What is a digital audio workstation?

At its core, a digital audio workstation is simply a software program that lets you record, edit and mix music in your computer. It requires hardware— such as an interface or a series of converters, so that your sources can be brought into the computer and recorded using the program. It’s really that simple to use. These software programs are actually built around analog console layouts, so if you were an older engineer it is quite easy to understand how to use just about any digital audio workstation software program. Each of the functions that an older engineer would find on an analog console or an analog tape machine can be found in a digital audio workstation software program. Each of these software programs were actually developed for ease of use. These programs are incredibly powerful, not just because of their inherent feature sets, but also because of their allowance for software extensions, or what are referred to as plugins. Plugins are essentially extension programs which allow you to use emulations of the great analog gear that could be found in the racks that were featured in the legendary recording studios of the past and present. Though digital audio workstations had long ago replaced analog tape machines as the dominant medium for professional music recording, among some smaller studios and even among a few major record producers, they have also served to replace their analog consoles as well, as touchscreen devices, interfaces and even summing mixers have become their equipment of choice. Another nod to the growth of the power and importance of digital audio workstations in the professional audio world is the fact that even most of the traditional analog console companies have either incorporated the ability to control a digital audio workstation program, or have been designed to work with one in mind. It has truly been a revolution in the world of professional music recording, but digital audio workstation software programs did not just appear overnight.

I may have been among the first assistant engineers to make the transition from using analog tape to working with a digital audio workstation software program. From the end of the Second World War, until the mid-1980s, analog tape machines were the preferred method of professional music recording. By the mid-1980s, 32-track digital tape machines manufactured by both Mittsubishi and Otari and later, 48-track digital machines manufactured by Sony gained traction and though they never fully replaced 24-track analog tape machines, quite a few producers and engineers used them to record the great music of both the 1980s and the 1990s.  But, both analog and the digital tape machines of the period were limited in their track counts— neither could record beyond 48-tracks and locking machines together so that they would work in unison was often a headache. Plus, the ability to edit music involved ping-ponging, or essentially, bouncing tracks— a trick perfected even early on during the 1960s to try to increase the number of tracks for recording (bouncing involved playing four tracks for example and then recording them onto two tracks on the same machine by placing two open tracks in record while you are playing back the other source material, just as an example). However, locking machines together was not the only headache, with each bounce to tape, in the analog domain, the source material degraded. By the mid-1990s, digital audio workstations appeared for the first time. 

The first major digital audio workstation program, Digidesign’s (now Avid) Pro Tools, caught the professional music recording world by storm in the mid-1990s. I first learned how to use Pro-Tools in the spring of 1997 and at the time, the program was mostly used just for editing and vocal tuning and comping. At the time, the problem was that the accuracy of the signals being recorded into the software programs were not close to the quality of what could be recorded in analog. It all boils down to sample rates and as they improved dramatically over time, so did the use and capability of digital audio workstations. It’s probably simpler to think of sample rates as similar to pixel rates when we are speaking about the sharpness of an image— the more pixels, the sharper and more life-like the image will be— sample rates, work in much the same way, the higher the rate, the sharper and more natural sounding the recording will be. As sample rates rose and interfaces allowed for the ability to reproduce signals with virtually unlimited track counts at the fidelity of analog, it became only a matter of time before digital audio workstations would replace tape-based mediums for professional music recording. By 2010, it was safe to say that digital audio workstations had totally supplanted not just tape-based mediums, but were even changing the nature of the recording business itself. With their small physical footprint, low cost and powerful feature sets (particularly with the onset and development of software plugins), digital audio workstations enabled artists, engineers, musicians and producers to be able to record their work at home and this has led to the closing of quite few major recording facilities around the world. It is safe to say that if you want to become involved in the process of professional music recording, you must know how to use a digital audio workstation. In the next section of this feature article, we will discover how to use a digital audio workstation software program. In the next section, I will use Apple’s GarageBand which is a digital audio workstation as an example and highlight how it is similar to other digital audio workstations which are used in the world of professional music recording. I have taught both Apple’s GarageBand and Logic Pro Studio and Avid’s Pro-Tools, which is the standard program for professional music recording. By the way, if you can learn how to use GarageBand, then you can easily make the transition to working with either Logic Pro Studio or Pro Tools, or even MOTU’s Digital Performer, another prominent digital audio workstation program.