Learning how to use a DAW is not difficult. Anybody that really wants to do it will find it will not take long to learn the basics. The rest you learn in detail as you need to.
True enough, simplistically speaking. DAWs are not hard to learn. For most at least. Some have trouble. The rest, as has been pointed out cant be learned well, save by experience. I'm a huge fan of that, and that would be reflected in my lessons.
Psuedo-sales-pitching aside, I know that none of my clients in this will be from this forum, so I shall speak freely:
- You can pick up what you need to as you go along, yes. There are easier and much more productive ways. The phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' comes to mind. People often find things that were already within their ability in DAWs only after it occurs to them that the capability might be there to be looked for, after they need it. A decent tutor can show its there and prepare you for its use before you need it.
- There are far more complicating factors to recording than just getting your head round a DAW. What I propose is not just DAW training. I'm well aware of the the many facilities people have to learn their DAW of choice. Recording and mixing are vastly more complex than a DAW.
I was a little bored today so I started a mind map of the broad sweeping topics involved in recording, the things that you can benefit from an understanding of, in order to plan lessons. I tapped out at 3 very densely written pages of A4 of extremely generalised subject topics. Easy 200 topic titles, between 2 hours and a lifetime each. Accordingly, I cant claim anything like total understanding of the topics I'm aware of, but I know that when I started recording, I wasnt aware that most of those topics existed at all. I could have carried on more or less indefinitely, but screw it, even going about it so egregiously simplistically I wasnt really getting anywhere, so I stopped to try and think of a better way.
- The same sort of logic (no pun, for those that use it) applies to effects. Take the humble compressor. All of them have (whether they let you control them directly or not) the same basic attack, release, threshold, ratio, makup gain. You can learn that very easily indeed. That no more really tells you what to do with one than learning the location of all the notes on a guitar tells you how to play it. Extrapolate that for every effect you can conceive of and then remember that the sound of everything affects the sound of everything else ;).
Fred: theres been a lot of good ol' fashioned working class reactionary diatribe in response to people using scary big words and typing lots of them on the board lately. I'm tired of it. Its retardation aggrandising bullshitee. I dont want to turn this thread into one of
those threads but suffice to say:
mocking being clever is not being clever, it is the opposite of clever /mini-rant. The reply was for Andy, I hope he appreciates it, and the humourous intention of its overwritten nature. And that line too.
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