Great tip
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This shit is awesome. I have no idea how I haven’t heard of it prior to now
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There’s an art to not losing your shit when you find out that you just lost hours upon hours of work and now you have to do it allllll over again
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Free DAW exporting
(I’m going to use headers on these if that’s legal here)
I probably mentioned this at some point but it feels important right now.
Most DAWs let you use their entire suite of tools (like, the PRO version) for free for an unlimited time so you can really check out the workflow and see if you want to buy it. Saving and global export are almost always disabled.
(Well, FL studio lets you globally export, but that’s like having a full tank of gas on a car that doesn’t run)
But…
Usually you can ‘bounce’ tracks, busses, and various configurations (including the master, whoa) and just catch the temp files in something like voidtools’ Everything (it’s free) and move them to some place that doesn’t get flushed when you shut down the program.
At first, this sounds like, “Who has the time?” but that’s what they want you to think – it’s actually a pretty quick process, and comes in handy when you need something like Bitwig’s spectral processing suite to process a sample but don’t want to pay $250 in order to do so.
Free DAW recorder
You don’t need to be a modular nerd like me to use this, but there’s this technically free VST I use all the time called Voltage Modular that basically functions as a modular synth and allows you to buy modules in the form of DLC.
But…
There’s a free inbuilt recorder in it that not many people know about, so you can just wire up the FX instance (post here if you actually use it and have trouble) and record your DAW’s output without even having to export. Not only can this work on DAW demos, but you can do this creatively to expand your workflow and real-time record like people did in the olden days.
You can even set it up to just record every time something triggers it via MIDI, if your DAW is currently playing your track back, or you can even get really cheap (like $5) modules to expand into boolean logic and math, if you’re a nerd like me. But otherwise, the rest is just built-in and $0.
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Fantasy consoles have hidden trackers
(you don’t need to be able to code in order to use these)
Basically, free consoles like TIC-80 (and the ‘educational’ version of Pico-8) have full-fledged tracker sequencers complete with 8/16-bit synthesis engines (sometimes even featuring FM) that allow you to (traditionally) make music for your games.
But…
You can technically just export the sounds and songs you’ve made without even having to write a single line of Lua. You can literally make entire sample packs based on the tools provided here (I’ve done it!) and get some free, believable chip sounds in the process.
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Hotkeys.
Learn them. Learn them all.
Oh an another one. I wish I could tell this to my dumbass self 15-20 years ago:
“This project/album/track you’re working on right now, it’s never gonna be finished for you. There’s no such thing as “finished” in art or music. You’ll re-listen years from now and still feel that way, no matter what you do to it right now or later. Just release it when it’s ‘good enough’. AKA now. Then move on to the next thing.”
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