Recommended Digital Audio Workstations (DAW)

Pro Tools
Logic Pro
Ableton Live
Reason
SONAR
Digital Performer
Reaper
Cubase
Free DAW Options
Pro Tools First
Garage Band
Audacity
Studio One Free
Podium Free
OhmStudio
Ardour

While your artist identity refers to who you are as an artist, your artist vision is your aspirational
ideas or what you are trying to accomplish as an artist. It could be anything from trying to be the
greatest rock n roll band in the world to trying to preserve the traditional music of Ecuador by
infusing it with electronic elements and making it modern. It can be almost anything and you
should really think about what it is that you're trying to accomplish as an artist. If you can get it
down to one sentence, that's amazing and it can guide you throughout this entire process.
Now, you may have more than one vision: you may have a vision for your overall career and a
separate vision for the individual projects that you're going to be producing. The problem with
many albums, and certainly most first albums by artists, is that the artist is trying to cram too
much in. They are trying to show all of the breadth in one project. So if you're trying to say
everything that you have to say and demonstrate everything that you are in one project, if it's an
album project that you're working on, often this is incredibly unsatisfying.
One of the ways I get around this with artists is rather than just planning for one album, what I
encourage them to do is let's plan your next three albums. Let's plan your next three projects.
That way, if something doesn't really fit artistically with the other things, we can say "okay, that's
going to be for this next project." If you have three projects that you're thinking about at the same
time, you can wind up having a much more artistically satisfying project each and every time
where you're not just willy-nilly trying to cram in the songs you happened to have written or the
songs that you happened to have worked up at any given moment.

Again, great art has focus and this is hard. It's really hard to leave stuff out. It's easier just to say
"oh we'll do this and we'll do that, we'll keep it all in," but you have to make those hard decisions if
you actually want you art to hold together.
One really good example of this is the career of Miles Davis. Miles is one of the hippest guys on the
planet and he had a career vision of doing a lot of different kinds of music, of covering a lot of
ground. But each individual project was very focused. Think of "Kind of Blue" - very focused,
limited pallet of emotions. There was not one burnin' beebop tune, not one up tempo tune.
Everything was kind of this sensual personal stuff. Then, look at "Sketches of Spain." Again, the title
tells you exactly what you're in for - a very very focused project. Then there's "Bitches Brew," which
couldn't be more different from "Kind of Blue." It's all angular and angst-ridden and electronic and
avante garde, but again, there wasn't a ballad on "Bitches Brew." It wouldn't have fit. If there was
something from "Kind of Blue" or "Sketches of Spain" that showed up on "Bitches Brew" it
wouldn't have been as nearly as powerful an artistic statement.
So, having an artistic vision for your entire career is an excellent thing to do, and then having an
artistic vision that is focused for your individual projects is also very important.