntakt still doing 80% of the work. We'll see how it goes. But one thing is certain: the DAW is always the final destination!
That sounds like a very capable setup, and it’s good you put in the time to find out works works best for ya!
Thanks for sharing 🙏 Can completely relate.
@@henryhicut Glad my ramblings are helpful. 😊 Looks like you did pick the Digitakt though - and countless of other gear! Did you try the SP-404 MKII yet?
@@sinewaymusic haha yeah ;) haven't tried it yet but it looks pretty neat for that job.. I recently switched my setup to overbridge mode to be able to do some more in depth mixing and editing inside Ableton. So no actual need for the SP at the moment but for a compact live setup it might be great to play stereo stems alongside the digitakt doing the one shot work ;)
@@henryhicut checkout the korg electribe samplers too, or rathet sample players. you can't sample directly into them but they are affordable and powerful, or maybe the blackbox, or polyend play
No it doesn’t. 😂 My PAW (personal audio workstation) is cherry. I wouldn’t even trade it for Octive One’s…
Agreed! I’ve basically never not had a DAW as part of my pipeline and there are some things it does so much better than DAWless. On the other hand DAWless is usually more tactile and fun for me so combining both is the move!
Great setup by the way!
Oh snap!! Also Portland! There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
Thanks a ton!! 100% yes about the tactility. And I’m guessing you’re on the west coast? I’m going to OG Portland (where I grew up!)
@@SlowHaste haha yeah I’m in the Oregon Portland 🤣 that’s rad though!
Thank you for introducing your setup.
I'm just too busy and exhausted from work to even plugin cables so my setup at the moment is battery powered. Yamaha Reface CP (for noodling), notebook (writing down ideas), Deluge (for realizing ideas from noodling) and headphones.
Tbh that sounds like a fantastic minimal setup! I’ve always wanted to try the Deluge as a standalone all-in-one outside of the studio
Everything very nice but those Presonus monitors are such a crap. Your beautiful Elektron machines would sound very different through some decent ones.
Where’s the OP-1? Asking for a friend.
It’s unfortunately been long packed away in its case :/
@@SlowHaste sending it for a battery replacementttt!
Good stuff! Thanks for sharing your setup. I just picked up a Digitone, and I'm still learning that. I haven't even touched Overbridge yet, but the easier integration is one of the reasons I grabbed it. I love my Deluge, but getting stems out of it is a bit more work.
I have Eris monitors as well. They're great foe the price, but have a hiss / noise floor that occasionally tempts me to replace them. Definitely not as exciting an upgrade as adding some pedals to my setup would be, haha!
Hahah monitors are tough - I’ve never been in a properly treated space since (and may not be for a bit!) so I stick to headphone mixing primarily!
@@SlowHaste Hah, fair enough! What do you use for headphones?
Great video. I’d wager that the large majority of DAWless setups eventually find their way back to a DAW, unless we are recording to tape, or really only jamming/performing without event revisiting.
An early welcome to Portland, hope the move goes smooth, and perhaps I’ll bump into you at Control Voltage.
Thank you!! I suppose I should’ve specified, Portland, ME! Once a New Englander, always a New Englander :/
@@SlowHaste ahh fair!! I'm a New Englander, myself, but wound up in the other Portland.
Great explanation of your setup. I enjoyed watching your video.
Thanks for the comment!
Nice use of space (you will be rocking when you move to bigger space).
I love your chunky computer keyboard 😍
Is that wireless?
Thanks! I’ve since moved and love my current setup even more :). And the keyboard is wired, just not plugged in - it was an early pandemic project!
Great approach Daniel, over time I've done very similar but ATM I have settled with Monome Norns, Cassette machine and ipad running Garageband! The possibilities are endless with this setup but also very streamlined. I agree adding a DAW into the setup as and when needed is really helpful, I don't always use it but it's there when I need it. Hope you're good, stay well my friend
That does sound incredibly flexible! The monome stuff looks wildly interesting to me.
I hope all is well with you, too!
@@SlowHaste All good here my dude, Norns is the best piece of equipment I've purchased for sure!
Love this very clear walkthrough. I keep coming back to Ableton as a midi brain, sampler and audio mangler as well as a performance tool but the immediacy of my DAWless work is so pleasing. I’m still finding the right balance - partly thanks to your inspiration!!
Thanks Mark!! And for folks like yourself coming from the software side of things, it’s always fantastic to see the excitement about getting out of the box and into a more “instrument” based space
I have been saying this for years 👍
moving from NY to San Diego next week. can’t wait to get myself set up again. thanks for the vid and the inspo!
Good luck with the move! It’s always refreshing to reset things a bit
@@SlowHaste thanks!!!
Hi! What will you be upgrading the Minilogue to and why? I own one myself and not being able to play extended cords is the one thing that makes me consider replacing it.
Eventually I want to get myself an UDO Super 6! Definitely a tax return/win the lottery/slowly put aside $ for it type of synth
@@SlowHaste haha, I hear you. Hopefully you’ll get a decent tax return. Which reminds me… I need to file mine.
Nice to see your channel grow…..
