Blockhead DAW by Colugo

Lounge
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Hello all! I thought I’d mention this upcoming experimental daw to this forum. If you have not heard of this or seen any beta videos, I think this daw appears to be a game changer in the playing in vcv → finishing projects workflow. All in all super worth checking out.

here are some key features for me and vcv:

It abandons the concepts of a traditional daw in favor of a more flexible understanding of organizing sounds.

upon opening a project, the user can choose to have a global clock, or not, or multiple that overlap.

it treats plugins and effect as “baked” instantial and momentary effects per audio lane, instead of simulating every playback, allowing low CPU use. From all I’ve seen the daw will be a very light CPU whise.

the daw has a rolling buffer, where you could record audio from a source, and chop it, and drop it into the daw.

all this to say, my and probably others annoyances with the workflow of making a patch, matching tempo sync, using two programs at the same time (vcv and daw) and still staying creative and moving projects along in a workflow that doesn’t drain the energy and speed of making things could be a thing of the past. ( I can imagine this beautiful world where you could perform the patch in pieces, then bounce the audio out of a good take, building a song part by part. All on one computer.)

the daw seems a useful and experimental thought exercise to many others who follow along with the creation of the daw, but for me and other vcv users, I think some of its core features seem like they could change everything about the way we use vcv and daws. I know it will for me.

I thought I’d mention it, and share the stoke.

cheers!

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wasn’t that a popular thing like 20 or 30 years ago?

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thanks for posting it here, I’ve never heard about it.
the “live always recording to istant audio slice” feature is worth givin it a try, I think it could be very helpful to me sometimes. I am curious to what I will be able to get out of its concept of “time”.
let’s see where it will be in few months, I hope by the end of october to put my mouse on it :+1:

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here’s an explanation video from the creator:

and here’s another one (by someone else):

… and now I’m asking myself: What can I do with this DAW that I can’t do with e.g. Bitwig Studio? Maybe some results are easier to achieve for the cost of being unable to do classic DAW tasks (like MIDI note editing, proper timestretch/pitchshift, sidechaining and so on) :thinking: From my perspective, this should not be called a DAW because it’s primarily some kind of loop recoder and sample warping device with an FX section.

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midi will be coming!

fwiw, potentially the workflow from vcv to daw could feel more immediate, therefore more intuitive. i hope this will move more projects along for me. i get lost in some slog of

  1. getting the idea from vcv to daw (multitrack recording is its own process…)

  2. syncing daw stuff to vcv stuff (i find the pro vst version lacking some core functionality FOR ME, in the way of clock sync, start and stop finickyness, etc)

  3. limitation on cpu with a typical daw means tough to use both programs at same time.

i guess as always ymmv, but its a wild take on a daw! thought it could be useful for some in this community.

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I wasnt around 20-30 years ago, but id guess the implementation is far more novel.

This time around you keep the flexibility of automation on parameters :slight_smile:

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Yes, DAW-integration lacks exact syncing and timing. Maybe the Cardinal VST does a better job here (Cardinal comes with a dedicated Host Time module).

Do you run VCV and Blockhead at the same time and record live from one into the other or do you save audio to files for transferring music/sound/noise between VCV and Blockhead?

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Using a loopback audio source as the buffer audio source you could run both and play vcv while blockhead ambiently records in background theoretically.

then you could pull a tempo from the recording using tempo guide. (instead of choosing tempo in daw) pretty cool

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