Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
At some point you might want to record some of the music you have been playing. Of course you can hold your phone next to your guitar and record, and at times you don't need more than that. But what if you want to do a bit more, actually record a full song, or multiple layers of instruments. That's when DAW's come into play.
What are some of your favorites? What are the ones that in specific cases do a thing really good, but in other scenarios not so much.
As a person who mostly plays live, and has zero interest in composition, special effects, or editing, recording layers into GarageBand to play with myself and/or importing stuff from friends so they can play with me from faraway is good enough for me!
I use Ableton Live for making mashups of existing stuff though, the Warp function is super helpful.
I'd usually butt out of this to let the people who do more than just play around in DAWs talk, but the Fediverse could use engagement and it's still technically on-topic because I talked about my favorite DAW :P
We all use it for different things! For live playing I used Ableton with a midi controller to trigger a simple sample once. Normally we don't do those, so it was thrown together with what i had lying around.
Garageband is awesome to just do that stuff! This topic is not about bashing DAW's, but sharing the cool stuff, and why, and how you use it.
I feel like I'm missing the word for "plays live without a DAW", what do I call that? Usually the highest-tech thing in the setup is a microphone. (Or maybe the keyboard itself, but mostly I just leave it on the default piano sound and treat it like a piano that just so happens to plug in and doesn't require a moving team to handle.) I may have half-assumed people would infer that when I said "play live" even though that is factually incorrect because I know live play often involves the kind of thing you mentioned, using computers and controllers to trigger or change sounds. (Disclaimer: not a snob saying doing it that way is less valid. I am aware it requires a musical skill set to sound good and a technical skill set to make it work! It's just also not what I do and I want to know how to better talk about it.)
Do you play live with mostly acoustic instruments, or is it analogue synths / sequencers? Because then you don't need a DAW. Easiest way to describe it is with the artist LOOK MOM NO COMPUTER. Not sure if you can use that as a verb though. 😁