Who let the DAWs Out? The Digital in a New Generation of the Digital Audio Workstation

Abstract

Pop is increasingly assimilating the compositional practices of hip-hop and EDM (electronic dance music). This shift is driven by a new generation of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). These are less based on a recording studio logic and more a combination of controlling loops and the networked logic of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) culture. Via new media theory, this article discusses how the practices of hip-hop and EDM are digitalised in the DAW, and what that means for pop production. I argue that it entails fundamentally new practices that can better be understood as control of metadata that define interrelational running processes. .

Full text

Who let the DAWs Out? The Digital in a New Generation of the
Digital Audio Workstation
Anders Reuter
Independent
ABSTRACT
Pop is increasingly assimilating the compositional practices of hip-
hop and EDM (electronic dance music). This shift is driven by a new
generation of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). These are less
based on a recording studio logic and more a combination of
controlling loops and the networked logic of ubiquitous computing
(ubicomp) culture. Via new media theory, this article discusses how
the practices of hip-hop and EDM are digitalised in the DAW, and
what that means for pop production. I argue that it entails funda-
mentally new practices that can better be understood as control of
metadata that dene interrelational running processes. .
KEYWORDS
DAW; digitalization; music
production; pop; ubicomp
Introduction
The 20-year-old producer and college student Tank God is sitting in a recording studio
explaining the creative process behind one of his tracks. Working in FL Studio 11 on
a laptop with stickers on it, he explains how the drum-programming, compression, pitch-
shifting, EQ, melodies, and vocals came together. Like most of the videos on YouTube
where producers explain and demonstrate how they created a hit track, this one also takes
place in a recording studio. But Tank God is not really using it. In fact, he has put a wood
plate on top of the recording studio’s mixing desk – to hold his laptop. The track Tank
God is demonstrating is 2017’s “rockstar” by Post Malone. The trap hip-hop-infused
song went on to break Apple Music’s first week streaming record, became the third most-
streamed track ever on Spotify, and arguably made Post Malone one of the biggest new
male popstar of the second half of the 2010s.
Pop music and its production practices have indeed changed. DAWs (digital audio
workstations) like FL Studio and Ableton’s Live are increasingly based on practices
stemming from electronic music production and a logic of looping, sampling, and
synthesizing rather than recording audio. These practices are increasingly dominating
mainstream music. The genres that have arguably had the biggest impact on recent pop
music – trap
1
and EDM pop – are molded mainly in either FL Studio or Live (see Weiss;
Jackson; Fintoni; D’Errico; Brett).
The consequences of the digitization of popular music production has been
researched in a broad range of musicological research (Brøvig-Hanssen and
Danielsen; Zagorski-Thomas; Théberge, Any; Moorefield; Bayley; Cook et al.;
CONTACT Anders Reuter andersreuter@gmail.com
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2021.1972701
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Strachan; Toynbee; Warner; Prior, Popular; Burgess; Walther-Hansen). However, these
tend to prioritize the perspective of the physical recording studio. Research on the
practices of hip-hop and EDM (electronic dance music) rarely engage the consequences
of their assimilation into pop. The methodologies are often either historical or ethno-
graphical, exploring the subcultural practices of DJ cultures (Rietveld; Butler,
Unlocking, Playing; Lawrence; Poschardt; Reynolds, Energy; Sicko and Brewster;
Thornton; Brewster and Broughton) or hip-hop’s cultural roots (Schloss; Chang;
Rose; Katz, Groove; Williams; Krims).
However, the formation of this second generation of DAWs coincides with the rise of
ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) culture (see Weiser and Brown; Ekman; Greenfield;
Beigl). Device-agnostic, interface-controlled, networked, and pervasive computing
increasingly defines the DAWs that work across and between the interfaces of laptops,
tablets, and smartphones – and which are cloud-connected to endless libraries and
services that initiate, support, and distribute music. In other words, pop music has
assimilated new genres with different technological rationalities, and these changes entail
novel ways of producing pop music that are innately digital.
Yet, the digital pop music production that I focus on in this article is also part of
plural and parallel histories and practices. Media are produced in accordance with
human action and their significance varies betweens and parts of society. I aim to
elucidate the specificity of use of media in multi-level transformative processes and the
mutual dynamics between media and practice. I do argue that “something is new”
(technology-driven even), yet it is not a matter of one rationality replacing another, but
of the emergence of new rationalities that affect and are affected by the previous
rationalities. It is within this give-and-take of the previous and the new that the digital
in music production is emerging. Instead of understanding digital music production as
a remediation of analog recording studio practices, this article will discuss how changes
in compositional practices can be understood as a new media logic in music produc-
tion. I argue that changes sparked by the use of newer DAWs characterize
a fundamental shift toward a logic of controlling interrelational processes. Essentially
algorithmic in nature, the sequencer and loop paradigms are connected to network
culture and represent a new type of compositional practice based on controlling
processual macro-synthesis of metadata rather than working with individual recorded
sound sources.
I start by discussing and critiquing musicological approaches to the digitalization of
music production. I argue that the consequences of newer DAWs’ practices have been
overlooked due to an analog recording studio perspective that clings to music production
theory. Instead, I turn to the sequencer logic and loop practices of FL Studio and Live.
I argue that they represent a shift from sound material’s embedded value and meaning to
a processual negotiation controlled by metadata. Next, I turn to an analysis of how the
new DAWs integrally connect to network culture. I discuss how this has created a faster,
game-like trial-and-error compositional practice that is also supported by new cloud-
based services that offer loops, presets, and production services. Counter to arguments
about standardization, I argue that this essentially puts the emphasis on how processes
interconnect, shifting complexity from individual characteristics to the unfolding multi-
plicity of interrelational processes. In conclusion, I sum up how what I call the DAW 2.0
relates to and differs from the traditional recording paradigm.
2A. REUTER

