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What was your first computer software DAW?


Mark L

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Cakewalk vs. 1. I still have the disks. Since then I have purchased about every other update through the current version of Sonar along with all of their virtual instruments and most of their sample/patch collections. Guess I am a "funding" member of Cakewalk. :smiley-rotfl:

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Music Composer, it was the sequencer for the Yamaha CX-5M music computer.

Had different harware modules, all software were on ROM cartridges.

The module I had was a 4 operator FM synth similar to a FB-01.

Cassette tapes for storage! later added the 45 MB hard drive, bleeding edge at the time.

MSX was a Microsoft OS for 64k machines, all of Japan's electromic manufactorers made them.

The OS was catching on in Japan, until MS stopped development to concentrate on desktop PCs.

Picked it up in Japan while in the Air Force Band.

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I went through the MIDI sequencer phase, but my first real audio recording and editing workstation was a Turtle Beach 56K that my dealer loaned me to try to get me to buy one. I decided that I wasn't ready for it when I figured out that it would cost me $2,500 just for a 650 MB hard drive so I'd be able to work with a full CD's worth of material.

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I think I started with one of the early Cakewalks,  too...    I dunno,  I've always liked their layout/interfaces...

 

Marky,   I just think you'd have a helluva lotta fun on a DAW.    Yes,  they can seem daunting at first,   and they positively require you to understand pitches as Frequencies,   and require you to understand a little sump'm about the overtone series,  and sump'm about modern digital audio qualities  (like bitrates and audio formats).     But it's like the proverbial bicycle:    Once you have a couple of big "Aha!" moments,    you'll never look back,  and wonder how there ever could've been a time when you couldn't do it.  

 

Perhaps DAWs are like reading music:   You don't strictly need it to make music,   but you're helluva lot on sturdier footing if you DO know how to do it,    and ignorance of it-- nowadays--   is not quite something to be proud about.

 

It might be comforting to know that many features within your chosen DAW you may never,  ever use...   There IS such a thing as "bloatware",  and you'll find yourself returning,  again and again,  to the same commands in your DAW workflow.

 

DAWs enable you to step away,  creatively speaking,   from the idea that a recording is simply a facsimile of what the ear heard during a live acoustic performance;    you'll twig onto the George Martin/Sgt Pepper idea that a pop song can be a weird 'n' wild collage of sounds that the human ear will never hear produced by "nature".    You can make anything.......   sound like.....  anything. (It's almost criminal the freedom you have).

 

The world of DAWs becomes easy and intuitive the moment you appreciate that the human ear can hear only four basic things,    and every time you make a change,  tweak a knob,  alter a curve,  push a button,   you are invariably changing one or more of those FOUR basic auditory qualities:   Pitch (aka,  Frequency),   Loudness (aka,  Amplitude),    Timbre  (aka,  unique tone quality,  as described by the overtone series),   and Directionality   (aka.  the stereo field...   where,  in space,   your sound is coming from,   or appears to be coming from).     Those four things...   are the only four things you're basically altering with any action you execute within a DAW,  no matter how fancy is the plugin or algorithm that's doing it.      Print out this little chart and memorize those four basic ideas.

 

4 qualities of sound.jpg

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My first software editor was FastEddie.  All it did was edit, but it was really, well, FAST at it.

At work, the noise researchers used something called Cool Edit.  It lived up to its "cool"name also and did a heck of a lot more than edit (synthesized brain waves, anyone?).  I wasn't a noise researcher then (we had an entire floor of them) but from my live sound (music) background I was pretty excited by their toys so I volunteered for their crew and started going out on their missions.

Their missions were pretty exciting.  Dragging an instrumented trailer down the road at 60 mph while other crew members man microphones and recorders at the roadside as the trailer passes, lying under trailers and vans and wiring / troubleshooting stuff, etc was exciting and challenging.  Did I mention this was all in the wee hours of the morning, pitch black (when the traffic is lowest)?  Did I mention it involved gunfire (the original sync marker for multiple recorders)?   Did I mention that we did aiport pavements too, with 747s landing over our heads?  They don't close the airport for anyone, and they DO take your guns away - even starter pistols.

As with all research, the money eventually dried up and the researchers blew to the four winds of the earth.  Because I was not a noise researcher, I was the last man standing and inherited all the gear and software.  When the cycle came back around, and noise was important again, I was our Center's obvious choice to lead the new program.