❤
Thanks a lot 😊!!
No!!! Nooooooooooo. No. I used to love you man. Why. Why do you have to do me like this.
Hahah I think you’ll find many of your favorite “DAW-less” folks record audio to software (unless they’re fully analog w/ tape reels!)
@@SlowHaste Lol. For sure. Good tips in any case
When you say "Hybrid" a true Hybrid setup is actually when you are using both Hardware and Software Synthesizers. Not really any different for Hybrid Mixing that utilizes both DSP effects plug-ins such as UAD, Waves in conjunction with outboard analog gear. I have both a Hybrid Mixing and Hybrid Production setup as I utilizes both plug-ins and hardware. I own 5 Hardware Sound Modules racked mounted in my Argosy Console Desk that are connected to my MOTU MIDI interface. I record the hardware synth midi tracks in Studio One and also use soft synhs such as Spectrasonics Keyscape, Native Instruments Komplete, ANA.. I own a Roland Integra-7, Roland Fantom-XR, Yamaha Rack MOTIF-ES, E-MU Proteus 2000 and E-MU MO Phatt. I have the left side of my Argosy desk full of analog outboard such as Micpre pre amps, Compressors.. that I use for both tracking and Hybrid Mixing. I also use a combination of Waves plug-ins, T-Racks for mixing. I actually came off of Hardware sequencing myself as I just gotten rid of my Akai MPC 5000 as I moved away from hardware sequencing and workstation keyboards. I still have my 20 year old MOTIF ES6 keyboard sitting in the closet that will soon be put up for sell while I have the rack mount version of it that replaced it.
i'm not trying to be the party killer here, but many of these devices are technically a DAW on their own. so instead of using a DAW on a generic purpose computer, this configuration is basically using multiple daws in a micro-service architecture. it's hard to go truly 'dawless' when most of these devices are quite smart and completely capable of operating as a full fledged audio workstation on their own.
Thanks for the comment! I would argue that the Elektron boxes are far from a DAWs-in-a-box, in the way that something like the Deluge or the MPC One/Live can function. Key things being: lack of an audio arranger & general device interface (see the MPC devices referenced)
Either way, I’m using my DAW to complete tasks that aren’t achievable with the other sequence-capable devices in my setup: capturing long-form streams of audio to capture ideas for writing sessions.
@@SlowHaste Awesome - yes, do whatever works the best for You and whatever inspires you / makes you happy.
You mean a MIDI Sequencer? A true DAW hense the name is built around audio editing and recording. Majority of DAWs today started off as MIDI sequencers before audio recording, editing and mixing was a thing. Protools when it was Digidesign was really the first true DAW. MOTU actually provided the hardware interfacing at the time. Portable hardware DAWs started popping up such as digital mixers that had hard disk recorders or tape recorders. The industry standard of all time hardware MIDI sequencer was obviously the Akai MPC s as virtually every Hip Hop Producer at the time used them to sequence all their soun modules and keyboards hooked up to them as they didn't use them strictly as drum machine's. Now that computers gotten better and latency has improved over the years, the use of hardware sequencing in recent years have declined now that Majority of the music industry sequences midi in a software DAW.
@@eman0828 In my experience, it goes way beyond that. THE CMI Fairlight sampler/sequencer from 1979 was a full blown DAW, with a digital display, sampler, sheet editor, sequencer, wavetable editor, everything. The Commodore 64 which came out in 1982 and was super affordable, also had so called 'Trackers" from the mid 80s. Atari STs had built in midi ports and were perfectly capable to sequence and control hardware instruments. The Commodore Amiga had excellent .MOD trackers (albeit on 4 channels by default), by the early 90s you could use the completely free FastTracker II on PC, with up to 32 channels, in stereo, with 44khz mixing, 16 bit samples, with all kind of effects, envelopes, everything. Entirely Free. The latest incarnation of the these trackers is Renoise. "DAW"s such as ableton started to appear in the early 2000s, and by 2010s was the breakthrough, when they started to surpass the capabilties of multi-million dollar studios. Now you can use your smartphone and run a full blown DAW there (for $30) such as Nanostudio 2, which is suprassing the capabilities of the 1979 CMI Fairlight in every imaginable aspect by a magnitude of 1000x. And the Fairlight CMI price was $120k back then (inflation adjusted it would be even more ridiculous today). The 80s trackers on home computers such as Amiga, Atari, etc were way more sophisticated and advanced than an Akai sampler.
@@neonvoid I'm fully aware of that but that is not a DAW. A DAW was based around audio recording and mixing when everything was recorded on analog tape and then the Sony DASH digital tape machine before Protools was a thing. You are getting digital samplers and midi sequencing mixed up with audio recording and mixing. A DAW was ment for recording linear audio, editing and mixing. A Sampler is an entirely different thing that's more of an electronic musical instrument.
Regarding the Octatrack, I can really, really recommend the manual, for everyone who didn't consider this, yet (like me, in my early OT days, hehe). It's comprehensive and it has a dedicated section with examples, explained in mostly enough detail to understand what is happening, how and why it is happening. It really boosted my understanding quite a lot.