The Recording Studio Paradigm
The first iterations of DAWs were released in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989,
Digidesign (now Avid Audio) and Steinberg released the first versions of Pro Tools and
Cubase, respectively, and an early version of Logic Pro was released in 1993.
2
Throughout
the 1990s, Pro Tools became the industry leader with a setup that combined hardware
and software in complete packages. In 1991, that hybrid cost nearly $6,000 (Future
Music) which was a considerable price tag and commitment for most recording studios.
However, the combination of software bundled with hardware offered the opportunity to
transition to digital with high sound quality and stability in an environment and logic not
too far from the analog.
DAWs initially worked mainly as supplements to the tape-based recording studio, but
Pro Tools and its competitors eventually overtook the functions and thereby also the
metaphors and infrastructure of the studio. With knobs and faders as symbolic handles,
the mixer, the channel strip, the effects rack, and the playback panel (with the analog tape
recorder functions of play, stop, fast-forward, rewind, and record) were all visualized in
the interface. DAWs also included MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a music
industry standard protocol introduced in 1983 that allows digital instruments such as
drum machines, synthesizers, sequencers, and controllers to communicate and synchro-
nize. In the DAWs’ interface, the ability to both program and record MIDI’s metadata
became a lot easier. It offered new ways of editing, because performance information
could be corrected after the performance and before it was applied to sampled or
synthesized sound. The opportunity to sequence data parameters such as timing, dura-
tion, velocity, and pitch-bend in the gridded piano roll broke down barriers between
performance, notation, and programming.
However, the logic of the recording studio in the DAWs’ interface was still often
defined by a high level of skeuomorphism, as previous hardware-based machines’ layouts
and controls were visualized in the interface (for more on the skeumorphism in music
production software, see, e.g. Bell, Hein and Ratcliffe; Marrington The DAW;
Lagomarsino). From this perspective, early DAWs can be interpreted as remediators
(Bolter and Grusin), as they mainly refashioned the logic of prior media forms onto new
media.
The conclusion correspondingly follows that the emergence of musical software is
primarily a matter of representation, where music software mostly functions as interface-
control of the hardware. Accordingly, “so-called digital media technology in the field of
music production is better understood as an analog rather than as a digital revolution”
(Kvifte 105). Paul Théberge begins his 2015-essay on music’s digitalization with
a likeminded statement: “The digitalization of music is not a ‘revolution’”
(“Digitalization” 329). Yet, somewhat contradictorily, the essay’s last sentence explicates
that digitization is “a phenomenon that permeates virtually every aspect of how we think
about, make and experience music in contemporary culture” (337). Similarly, Brøvig-
Hanssen and Danielsen write in the introduction to their 2016 book, Digital Signatures:
The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound: “Digital technology has actually
offered relatively few operations that are entirely new” (15). Arguably, there seems to be
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 3

