I’ve used a lot of DAWs in my life – Nuendo, Cubase, GarageBand, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools come to mind. And given my choice of DAWs, well, I made my choice – Logic Pro. And Ableton Live Intro. Hey, one DAW doesn’t meet all of my needs.
Talking about DAWs is like talking about religion: people go nuts if you diss their DAW. I know this from stupidly trying to discuss Logic Pro in a YouTube comment thread, where someone said Apple never updated or innovated Logic Pro. This after they just added a ton of new instruments and a new method of using it designed to be more like Ableton. People don’t use, um, LOGIC when discussing DAWs.
Honestly, there seem to be four big DAW kingdoms on the web: Ableton, Logic Pro, Studio One, and Reaper. So let me try to say something nice about each kingdom…
Ableton Live – I run Ableton Live Intro as part of my live rig because it is the most CPU efficient DAW out there on the Mac. Ableton also dominates the DAW market when it comes to EDM, because it’s designed for loop-based music out of the box. If you want to use a DAW live, or you do EDM, use Ableton.
Logic Pro – I run Logic Pro as my home studio DAW because it’s set up closest to the way my brain works, and for one more reason – at $199, nothing on the market can touch it. It comes with a drummer with AI and multiple kits, it comes with almost every synth sound and sample you’ll ever need, the piano sample is outstanding, it comes with outboard gear mostly good enough for almost any need. It’s the best DAW for home recording in my opinion on the Mac, out of the box without needing to buy anything else.
Studio One – Unlike Logic Pro, Studio One is cross platform so you can run it on Windows. Unlike Logic Pro, there’s a free version. It comes with a sampling of sounds to get you started. Studio One Free is probably the best free DAW on the market for Windows.
Reaper – Reaper is the Linux of the DAW world. It doesn’t come with keyboards or drum samples (last time I checked.). But you can practically program the thing to build any workflow/layout you want, and there’s no DAW more customisable. In a way, it’s a DAW for pros. True, it doesn’t come with a collection of keyboards and drum machines and loops, but the best collections on the market don’t come with a DAW – the best sample library is paid, the best software synths are paid, etc. If you’re serious, you go with Reaper and you learn to build your own workflow. And then you buy whatever plugins you need.
Now, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose only one DAW, I would choose… Ableton Live. It’s “good enough” for home recording but it’s the best for live use. Logic Pro sucks when it comes to live use.
Notice I didn’t talk about Pro Tools. That’s because very few people use it. The people who DO use it are the people who work with professional recording studios, where Pro Tools is still the standard format. Quick poll – how many people in your city are running a DAW on their home computers? How many pro studios are in your city? In New Port Richey, there are probably over a thousand people running DAWs at home (if not more,) and no real pro studios. Pro Tools sucks at MIDI. Still. All the other DAWs do MIDI better.
I also didn’t talk about GarageBand, or what I like to call “My First Logic Pro.” Hey, I used GarageBand for several songs on my first album. It’s THE best DAW for beginners on the Mac, period. It’s the easiest to use, it sounds great, it’s got a lot of goodies in it, including the AI Drummer. Given a choice between Studio One Free and GarageBand, I’m choosing GarageBand because it comes with way more stuff.
But GarageBand is a stepping stone to Logic Pro. It’s a good one, but once you master GarageBand, the only reason NOT to move to Logic Pro is that you don’t have two hundred bucks, or because you don’t want to take your mixes to the next level.
There are Cubase users out there, but I don’t see them that often. The last time I used Cubase was 15 years ago, on the Mac, and it was buggy so I left it. Certainly they’ve worked out the bugs by now, I would hope. Nuendo was a kick ass DAW that I ran on Windows for a while. But it was like Reaper – it came with nothing.
Thinking Outside the Box
Let me drop some wisdom on you – if you are on a Mac and you like Ableton, Reaper, or Studio One, but you want more sounds, get MainStage 3. For $39, it has all the plugins and keyboards that Logic Pro has, and you can use them with your other DAW. My live rig is Ableton Live Intro plus MainStage 3.
Ultimately most of us could get the job done on any DAW. I like the fact that you can learn Studio One for free – more DAWs should have a free version. I think Logic Pro has a trial version, but Logic Pro won’t run on Windows. Neither will MainStage 3.
