This is gonna be longish but it’s what I was alluding to when I made that crazy post about fully stepping into the box and freeing yourself of these worldly trappings, lol:
The fundamental concept behind working in a DAW is embracing the parts of music production, that is, music production in the sense of the entirety of going from nothing to a finished thing, that are chaotic and aperiodic. Brian Eno said, and I’m gonna give him credit even though he stole it from me, that truly working in a DAW is like painting with sound. So, when you open your software it should, if the GUI is good, look like a multitrack mixing board but it’s actually a canvas partially falling outside outside of the x-y time-amplitude domain.
Now obviously the analogy, like most, doesn’t hold 1:1. Painting isn’t purely chaotic and even the most abstract stuff has some manner of planning and form in the process. It might be impossible to teach a pseudo-AI to fully paint something to completion but it’d be easy to teach one to plan to paint something. However, things break down at the point of subjective fine-tuned details and artistic flourishes. Like, you can’t use a periodic LFO to apply a streak of the right shade of green.
Basically, put simpler, truly working in a DAW is embracing the stuff that would be practically or totally impossible to do in any other manner. Of course, lol, a person isnt forced to do this and most just use a DAW as a glorified 4-track recorder with built-in effects pedals, which is totally fine! The most important thing to do not forget is that this is all supposed to be fun and rewarding. I’m just trying to illustrate (get it?) what motivates people like myself.
I want to stress though that this concept of the impossible does not mean the process nor the result is supposed to extreme or avant-garde or mind-boggingly different. In fact, the two examples I thought of are as simple discovering you have a fine-tipped paintbrush; the simplest (there might even be something simpler I’m not thinking of) would be the standard technique in EDM and related genres of ducking the bass or the entire spectrum underneath the kick to produce that pumping, moving sound (this sounds similar but is the done almost the opposite of the ‘French pump’ popularized by Daft Punk et al) using sidechain compression. Basically, the amplitude of the kick triggers whatever is ducking and you twiddle the knobs until it sounds right. Which, sure, but if you have a DAW and a paintbrush you can literally just draw the exact contour you want; here’s an example i just made using my superdupertriangle from upthread (the kick is from Faxing Berlin by Deadmau5):
Kick, synth, then both with no ducking:
(for a rudimentary visual aid too, though this only would be useful for an example like this with a bass and kick, we’d want the continuous decibel level to have no peaks:
Synth band-split with the lower frequency band fully ducking and the higher partially (despite all the overtone action the triangle is still just a bassline, in this case a drone of a perfect fifth):
The contours looks like this,
but the main point is, going another step into the impossible, is that I can draw the contour differently for each individual hit if i so desire!
Obviously with such a simple example as this there’s an element of reinventing the wheel but, perhaps ironically, in my experience it’s been older people, people in their 60s and 70s and beyond now, who embrace the concept because they knew what it was like pre-digital with the human inability to even come close to twiddling a knob and riding a fader with the speed and precision they’d consider ideal. It’s younger people who stack five compressors on some shit trying to get it to sound exactly right but it’s like, dog, a compressor just turns the volume knob really really fast but you have a robot with superhuman knob twiddling abilities, just use him.
Which I suppose segues nicely into this next example. This result is something you’d never hear on the pop charts but the process I’d say is probably used on at least the vocals of every current pop record.
So, zikzak posted that test of the mp3 uploader and you asked about the LFO wobbling; tempo-synced LFO controlling the cutoff of a low pass filter is one good way, but hypothetically we can also do ridiculous shit:
It probably doesnt need to be spelled out, but just in case, that when I mentioned professional pop records I didn’t mean distortion and a cutoff filter flying all around. Though that would sound fucking sick. I meant automation clips that look just as crazy as that are used on the volume of and filters for vocals, and other parts, to glue everything together just perfectly. I dont think I even sound particularly conspiratorial to say this is Fat Cats Dont Want You To Know territory because everybody is trying to sell somebody something. Like, the latest digital emulation of some hardware compressor to sound like the pros, blah blah blah, lol, but the pros are doing painstaking shit going over every syllable to make sure it sounds just so. If you could just lay back and turn on a compressor and slap the knobs with your penis a couple times everybody could do it.
So, this is actually the short version but hopefully these are good examples of the DAW-dependent possibilities; and there’s a whole world in between doing microthings to try to intentionally make something sound batshit or sound perfect.