an impetus in music production research to not only adapt a perspective centered on the
analog recording studio, but also to downplay or ignore the consequences of music
production’s digitalization.
Discussions concerning (new) media’s revolutionary impact versus its amplification of
previous media is far from new (see, e.g. Kittler). Wendy Chun fittingly warns against the
assumption that everything that has to do with new media is a revolution. Yet, Chun also
reminds us that new media matter most when they do not seem to matter at all – when they
become habitual, embedded in our lives. A similar argument can be made about the
development of the new generation of DAWs. As I will argue, a new production logic is
now habitual for a different kind of composer. New practices are emerging, and they suggest
substantial esthetic consequences and potentialities for twenty-first century pop music.
Generally, maintaining a perspective based on the analog or the traditional recording
studio when understanding digital pop music production thus seems increasingly pro-
blematic. To begin with, a perspective based on the logic of recording studios might miss
or apply less value to new creative and esthetic potentials of digitalization. It might even
implicitly privilege particular musical genres. For example, Mark Marrington writes
about how certain DAWs inherently imply particular musical practices that inform the
character of the music they are used to create (“The DAW” 55). As an example, he looks
at Pro Tools’ appeal to sound engineers whose focus is on recording musical perfor-
mances, and claims that “the conservatism of its interface basically reflects this” (56; see
also Möllenkamp who in his typology of DAWs describes the “studio paradigm” of Pro
Tools, Cubase, and Logic that caters mainly to audio engineers and producers). Similarly,
the recording studio paradigm applies more to popular music genres that are based on
recording multitrack band-based practices, such as rock.
3
However, the convergence of
practices between music software and digital culture has created emergent features that
fundamentally differ from previous rationales. Instead of software defined by hardware,
the DAW 2.0 is based on connecting, controlling, and determining data with data,
software with more software. It involves relations between almost purely digital
functions.
Still, while I am arguing for a distinction between a first and second generation of
DAWs, they do adapt and copy functions between each other and share many funda-
mental characteristics. This “feature creep” (Bessell 408) is increased as software allows
faster updates in commercial competition. For example, Logic Pro X 10.5 (from 2020)
comes with the added feature Live Loops, a nonlinear organizer of loops very similar to
Live’s Session View. Additionally, it is not uncommon for composers and producers to be
native users of multiple DAWs to an extent that allows them to switch according to the
need at hand. A track might be initiated in one DAW and finished in another. In other
words, it could be argued that the differences between the first and second generation of
DAWs are becoming increasingly smaller.
4
However, the DAW 2.0 is more about new
compositional logics across programs. These stem mainly from specific programs (FL
Studio and Live) that combine practices from electronic music (hip-hop and EDM) and
ubicomp culture.
This change is spurred by the combination of a surge in computational power and
falling prices. The need to invest in large computers to run musical software has declined
substantially, resulting in laptops increasingly hosting so-called “in-the-box” music
production. DAWs have accommodated this development by becoming more all-
4A. REUTER

encompassing, constantly improving their sound quality and operational functionalities.
This further decreased the need for added (and expensive) hardware or software.
5
While
the notion of the desktop or bedroom producer, or the so-called home-based “project
studio,” is far from new, the difference is that DAWs can be run on cheaper laptops that
are not necessarily designated music computers.
This shift to the multipurpose laptop is somewhat organologically paradoxical. From
one perspective, the DAW-based laptop and its one-object character seemingly fits
conventional understandings of a musical instrument better than notions of “playing”
the physical recording studio as an instrument (Bell; Watson, “Cultural”). Yet, from
a different perspective, the DAW on a laptop defies boundaries and traditional defini-
tions of what constitutes a musical instrument. Instead, it entails a merge between
music studio, music software, and music instrument, and browsers, games, social
media, streaming, e-mail, and uploads/downloads, etc. Operational practices bleed
into each other in an ongoing exchange of information that often includes other
devices such as tablets and smartphones. Music production has become part of
a media topology that permeates and defies strict separations of local, defined
“environments.”
Processual Macro-Synthesis: The Instant Expandability of Digital
Sequencing
Image-Line, a Dutch-Belgian software company, focused mainly on adult games such as
Porntris when their first iteration of FruityLoops was released in 1998 (Jackson). At first,
it was a basic 4-channel MIDI drum program for Windows, but in 2003 it toned down its
playful fruit-themed interface and changed its name to FL Studio (even though it is often
still referred to as FruityLoops by its users). The popularity of FL Studio grew, and it
gradually began to replace what had perhaps been hip-hop production’s main instrument
since the 1990s, the Akai MPC (a combination of drum machine, sampler, and sequencer
in one pad-based playable box). While most other DAWs can perform more or less the
same functions as FL Studio, it took the sequencing logic of the MPC and made it
accessible for a new and digitally native generation of beatmakers. Sequencing had
already been an integral part of electronic music, but in FL Studio the grids of the
interface’s multiple pop-windows made it easy. Here, “all you needed to do was drag
together colorful blocks of sound to create compositions” (Jackson).
Sounds are triggered and controlled by the small, squared, ticked boxes. They are
miniature monoliths of metadata that can be used in unlimited ways; one can additively
stack the same figure to activate or control samples or synthesis. The sequencing of FL
Studio is essentially based on a logic of constantly negotiating an interconnected taxon-
omy of repeated patterns. Like a Russian doll of loops within loops, a snare-sample is
active through ticked boxes on the piano roll, and that group of ticked boxes is then
visually represented as a sequence where it is grouped with more boxes that form the
arrangement of the song. It is the instant expandability of the digital. Automated multi-
plicity permeates every step. Actions and edits are duplicated across the arrangement,
thereby producing a new kind of direct synchronization between the detail and the
whole.
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 5

