Today on the Tuesday Trio we're gonna check out three free DAWs.
Hey everybody, welcome to Mina Studio for the Tuesday Trio- your weekly stop for free and budget
tech resources and corny alliterations. So today we're gonna check out three
free DAWs and if you don't know what a DAW is it is just a Digital Audio Workstation.
It's just a piece of software that lets you record and edit audio. Engage.
Our first free DAW today is Traction T6. You can download Traction T6
from www.traction.com and if you scroll down you'll see the Traction T6 DAW free
workstation app for all, and you can just download that right there. So let's look
at the actual program. This is Traction. It's got pretty much all the basics of a
DAW you have your tracks here you can select which input you'd like. Down here
you have all your typical controls play record etc. Here you kind of have an
inspector of what's going on in your track. This particular DAW is set up a
little different than a lot of DAWs I've used, but it shouldn't take too long to
figure out. The inserts this took me a little bit- this is where you get your
plugins and you drag them to this space here then you can add your plugins so
you can see it comes with quite a few plugins delay, chorus, reverb, equalizer,
all the basics. Let's pick reverb to see what that looks like. Then you have your
controls for it down here in the little inspector. If we enable our tracks
here and hit record. There we go- you can see my voice popping up on the
waveform. Stop and we've got our tracks. You can mix and move your tracks
around etc like you can in most DAWs. Our second DAW for today is Presonus Studio
One. You can find this at presonus.com. Click on products, Studio One,
then get Studio One. See this is the full paid version here, then down
here you see get Studio One Prime now. That is what you want. Studio One Prime
is the free version of Studio One. It's a stripped-down version of the Studio One
software. Let's open up the actual program you can see your Studio One
Prime. As you can see it looks more like a professional DAW, you have your tracks
up here mute, solo, record, etc. You have all of your channel strips down here
with your volumes your inserts such as your effects. You can see here we have
the Studio One instruments volume one and two, and we have a whole bunch of
software instruments in here. You pick a drum kit then I could play that on my keyboard.
Of course we can also record real instruments as well. Here we select
input 2 record, and you can now see it's recording my voice. Check check check.
Down here we have our control bar with our play and pause and
record, as well as a metronome, time signature, and tempo. This is a great
option for a free DAW. You get a professional quality interface, you get
tons of software instruments that come with it, you get some loops that come
with it, and you get a few effects, not a whole lot, but you do get some basic
effects as well. This would be my recommendation for a free DAW if you
want something that you can really record quality music with. Finally on
our list we have the grandfather of all free DAWs. We have Audacity. You can find
Audacity at audacityteam.org, as simple as hitting the download button and
choosing your operating system. You can see Audacity is an open source
DAW. It's not quite as pretty as Studio One or
Traction, but it does work very well. Audacity is very straightforward which I
like. You have all your controls here, right here you can select your input for your
track, if you need a new track- add new track, just like that. If you mute
your solo your volumes everything pretty standard and if I hit record you'll see
a recording on our new selected track. You can also add lots of effects to your
tracks you can see it comes with all of the typical effects like reverb,
equalization, and etc. So if you're just getting into DAWs and you just want a
free one to play around with I would suggest Audacity first as I
think it is the easiest to get started on and then you may want to start
playing around with like Presonus Studio Prime because that gets into more of
what a real professional level DAW looks like. What are you still doing here?
Go record your hit album and I will see you back here next Tuesday for another
list of awesome.