And that, dear reader, is why I use Adobe Audition to this day.  Because Adobe bought Cool Edit (and pretty much ruined it) but it was free to me to use for my own purposes as well as at work.  And you get pretty fast with an interface when you're shooting down an urban freeway with a $100,000 instrumented vehicle, trying to get three clean runs over a section at exactly 60mph with no cars on either side of you messing up the measurement.  You keep doing making circles and doing it until you get the data cleanly, and you can't go home until you do.

That's a lot of practice with Adobe Audition.  It might not be the best, but I can work it in my sleep now - and often did.

Intensity Probe

Terry D.

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MasterTracks Pro 4.* But it wasn't really a DAW, just a sequencer with some extensions. Some of my longtime music sequency pals (both Mac users) recommended it. Then when I got it, they said, Oh, you should have got Cubase! I didn't say anything. (And, actually, I'm glad I didn't; Cubase became a very good DAW but early versions of it that I used struck me very poorly.)

I used MTP4 to sync MIDI to my ADATs (actually vice versa) via a BRC.

In late '96, I bought Cakewalk Pro Audio 6, which was a full DAW (because MTP didn't even announce they would be building audio capababilities into the sequencer until after I'd been runnig CWP6 for a while and I don't know if they EVER fielded a product... the company just seemed to disappear). Anyhow, for a number of years I used my ADATs as i/o conversion (until they both died about 6 months apart).

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Ras, various people on here have pointed me in the direction of trial-versions of various DAWs, and to them I am very grateful

But apart from not really understanding the basics and indeed the 'language' of DAWs, I have another problem. My loft is not a pleasant place to be. In summer it's too hot and in winter it's too cold, and it's not soundproofed. I can't afford to remedy these things. And I'm hemmed in on both sides by neighbours, so recording vocals is always a bit embarrassing

If I lived in a house where I had a room set aside for my music, which was not connected to a neighbour's house, and which was soundproofed so that my wife couldn't hear me sing, I'd definitely invest in a DAW. If I lived in such a house, I could afford to invest in a DAW. I'm very short of cash, mate. My job doesn't pay well

Hey, this is not a begging post. I'm just telling you how things are with me :)

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rasputin1963 wrote:

 

 

Marky,   I just think you'd have a helluva lotta fun on a DAW.    Yes,  they can seem daunting at first,   and they positively require you to understand pitches as Frequencies,   and require you to understand a little sump'm about the overtone series,  and sump'm about modern digital audio qualities  (like bitrates and audio formats).     But it's like the proverbial bicycle:    Once you have a couple of big "Aha!" moments,    you'll never look back,  and wonder how there ever could've been a time when you couldn't do it.  

 

 

 

I've been having those "Aha!" moments with DAWs for years, and it's always: "Aha! That's their work-around for . . . .  "  There's just no substitute for two important things:

  • Good music, well exectuted and recorrded so it doesn't have to be rescued
  • All the easy-to-use, limited so you won't waste too much time fooling with it hardware that I've accumulated over the years.

I'll concede that someone starting out in recording in the last five, or maybe even ten years will pretty much have to start with either a computer-based DAW or a hardware recorder/mixer like Mark uses. When you don't know what you're missing, it's hard to justify a real mixer, real signal processors, and a real recorder (even if it's digital).

 

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In 1989 I purchased my first DAW, Digidesign's Soundtools... the two track predecessor of Pro Tools. It ran on a Mac FX platform and I used it to edit stereo DAT tapes of live concerts recorded on a Panasonic SV-255 and earlier digital audio recordings of live concerts made with the original Sony PCM-F1 paired with a videotape deck... the PCM-F1 was purchased on a concert tour of Japan in 1984. Since then I've used SoundForge, Cool Edit Pro, various Cakewalk programs including Sonar, several freeware DAWs developed in Europe, Soundbooth, Audition, and finally StudioOne Pro from Presonus... my current DAW of choice. In almost 25 years of computer based editing, I have learned one consistent lesson... garbage in - garbage out. Just sayin'.

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Mine was Dr.T's KCS on the Atari ST. :smileyhappy: Way back in the late 80's...