Paradoxically, FL Studio has been pivotal in the birth of two seemingly different
electronic music genres in recent popular music: EDM pop and trap. The exchange
and teleological shaping of additive patterns was an essential part of the EDM pop that
entered the charts around the beginning of the 2010s by FL Studio users such as DJ-
producers Martin Garrix and Avicii (EDM pop had been very popular at festivals for
almost a decade at that time, see Reynolds, “How”; Matos; Holt; Gálvez). Conversely, the
characteristic stuttering hi-hat rolls and circular beats that originated in trap and rose to
near-ubiquity in current pop music are the sounds of digital sequencing. The quantized
trap-beats are the grid gridding. Another reason for this dual genre-appeal is perhaps that
FL Studio’s standard BPM is 140 and not 120 like other DAWs. The faster tempo lends
itself to EDM-related genres, whereas the slower tempos of trap are often based on
a tempo-octivation where the pulse is felt as half the of BPM (Bennett).
Processual Fitting
Live, like FL Studio, can do about same as other DAWs, but its loop-based Session View
offers a fundamentally different function. Its other component, Arrangement View, is
more or less the same as traditional DAWs, but Session View differs in that it essentially
eschews the start/stop-operationality of the recording studio. It is instead based on
performing directly with running loops by triggering, swapping, manipulating, or inter-
connecting sound material represented in a grid of colored, modular squares. Anything
from short percussive clicks to whole albums can be drag-and-dropped into the real-time
flow of the composition.
When Berlin-based Ableton released its first version of Live in 2001, it was originally
aimed at more techno-oriented, club-based live practices. However, many composers
quickly began to bridge the gap between DJing and producing electronic music, and it
grew to become perhaps the most influential and popular DAW of the twenty-first century
(D’Errico; Brett). It arguably bridges DJ-practices with more code-based programs’ ability
to program on-the-fly (Wang and Cook). While the more patching or code-heavy opera-
tions of programs like ChucK (or similar programs like SuperCollider or Max) appeal
more to programmers of electronic music, Live is also accessible to users without experi-
ence in either music or coding.
6
Compared to the additive process of recording, loop-
based composition quickly establishes a starting point, an initial material to work from,
and the subsequent work is a matter of subtracting and adjusting. Additionally, Live has
continually added a long line of functions that eases impromptu use. For example, it was
the first music software that could beat match audio samples and MIDI sequences into
loops, thereby reducing programming to drag-and-drop spontaneous operationality.
In this loop-paradigm, the relationship between object and process has been turned
around. It is about the authoring of processes themselves (D’Errico 44). Working with
loops is less about inscriptional value of musical material represented as static objects in
block diagram-visualizations. It is an ongoing adjustment, manipulation, or “re-
performance of material” (D’Errico 46). For example, making sampled elements groove
will often entail tweaking the loop’s so-called “braces” (the beginnings and ends of the
loop) while they are running. Producing in Live is therefore based on a constant ongoing
adjustment, not just of the choice of the material being looped and its combinations, but
in a fundamental fitting of running processes.
6A. REUTER

