Mac ownership, my inconvenient truth

2024-10-26

Much to my own shame, I own an Apple Computer. It is a MacBook of some kind. I don't know what kind off the top of my head and I can't be bothered to check. It's fairly recent model, with some sort of apple silicon chip. That's about as much as I know about it or care to know. I've owned it for several years. Before that, I owned a different mac. In fact, I've been using macs for a long time. It's part of what made my transition to Linux comparatively seamless, already being somewhat familiar with unix filesystems.

I've expressed a love for music since a young age, and my father, having seen the propaganda regarding Apple's position as the computer company of choice for the arts, purchased me a mac as my first computer. Previously, I had used his old work laptop for a number of years. I had this mac laptop at the point when I decided to start doing music on the computer. I learned in garageband, then subsequently the next logical step, Logic. Logic is apple's first party DAW program. Unfortunately I have become highly proficient in logic, having used it for probably a decade at this point. I work extremely fast. When I was in university studying music production, I would regularly receive comments from students and teachers alike on my speed. I just have a very streamlined workflow. This presents a problem, in that trying to make music with anything feels PAINFULLY slow. Now that hasn't completely stopped me, I've made quite a few songs using different software such as schism tracker, vcv rack, orca, LMMS, Sunvox, I'm not going to list every single piece of software I've ever made a song in but the point is, the principles of synthesis and recording are generally transferable across tools.

I don't want to ramble for too long so I'll get straight to the point. At some point this mac is going to break due to planned obsolescence, and I desperately want to never have to buy another one when that happens. The other thing I use my mac for is video editing but the options available on linux are good enough for my needs, so my primary goal is to find ways of making music where I don't have to use a mac.

The tragedy of the DAW.

Modern computer music production is centred around the DAW. Now I could complain about DAWs not adhering the unix philosophy in concept, but if it works, it works. No, the problem is that there are only really three or four DAWs which are suitably advanced as to meet my needs and the needs of the industry: Ableton, FL Studio, Pro Tools, and Logic. I've spent some time with all of these and aside from Logic, Ableton was the most enjoyable. The problem is, they are all proprietary software, and none are available natively on Linux. The easy option for me would be to (definitely legally) obtain a copy of Ableton, spend some time getting accustomed to its work flow, and then when my mac shits the bed, I can simply run it through wine. This is the pragmatic option. The sensible option.

For some reason, I am resistant to this option.

I don't like that it's still proprietary software. I don't like the idea of having to futz about with wine. I feel like if I'm going to learn a new workflow anyway, it may as well be something radically different. Something about it just doesn't feel right to me, although if I'm being honest this is quite likely to be the solution I end up going with.

Escaping the box

The next option would be to move a bit more away from computers, and create the mythical "DAWless Setup".

The setup for Guitar Music would be fairly simple, my bass guitar, some pedals, an amplifier, a microphone routed through a DAC into a computer recorded with audacity. Then Something as simple as a basic drum machine. Two bands which are hugely inspirational for me, Godflesh and Planning For Burial, both use drum machines in their music, so I'm not worried about being able to make it sound good. Audacity also has decent enough features if wanted to do some basic eq or add reverb or whatever. So for that kind of music, I'd say that setup would pretty much work.

So what's the problem? Cost is the problem. Physical gear is expensive. To cut costs, I could just DI from the pedals into audacity without an amp. Well I just experimented with that after typing that sentence, and it technically works, but I would need to use some sort of amp simulation plugin in audacity to really make it usable. I'd really prefer if the recording sounded good going in. But buying an amplifier is quite expensive.

Electronic music is an even bigger problem. I own one physical synthesiser, the behringer td-3. As a sidenote, since buying that I learned that behringer have been involved with some fairly sketchy things with regards to labour rights in their factories, among other things. Anyway, it's a 303 clone. I never really use it because it's literally faster to create a 303-like sound in a vst than it is to go through the process of setting up the device. The thing about it is, if I program a melody on the td-3, I can never get the tempo to stay synced with whatever drums I'm using, so I end up sending midi from logic, but at that point I can barely see the point of using the hardware. However, if I had a drum machine or a host of other hardware, then it would make more sense to use. Again, the major problem is price. It's an even bigger problem in this case because you're paying way more for something you can do for free in a computer. As nice as it would be to have a dawless setup with a bunch of synths and effects units, I really just think it's outside of my price range. Also I hate to say it, but I've spent some time on music gear forums and whatever, and 90% of the stuff people are making with these dawless setups that cost thousands, it just sounds like shit. Spending thousands to make default fl studio noises. It seems a bit weird to me.

Some sort of weird fucked up shit

It's possible that I could mangle together some sort of weird fucked up hybrid shit on linux, a modular type setup without a daw, just a bunch of stand-alone programs routed through JACK or something. That seems like a huuuuge fucking pain to set up and deal with, but it would ultimately be a somewhat workable solution. That combined with whatever cheap hardware I can find could end up working out to something. Maybe I should get into renoise. Honestly the keyboard driven workflow seems like it would appeal to me, and I have some level of experience with trackers. Aphex twin makes music using what I would class as some sort of weird fucked up shit. If you wanna go really deep into the super out there sound design experimental electronic stuff you kind of end up in this realm by necessity.

Conclusion

It's a total mess out there man. I'll keep you updated as I try out more things. Today I tried using puredata for the first time, maybe something will come of that at some point who knows. It's a mess. I'm a mess. You can probably tell from the deterioration of my prose throughout this post that I've been having a bit of a breakdown through writing it. This happens occasionally and is nothing to worry about. I will sometimes get very frustrated with the idea that I'm using Logic Pro X by Apple Computers Software Company and think myself into a spiral researching alternatives. The thing is, I can make my jungle music in schism tracker, I can almost make my guitar music with just a freaking gosh darn bass guitar. I get stuck in choice paralysis when I try to think about this stuff. Sorry, this was supposed to be a small and simple post where I just briefly outlined my current problems and situation, but it kind of spiralled. Well my only option just like always is to keep trying stuff until something sticks.