 

Scott

 

--

Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com - SONAR X2 Power! - http://garrigus.com/?SonarX2Power

* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks

* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor

* Publisher of the DigiFreq free music technology newsletter: http://digifreq.com/?DigiFreq

* Publisher of the NewTechReview free consumer technology newsletter: http://newtechreview.com/?NewTechReview

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In the early 90's we started using MTU's Microsound. It was a broadcast-quality DAW that we uses to produce segments that were eventually played back over the phone. At $5K + PC it was a pretty heavy purchase back then. These days it's Audition & Sonar...

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I guess the first was essentially a sequencing program that I think was called Sonus Sequencer. It came with a MIDI interface I bought for my Commodore 64. I'd record MIDI tracks, then use a interface that striped a track on my four track Tascam. Then I'd have three live tracks to record guitars etc on. Then I'd get the whole rig running to mix it all down. Kinda miss the whole mess of cables and the dancing I had to do to get it all up and running together. I remember having two keyboards, a Yamaha FB-01, a Roland 505 drum machine, two guitar tracks on a reel-to-reel, a bass track, another guitar track and a vocal track on the Tascam 4 track along with a stripe track...cranking the whole mouse trap up and flying in a backing vocal track while shaking some maracas all at once, all of it going into a Yamaha mixer and outputting the whole thing to a Nakamichi 2 track cassette....Those were fun days. 

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I've just been watching something on Youtube, featuring the 1988 version of Craig Anderton

He was talking about music notation software and stuff like that. It was quite interesting to hear what he was using in those far-off days :smiley-music022:

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I started with C-Lab Creator which was the little brother of Notator (without notation features). Unlike Cubase it didn't have bars to indicate the recorded midi tracks and a song had to be recorded in blocks (verse/pre-hook/chorus). Audio had to be recorded on a traditional tape machine and synched with the midi data via SMPTE. I remember being completely blown away when sequencers emerged that could record audio directly onto the hard drive. Those where the days...

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WEW!!! Voyetra Sequencer Gold. Still have the V24 and the V22 midi interfaces but no ISA slots to put it in hahaha. We used it on a 133 ATX machine with 2mb ram, and 40mb hard drive and the very "new" 14" paper white monitors. We had it synced on a tascam 4 track cassette at home to make demos and synced it to the sony 24 track 2 inchers via smpte in the studio. Those were fun days. I still have the roland S-50 sampler we used as the trigger (the single side floppy diskette doesn't work anymore) but we used a korg M1R, a roland R8, a proteus module (can't remember which one though) and a newer Ensoniq module (Don't remember that one too).

 

 

I have to add something to a post by Rasputin

 

The world of DAWs becomes easy and intuitive the moment you appreciate that the human ear can hear only four basic things,    and every time you make a change,  tweak a knob,  alter a curve,  push a button,   you are invariably changing one or more of those FOUR basic auditory qualities:   Pitch (aka,  Frequency),   Loudness (aka,  Amplitude),    Timbre  (aka,  unique tone quality,  as described by the overtone series),   and Directionality   (aka.  the stereo field...   where,  in space,   your sound is coming from,   or appears to be coming from).     Those four things...   are the only four things you're basically altering with any action you execute within a DAW,  no matter how fancy is the plugin or algorithm that's doing it.      Print out this little chart and memorize those four basic ideas.

 

4 qualities of sound.jpg

 

The four important elements of sound are:

1. Pitch

2. Loudness / Dynamics

3. Tone quality / timbre

4. Time / duration

 

Directionality although a practical way of describing the perception is incomplete.

It has to be explained that the 4th element is TIME. Directionality is a product of time. In a stereo field our ears percieve the differences in the TIME it takes for  sound to reach them and our brains unconsciously sums it up to distinguish depth of field just as our eyes do. It is a basic form of triangulation. Our ears and brain percieve space as a product of time.To complete things, the 4th element also has to do with how long a tone is sounded. 

In this way all types of effects that we use in the studio can be catergorized into the 4 elements or a combination of those 4 elements.

Equalizers - tone / timbre

Compressors  - loudness / dynamics

Pitch - formants / chorus / flanging etc.

Time - reverb/ echo/ sustains/  AND directionality

 

:smiley-bounce005:

 

 

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My early memories of computer based MIDI seem to be using a program called "Drummer" on an old amber chrome monitor. It was designed for drum programming but I used it for all sort so MIDI based composition.

 

I am pretty sure my first work recording/manipulating audio on a computer was Sound Tools.

 

The first work on what what we now think of as a DAW was the great Studio Vision from Opcode which Gibson bought and sadly killed:smiley-angry019:

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