This could be interpreted as reducing detail and diminishing the required talent of the
producer, but it affords new and different levels of complexity. As digital culture theorist
Luciana Parisi argues, “computational nature divides the Parmenidean infinitesimal con-
tinuum into finite small details particles, or atoms, within which complexity is contained”
(80). In other words, the digital affords a new level of detail which can be subject to
discrete variations that cause new levels of complexity. This demands new kinds of
attention, skill, and talent from the producer. Virtual graphical visualizations of sound
waves are still integral, but in process-based production, the representational design is
mostly based on connecting sampled loops and sequences, while creating filter sweeps and
controlling dynamic compression, etc. The composer’s scrutiny turns to the stream, the
event, and less so the object itself. Adjustments are done solely according to the main
underlying question: how does it affect the work’s composite ongoing processes? This is
a move away from the singular sound as the main component of composition and toward
not only the loop, but loops in plural, and how they work together.
Postrecording
This shift to a process paradigm is emphasized by the interface’s blurring of distinctions
between sound and metadata. Between databases and algorithms, signals are equalized,
ignoring the kind of information they represent (Fagerjord and Storsul 20; Gillespie 169).
From this perspective, music production begins to reflect some fundamental character-
istics of computational culture that emphasize the fluidity of manipulable data and the
patterning of information rather than material instantiation (see Hansen; Hayles). Media
archeologist Wolfgang Ernst argues that the focus turns to digital signal processing itself
instead of essences, narratives, or documents with inscribed meaning (“Tracing”,
Chronopoetics, “Media”).
7
Audio turns into programmable data regardless of the differ-
ences and hegemonies between audio, MIDI, sampling, synthesis, sound, and the meta-
data that controls it.
Digital music production becomes less about sound objects being transformed and
more about transformation itself. This challenges the privileged position of “the recorded
take” or “the perfect sample.” The operationality of recording (choosing a recording
environment, microphone, setting it up, setting up cables, choosing a microphone
amplifier, wiring hardware effects, etc.) rests on a notion of a mediatized “source”
which implicitly implies an original, a premedial condition. The DAW 2.0 is more
based on the processual unfolding of sounds and a mediatization that relinquishes
notions of original sources. It is a move away from traditional musical performance
and the craftmanship of recording, toward a logic of an interface-environment that on
a macro-level begins to resemble an interconnected processual synthesis.
However, it is not just the “pre” in premedial that is punctured. The centralization of
interconnected metadata and the opportunity to constantly edit performance informa-
tion gives rise to a new kind of fluid relationship between production and postproduc-
tion. Sound sources exist as negotiable references that are submitted to processual
mediatization. Here, human performance is increasingly modified to technology (not
vice versa). In this way, developments in digital composition exceed the McLuhanistic
notion of media adapting to the human (such as prostheses) and are instead examples of
the human adapting to media.
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 7

The Networked DAW
Digital culture holds a particular disposition for a game-like or lusory sensibility (Hjorth;
Dippel and Fizek; Galloway). Similarly, the combination of newer DAWs’ accessibility
and their innate embeddedness in networked digital culture encourages a particular
game-like or sprint-like compositional practice.
8
In the loop-based workflow of fast
creation, subtraction, and adjustment, many beats or instrumental backing tracks can
swiftly be made for sharing or selling online. Here, others can supplement or take over
(by adding melody, vocals, rap, more production work, etc.) in a shared, digitally
connected workspace across time and geography. Furthermore, FL Studio initially gained
much of its popularity through (often illegal) filesharing. “The internet’s favorite produc-
tion software” (Weiss) spread fast on applications such as Kazaa, Napster, and Pirate Bay,
which were new in the 2000s. Other users just used the demo version of FL Studio that
offered a full version of the software, but with the catch that you could not save the
project for later work. Instead, you had to complete the track and bounce everything
down to one finished file. In other words, the work had to be completed fast in one
session, which again encouraged sprint-like compositions.
Like the democratizing and anti-elitist potentialities of new media (Bolter), FL Studio
in particular can be seen as embodying anti-establishment tenets. As producer Porter
Robinson argues, FL Studio made music production available to “pretty much underage
gamers” (quoted in Weiss). It spawned a compositional ethos that did not identify with
established producers perfecting pop sounds in big recording studios with expensive
Apple computers. Similar to much software in gaming culture, FL Studio until recently
only worked on computers run by Windows (the first release of FL Studio for Apple’s iOS
came in 2018). A new segment of digitally native users that views and approaches
computation differently was given an opportunity to become composers.
In the interface, music production exists as an app-icon. Across laptops, tablets, and
smartphones, the production of music, the distribution of music, and the reception of
music inhabit the same gridded space as logoed thumbnails in the interface’s postmedial
versatility. It is part of the same system and algorithmic logic that connects and couples
ubicomp network infrastructures. Here, the DAW-composer is increasingly self-
sufficient, able to do everything herself, creating a paradoxical practice that is both
extremely individual and extremely socialized. In web-based compositions, pivotal
parts of a track such as a sample, a loop, a beat, or a lead vocal are shared and downloaded
on the fly, thereby blurring the boundaries between creative collaboration, file sharing,
and online retail.
9
The resurgence of trap around the beginning of the 2010s was born out
of web 2.0 logic with its trial-and-error uploads of homemade beats, tracks and mixtapes.
Hip-hop’s tendency toward “rebecoming analog” (Shaviro 45) is thus partially suspended
in this new wave of trap, arguably making it the first genre in musical pop culture that is
purely conceived, distributed, and received digitally.
Cloud-based Music Production
Concurrently, cloud-based music production is increasingly becoming the norm in pop
music production. Endless libraries of samples, presets, virtual instruments and mixing
tools – or even complete works for remixing – can be accessed copyright-free through
8A. REUTER

