Ah yes, the free lunch that so many people are always on the lookout for. We hunt for these things almost daily. Sadly, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has a price. That is true in everything including music production.
Now I know what a lot of people are going to say. There are plenty of free tools to use for music production. There are even free DAWs. Yes, this is true. There are plenty of free tools. I myself have written about a few of these and even use them.
But these free tools come at a price. No, the price may not be money, but a price just the same.
Let’s take the free DAWs. Have you noticed something about them? You probably wouldn’t if you hadn’t paid for something like Cubase or Logic. So I’ll tell you what it is.
They’re limited in what they can do. I’m not saying they’re worthless or that they can’t do what you need them to do at the time, but they’re still limited. If you ever reach a point where you need them to do more than what they’re capable of doing, you’re out of luck. That point in time is more likely to happen with a free tool than with a paid tool. Sure, even paid for DAWs can have limitations and may not be able to do something you want it to do. But the chance of that happening is a lot greater with the free tool. So you do sacrifice something. That is a cost.
No? Don’t think so? Let me ask you this question. You’re working on a project for a client in your free DAW. You reach a point where you need your DAW to do something that most paid DAWs can do inside of a minute but yours can’t do easily. You need to jump through a whole lot of hoops to get this one thing to work and those hoops take hours to setup.
Isn’t your time worth something?
This is where we get to the age old argument that people make that essentially reads like this.
“My time is my time. It’s for me to do with as I please. Therefor there is no cost to it.”
So you’d rather be spending hours doing something in your free DAW that could have been done in a minute with something like Cubase or Logic than, oh, I don’t know, maybe working on another project to make even more money or, for that matter, doing something for fun?
If the answer to that is yes, then God bless you. You’ve found the free lunch you’re looking for.
Me? I don’t want to spend anymore time doing a task than I have to. I love creating music. I can do it all day long. But I don’t want to spend hours doing a task in creating that music with a free tool that could have been done in a minute had I had something like Cubase or Logic.
I’ll give you something really simple that would annoy the heck out of me if I didn’t have this functionality and had to go to another piece of software to do it.
Multiple file formats. Imagine your DAW only allowed you to create wav files but you wanted to make MP3s. You’d have to find a wav to MP3 converter. And assuming you don’t want to pay for that either, you’d have to find a free one. Oh, they exist. There are plenty online. That means going to a web site to begin with. More time wasted. Then you have to upload the wav file. More time wasted. Then you have to click the convert button and then you have to download the converted file.
All this when all you had to do with your paid DAW was choose the export to MP3 option.
That would drive me crazy and not worth my time.
And this doesn’t just apply to DAWs.
You think you’re free synths are so great? Hey don’t get me wrong. Some of them sound very good. I love my Synth1…for certain things. But it’s not a Swiss army knife. It can’t do everything. For one thing, it does have limited polyphony. It has limited waveforms that you can work with. It only has one ADSR for the filter and one for the amp and only one of each of those. It only has 2 oscillators and only a few effects.
If you think you’re going to get the sound out of that, that you can get out of something like Omnisphere, Zebra 2 or Massive, forget it. You can’t. Will it be good enough for what you’re doing at the time? Maybe. But it’s not going to replace the best synths on the market. It’s not meant to.
What about orchestral sounds? I won’t even try to pass off the free orchestral samples as realistic or anywhere near as good as something like EWQL or Vienna. Anybody who even tries to make a case for the free stuff over these is nuts.
Are the free samples good enough for cheesy pop tunes where you don’t really need real sounding strings? I guess. After all, we dealt with that stuff back in the day when that was all we had. But if you’re trying to create a symphony that sounds realistic, forget it. You’re fighting a losing battle.
Free DSPs? Some of them are quite good. But if you need a really professional sound they’re not going to cut it. Of course if you need a really professional sound your free DAW isn’t going to cut it anyway.
Point is, everything has a price. What you trade for your free lunch is quality and/or flexibility. You’re not going to get both. Not for free. I have learned this the hard way over the years when I always tried to take the free way out. It only gets you so far.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Not really.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim