Exciting new DAW

I want to write a few things about Septabee, which is an amazing and very exciting new DAW.

A DAW aka a digital audio workstation is a piece of software that does exactly what its name suggests, contains a bunch of tools for doing audio related stuff. Making and recording music, creating sound effects, and modifying those in a plethora of ways. I have been making music digitally or recording my singing/playing and then working from those, for quite a long time now, about 8-9 years. Sadly for the last year I have been having a bit of a problem both in terms of time and motivation and in terms of what software I actually would want to use.

I will now give a little history of what I have used so far, what I like about them, what I dislike about them, and then I’ll get onto Septabee, and by then it will hopefully be somewhat clear why I am so excited about it.

For almost the whole time of me making music I have been using FL Studio by Image-Line. This was only half my decision, but mostly I used it because it was very approachable and so there were a bunch of tutorials for it, and for young me that basically sealed the deal in choosing it. Further down the line I obviously tried other DAWs such as Abelton Live and other smaller DAWs and digital audio editors, however using these solidified my, now, decision to use FL Studio. I knew its shortcomings and the things that it does well, it has also inspired me to create a pseudo-random music generator based on music theory, outputting MIDI files (probably has less to do with FL as every DAW is able to handle MIDI files however, I still think that the sort of gamified look with the custom coloring inspired me to expand the project once I was mostly done with chord progression generation).

However after I moved to Linux I had to realize that currently there was no real way for me to comfortably run FL Studio without setting up a Windows Virtual Machine and working on that, since currently using WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) to run windows executables only allows me to run them in the windows terms ‘as administrator’ and for some reason FL Studio does not like that and is not functioning properly. Therefore, I had to look for a replacement, which turned out to be a much more involved problem than I had initially thought, as turns out none of the big names are available for Linux directly and I did not want a hacky solution for this. The absolute industry standard is ProTools, and other commonly used DAWs are FL Studio, Ableton Live, Logic Pro, neither of which are apparently available natively on Linux (maybe Logic Pro would be runnable since it’s directly developed by Apple, however I do not want anything to do with them and knowing Apple getting the software would be a hassle). Therefore, I started looking at other avenues, that are used by bigger names or basically anyone that could recommend it. This is how I stumbled upon Reaper, which is an amazing piece of software however the learning curve is so steep that I decided against using it long term. Another name that came up beside Reaper was Ardour, so I installed it. It has been working amazingly and is a great replacement for FL Studio, with a similar interface, similar options - sometimes more, sometimes less, but in the same ballpark nonetheless. I seem to have found my new main DAW why am I then so excited about Septabee?

First let me mention that whenever possible I try to use open-source source software after that I prefer going for either non-profit or European owned software and anything else is really only if there does not exist a suitable replacement for it, or I don’t have the time for a bit longer setup or learning phase as of that moment yet. FL Studio was nice since its Belgian-owned and Ableton would also have been nice as it is made by a German company. Just as a sidenote I want to mention how interesting it is that out of the huge names the two that are most approachable and used by the most people that aren’t necessarily using it commercially are European-developed as opposed to the true industry-standard Logic Pro and ProTools which are both developed by US companies and are much more expensive and less approachable. (What I am alluding to is that they are the industry standard because of lobbying power mostly and money and that not surprisingly the European-developed software is much more human-centric.)

So why am I so excited about Septabee?

Well this has a lot to do with the state of the music industry and music as a whole. As in 99% of music that gets written, is in 4/4 time signature for the whole song, they choose a single bpm (beats per minute, aka the tempo) for the whole song, they choose a single scale for the whole song, they choose a 4-chord progression for almost all the way through the song and one or two repeating melodies. Well, if this is the standard song then obviously the industry standard DAWs need to support what this kind of song needs. Namely, an insane amount of plugins that are supported or there by default for a lot of processing that is done automatically, half-automatically. A place to draw in notes. A place to set the tempo. And a way to record singing, maybe instruments. This is it, this is what a DAW needs to do for today’s standard song.

What it does not need to support, is a way to compose in any kind of tuning, to compose in multiple different times comfortably, to do slow-downs and speed-ups in the music, to have a way (without purchasing third-party plugins for another 2-300 dollars) to be able to apply effects note-by-note and not pattern-by-pattern, to be able to design sound natively in the DAW. I have been able to get most of this from actual sheet music writing tools like MuseScore, however if I did not want to stick to traditional instruments, or wanted a fully polished version I was completely stuck. And writing microtonal music in these kinds of software is still a huge hassle and is very hard, and I know this is a very unconventional use-case, however I feel that software that focuses on creating music from the ground up should support all of these.

Take a look at Septabee now. This is an independently-developed DAW that is made by one person, although it is not open, it is non-profit and the developer intends to keep it that way forever (I hope it’s going to become open at some point as well). It is native to Linux. It supports all the above-mentioned things, some very, very well and some only somewhat well at this point, however the software is still in very early stages of development. I love it since it really encapsulates the love for music I have in it, in how delicately it handles things, with a complex but charming UI, and how well it treats music as an art and not a thing that makes money.

So yeah try out Septabee if you are curious (it is free), it is an amazing piece of software, support the developer and have lots of fun.