subscriptions to services like Splice, Noiiz, or Loopcloud (Shelvock).
10
These cater to the
loop-based, postrecording practices of the DAW 2.0. Similarly, so-called “type beats” are
becoming increasingly popular and common. These are basically instrumental tracks
based on the producer’s ability to imitate a popular artists’ sound. Type beats are sold,
leased, or ripped on webpages like typebeats.com, beatstars.com, and YouTube. The
name of the beat often mentions the type of artist that the beat was inspired by, making it
easy to find.
11
Similarly, sites like Landr.com sell instant mastering services based on
algorithms making the music ready for streaming services such as Spotify and
SoundCloud. In other words, pop music’s increasingly networked character changes
the traditional logistics that connect creation with publication.
Furthermore, its DIY-culture is a culture based on uploading tracks or parts of tracks
that are not necessarily completely finished. This trial-and-error character is extended to
the work itself, depriving the work of a sense of completion. Like a screenshot, the final
so-called “bounce” of a musical project materializes the immaterial looped information.
Yet, it is still available for upgrades. The finished musical work is less about a final result
that entails passive storage in a physical medium, since streaming culture allows artists to
edit works swiftly and continuously (for instance, HBO deleting an accidental Starbucks-
cup in a Game of Thrones-episode, or Kanye West’s ongoing corrections to his 2016
album The Life of Pablo). This continual work-in-progress mentality begins to mimic
how online platforms are constantly developing and invisibly A/B-testing different
versions as a source of information for making product decisions (see Bucher). The
nature of the digital destabilizes the musical work. It becomes ephemeral, a constant beta-
version, a pilot – nothing is ever completed, always ongoing, subject to upgrades.
It is also in this light that we have to understand the interface, its operationality, and
skeuomorphism. With music production’s arrival on networked computers and touchsc-
reens, the interchangeable interface of the DAW becomes more than just the virtual
operation of traditional recording studio logic. The interface is just a level or threshold
that, on one hand, reduces and simplifies complex systems, but on the other, connects
events, phenomena, and actors across time and space (see Bratton 228; Cetina). From this
perspective, interfaces afford more than operations at hand or practical means to an end
goal. Instead, the DAWs interface-operationality suspends differences between localized
objects and the globally connected flow of cloud-based computing.
Standardization and Tactical Media
In addition to cloud-based access and distribution of sounds and loops, the compositions
in newer DAWs are often made with the DAWs’ default sounds (Weiss). This is first and
foremost a result of the overall improvement of the sound quality and the accessibility of
the software. However, combined with the game-like composition-as-sprint practice, it is
perhaps also part of a particular esthetic sensibility. Trap often consists of a constant,
looped beat, a singular timbral environment, and a basic concept, idea, or premise that
bears repeating. This could be interpreted as standardization. Indeed, the EDM pop that
hit mainstream culture around the early 2010s was also based on some very particular
characteristics (e.g. four-on-the-floor kick-drum, grand synthesizers, and sidechain
compression). Similarly, trap revels in distinct stock sounds like the Roland TR-808
drum machine’s kick-drum (which can simultaneously function as the characteristic
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 9

