welcome

“Naughty, naughty, very naughty”

A very wise person once said – think Mr. Miyagi in or the prime minister of New Zealand choice. All DAWs offer enough features to turn your ideas into music, and it’s really the workflow – that most personal of preferences – that should be your deciding factor. But when Apple dropped its Live Loops bomb into Logic 10.5 – not to mention a couple of samplers, along the way – it was pretty clear which road they were travelling down (and there were signposts to Berlin all along it). So my rather sensible ‘try before you buy’ philosophy has now been blown out of the window and shoved aside by the sensationalist journalist in me. (And yes, I did want to put a pair of boxing gloves shaped like both the Apple and Ableton logos on the cover.) Bringing some calm to my quandary, former editor and DAW ‘grandmaster’ Ronan Macdonald compares the form and functions of the two on p16. Whether this was wise or ‘naughty, naughty, very naughty’ (the words of another great philosopher) is up to you to decide. Would you choose one DAW over another? Or would you, as reader Anton suggests on p98, prefer a more modular DAW? As ever, let me know, marking your mails with either ‘wise’ or ‘naughty’.