How to become a power user of your favourite DAW

Mastering your DAW of choice takes years of practice and use, but there are some shortcuts to help you become a power user.

Today’s guide will talk about the various ways you can become more efficient in your DAW which will save you time and more importantly, let you turn out more projects.

Another key thing here is that having a solid grasp of your DAW means that you will not spend as much time setting up and working through menus. This will help you by preventing ideas escaping as you are fiddling with settings.

1. Learn Shortcuts

Shortcuts are essential for any software but I would argue especially for creative applications. They allow you to get things done quickly and easily.

Every DAW has a range of shortcuts, and while some (like Ableton) aren’t changeable, others allow custom shortcuts.

Consider Reaper for example. Not only can you completely reset all shortcuts to your choosing, you can also chain shortcuts together to single hotkeys.

READ MORE: Ableton shortcuts guide – what are they and when to use?

Regardless of how your DAW approaches shortcuts, one of the best uses of your time is learning them.

In my time teaching people how to use DAWs, one of the main things I’ve seen is that those using shortcuts are seen as wizards by those who don’t. You can really speed up your workflow with them and editing becomes a super smooth process.

2. MIDI Control and Gaming Mouse

Following on from the shortcuts thread, having additional surfaces and controls is a great way to speed up your workflow.

Many professional sound engineers use hardware mapped to their DAW to help with mixing. This hardware normally comes with faders and other tactile controls to accurately dial in settings and commands.

If you have a MIDI keyboard or DJ controller, you will already be ahead, as both can be mapped to various controls and speed up your workflow.

If you are looking for a MIDI keyboard, consider getting one with additional knobs and pads on it so you can add shortcuts to them and speed up the process.

For more advanced control, nothing beats a dedicated mixing controller such as the Akai APC series for Ableton or a surface with motorised faders that react to automation, such as the Presonus Faderport.

Another great option is to get yourself a gaming mouse with additional controls on it. I use this religiously with various software and it makes editing a blast.

Grabbing a gaming mouse with 12-assignable buttons on the thumb may sound like a lot to learn, but it becomes second nature very fast.

Mice like these are fantastic for various tasks and many have several profiles on them so you can have different settings for each application.

For example, I have an editing profile in Reaper which allows me to run certain scripts to remove silence in podcast recordings. I also have one for writing which gives me features such as highlighting whole lines and making them bold and inserting hyperlinks.

Remember, unless you are an avid gamer, you won’t need to splash out for the most expensive options with a programmable mouse, but you should look for quality when buying MIDI controllers.

3. Spend time in the manual

I’m sorry, you probably didn’t want to hear this one, but it works. The problem with a lot of complex software is that there isn’t enough space on the screen to show all features at once.

As such, you may not even know some features exist or how to use them unless you familiarise yourself with the manual.

A good example of this was a previous article I wrote about Ableton’s Utility plugin which has a “hidden” Mid/Side mode“. A lot of readers had no idea it was there and I believe this is Ableton’s fault. It is a feature mentioned in the manual, but the effect appears so simple that most people would skim right over that part.

The lesson is, there are potentially dozens of features like this that you may not know about unless you browse through the manual and find the “secrets”.

The alternative to this is searching the web for articles with the (admittedly clickbait) titles such as “hidden features in Ableton” or “things you didn’t know in Logic Pro”.

4. Spend time setting up templates and custom macros

This can be a major time-saver. Pretty much every DAW allows some form of templates which you can save and load up for each project. This means you can have all the tracks you always start off with ready to go.

If you think about it, every time you start a blank project, you tend to do the same things, whether it be setting up the tracks and sends/receives, or having to add instruments manually.

READ MORE: How to make a super easy podcast editing template in REAPER

If, for instance, you always use Serum in your productions, why not create a default template with five or six instances already loaded, as well as tracks for drums and sidechain routing already dialled in?

Another thing to get on top of is custom macros. Different DAWs do it differently. In Ableton , for example, you can group effects into a rack which has eight assignable controls. In Reaper, you can save your FX into chains.

Remember most of your mixing will start with the same steps. Perhaps you have a high-pass filter above 20Hz then an EQ, then a compressor. You can (in most DAWs) set this up so it loads by default on every new track.

You could also see if your DAW lets you save custom tracks for different instruments. That way you could load up a vocal track with all the effects you need already in it.

Going further, if you use the same singer or instrument regularly, you could even save the same mixing setting within the rack so you don’t even have to mix it from scratch each time.

This can work great with albums, where you want the drums or the singer to sound the same each time.

5. Share your projects and learn from others

Another great trick is one that can be quite tricky. If you can find some friends who use the same DAW as you and share your tracks for them to play with. Not only does this generate endless remix potential, but you also get to see how other people use their DAW.

This is a really enlightening process as you see them achieve the same goals in different ways. It can also highlight some cool tricks which you never knew and gives you plenty of things to chat about.

Collaborating on tracks is another way to achieve this, one idea might be to each start a song and get halfway through then swap projects.

If you don’t have access to projects, there are plenty of templates online which you can use to practice mixing and tweaking, all the while, learning from someone else’s workflow.