boomy bass), its short closed hi-hat (which works perfectly for the abundant fast-rolling
hi-hat figures), Auto-Tune, and a general disposition for distortion. A more specific
example is the metallic sound of the “young chop snare” from the producer Young
Chop’s sample library that has been almost ubiquitous in trap and trap-related tracks
(including Post Malone’s “rockstar”).
From this perspective, the culture and compositional practices around FL Studio
resemble what Garcia and Lovink call tactical media. It is a type of “cheap media”
exploited by people who feel aggrieved or excluded from the wider culture, made
possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and new forms of distribution.
Building on de Certeau, they further explain tactical media as a set of practices rather
than a domain of texts or artifacts, thus shifting the emphasis to uses of representation
rather than representation itself. Bridging so-called desktop producers or bedroom
artists, type beats, and mainstream charts, the fast and standardized practices of FL
Studio and Live could be seen as an esthetic discharge of tactical media. Writing about
1950s garage rock, Zagorski-Thomas argues that if professional-quality sound is
a signifier for the “establishment,” then “the rejection of it – the choice to go lo-fi –
becomes a political statement: a marker of difference” (89). Echoing early punk music’s
deliberate (mis)use of standardized instrumentation, particularly FL Studio has
spawned a raw, DIY-based musical sound, as well as culture. The emancipatory
elements of tactical media become an esthetic trademark realized in FL Studio’s
disposition for fast, course, sparse, and standardized sounds that provide an alternative
to pop perfection.
12
Yet, it would be a misunderstanding to view this as premised on
a lack of skill or access to technology. It is first and foremost an esthetic choice where
complexity and detail is created through how sounds are treated and interconnected
rather than their individual characteristics.
Conclusion: Dening the DAW 2.0
In this article, I have analyzed a new kind of digital audio workstation. It represents a shift
from a recording paradigm to a processual programming paradigm that reflects and
connects with networked computational culture. I will try to sum up some of the main
characteristics of this 2.0-version of the DAW.
First, it is increasingly device-agnostic, controlled or running on operating systems
across laptops, tablets and smartphones. Second, it is intrinsically loop-based. Whether
it is sequencing MIDI-information in the piano-roll or audio-loops, production is
centered on loops within loops in algorithmic processes that interconnect and
mutually affect each other. Since sound material can be generated fairly quickly (due
to access to various cloud-based libraries of samples, loops, and presets), production
shifts from a logic of addition to one of subtraction. Combined with the democratiza-
tion of music production, the game-like ethos of digital culture, and developments in
networked cooperation/distribution, production has become fast or sprint-like.
Complexity is created in the infinitesimal digital details between loops and interrela-
tional functions across sound sources. Distinctions between recorded sound, sample,
and synthesis, as well as between pre- and post-production, blur. It is the interrela-
tional juggling and adjustment of metadata rather than inscriptional value that is
augmented.
10 A. REUTER

Pop tracks are, in other words, almost solely produced or defined by data that never
leaves immaterial code until its playback. It is less about analog to digital transfer, and
more about the combination of digital information – from inception to distribution to
the playback device – to finally realize the song as physical vibrations. In fact, even
though the tracks do become physical sound waves when played back, the notion of
“recorded music” seems increasingly misleading.
Popular music still entails many genres and practices that include or are solidly based
on recording (studio) practices. But developments in pop music’s increasingly digital
nature represent a type of music that does not fit solely into traditional interpretations of
popular music, nor does it fit those of various types of electronic music. However, as
I have argued here, pop music production has bridged some of the logics of electronic
music production and the logics of new media. This shift and ongoing development is
innately hosted by the type new digital audio workstation – the DAW 2.0. Yet, the
emphasis is on the digital information and less so on the audio. Maybe it should be called
a digital music workstation instead?
Notes
1. Trap can be traced back to the 1990s (Bennett), but its recent insurgence is closely related to
and often conflated with what is often called SoundCloud Rap. It spread in the 2010s on
SoundCloud.com, where artist would upload often rough mixes of their songs. New York
Times music critic Jon Caramanica has called SoundCloud rap “the most vital and disruptive
new movement in hip-hop.”
2. For clarity, I am not including a long line of other programs, e.g. PreSonus’ Studio One,
Cockos’ Reaper, Renoise and Reason Studio’s (formerly Propellerhead) Reason.
3. The industry of recording studies is indeed changing and has been for the last couple of
decades. “The professional studio business that remains today is what cannot be done at
home: live recording and mixing,” the owners of the celebrated and Pro Tools-based Unique
Recording Studios told Billboard when they had to shut down in 2004 (Walsh). But
recording studios, big and small, still exist and cater to everything from the amateur indie
band to high profile artists (see Watson, “Digital”; Rogers). However, studios increasingly
serve more as a creative space for songwriting, programming, and recording vocals.
Arguably, this also entails elements of romanticism and nostalgia toward the traditional
analog studio and band-based recording sessions. In his doctoral thesis, “The Evolution and
Decline of the Traditional Recording Studio,” Philip Ronald Kirby quotes music journalist,
writer, and ex-record company owner Paul Morley: “There’s an almost sentimental even
superstitious attachment to the idea of making the sounds in traditional studio buildings”
(324).
4. This is fittingly exemplified in three seemingly contradictory statements about the preva-
lence of various DAWs in the 2000s: “In 2007 . . . virtually every studio seemed to offer some
form of Pro Tools compatibility” (Théberge, “End” 85); “FL Studio became the defining
music software of the ‘00s” (Fintoni 1); and “in the mid-2000s, Live became the dominant
software for electronic music producers working across genres” (D’Errico 23).
5. It could be argued that there recently has been a certain return to hardware. This can be
seen in not just the fetishization of vintage analog equipment, but also in the variety of
various performance controllers that are made specifically to connect and perform with
DAWs. Ableton has, for example, released Ableton Push, where 64 gridded, backlit
squared buttons with changing colors connect with Live thereby enhancing the haptic
performative elements of the DAW. Yet, here hardware serves mainly as controller of
a software logic.
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 11

