The Craft of Contemporary Commercial Music

Chapter 6

Manipulating Rhythm in the DAW Environment

This chapter introduces you to the ways in which music and MIDI are represented and manipulated in a DAW with a specific emphasis on rhythm. In Chapter 2, you were first familiarized with a passage from “The Black Pearl.” Here, we return to that score to demonstrate how a musical idea can be manifested in a DAW environment, while also exploring common functions found in all DAWs. It is important to note that inputting notes from an already completed score is only one way to create music in a DAW. In fact, for many composers, it is more typical to begin composing ideas directly into a DAW, bypassing notation software or pencil and paper altogether. Regardless of the phase within the compositional ...