Regardless of whether you’re a budding beatmaker, hip-hop producer, singer-songwriter or something totally different, owning and knowing your way around a DAW is crucial to your success as an artist. On a fundamental level, a DAW, or digital audio workstation, is a program that lets you record, arrange and edit audio tracks, as well as capture MIDI data and utilise sample libraries to create fully fleshed out songs to send off to be mixed. In today’s musical landscape, there’s no tool quite as vital to your livelihood as a musician than that of a DAW. Words by Will Brewster A breakdown of all the top entry-level DAWs available today.