6. Live 8 incorporated Max into their Live Suite (Max for Live) in 2009 making not only Max
accessible to Live users, but also offering a new level of flexibility to Live.
7. As a concrete example of the increasing lack of distinction between matter and code, Bitwig
Studio, a DAW released in 2014 by former Ableton employees, offers four track types:
Audio, Instrument (MIDI-programmed), Effect, and a Hybrid track. The latter can host
both audio and MIDI at the same time, thus making it possible to make programmed
information into audio whilst keeping other parts of the same track programmed as MIDI.
Additionally, like many other newer DAWs, Bitwig supports touchscreens. Its outline is
akin to Live’s, but it is built around a more synthesis-like interface where the touchscreen
affords faster and easier connections between modules.
8. Hip-hop culture can also be interpreted as being rooted in a competitive culture through rap
and DJ battles (see Forman; Perry; Katz, “Men”). However, the more recent digital compo-
sition-as-sprint practice I am describing here differs substantially from the time-consuming
hip-hop connoisseurship of diggin’ in the crates which includes finding and sampling from
old, unusual, or rare vinyls (see, e.g. Demers; Katz, Capturing; Schloss).
9. The ephemerality of internet-connected recording studios has also been considered by Paul
Théberge (“Network”). The recording studio – professional or an amateur home studio –
“should perhaps also be considered as a kind of “non-place” – a world relinquished “to
solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and the ephemeral” (763; see also Prior,
“Software”).
10. When Justin Bieber released his 2020 album, Changes, he was accused of stealing a sample in
the track “Running Over.” As it turned out, the sample came from a royalty-free sample-
pack on Splice.com that the young Bristol-based producer Laxcity had uploaded. The
melodic sample, made in FL Studio’s stock synthesizer Wasp, has been used for multiple
other songs before and after Bieber’s use.
11. The first pivotal example of the currency of type beats came in 2018. YoungKio, a teenage
producer in the Netherlands made a beat (based on a sample from the rock-band Nine Inch
Nails) in FL Studio and uploaded it to beatstars.com. A year later, 19-year-old college-
dropout and rapper, Lil Nas X, leased it for $30 and made the track “Old Town Road.” In
various remixed versions, including one with country-singer Billy Ray Cyrus, the track
became a viral hit and is at time of writing this the longest-reigning number one song
(17 weeks) in the 61-year history of the Billboard Hot 100 (Breihan).
12. This is further emphasized with the music culture’s extensive use of overdriven Auto-Tune.
While it was originally made for improving vocal performances through subtle pitch
correction, it is instead used in a way that results in its very characteristic distortion.
Making overdriven Auto-Tune sound good demands time, skill, and experience, but it
can ironically be heard as a signifier of rapid production.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Anders Reuter received his PhD from University of Copenhagen in 2021. Entitled “Pop Processing
- The Digitalization of Musical Time and Space” it intersected popular music studies and new
media studies. He also works as a journalist, writer and music producer.
ORCID
Anders Reuter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4969-7932
12 A. REUTER

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