This is the Roland TR-707 drum machine, an example of hardware used by Daft Punk while producing their debut album (Roland)

Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs encompass a wide variety of musical machines and tools that are used in production.  We will specifically focus on synthesizers, drum machines, and arrangement software, and their role in the production of electronic dance music.  To begin, it is important to realize the vast impact that these machines had on the culture of music production.  Synthesizers allowed musicians to produce an incredible amount of different sounds through the use of a single machine.  Furthermore, synthesizers, by the 1990s, had advanced far enough to be able to replicate the sound of acoustic instruments almost perfectly.  This means that for an artist, they have an incredible amount of material to work with, and can do so with little to no studio space.  To complement this, the use of drum machines allowed for an artist to create a looping pattern that lays down the background of a track.  An artist can toy with the pattern of such drum machines, producing a variety of different rhythms very quickly.  However, the piece of equipment that ties this all together is the DAW.  Such software allows an artist to record, arrange, and mix all of the sounds that they just created.  The more impressive feature however, is that a Digital Audio Workstations allows one to do so on a personal computer. The DAW Pro Tools, and its predecessor Sound Tools, paved the way for Daft Punk and other artists to arrange electronic music, by using analog machines to produce tracks that were ultimately arranged on computers (Mixdown Magazine, 2021).  This ultimately leads to a shift in the culture of music production, as now a studio is not needed for an artist to produce high quality music.  This factor leads to the possibility of small creative groups to become massively popular with a start in a bedroom, which is just what we hear with the duo Daft Punk.

Pictured above is a Roland MC-202, an analog synthesizer and sequencer. Daft Punk used this analog device as input for Pro Tools, among other pieces of hardware (Vintage Synth Explorer).