KVR Audio

bluedad · Post by **bluedad** » Wed Mar 13, 2013 11:56 pm

Started on a 286 mid 80's, had to upgrade it from 16k to 32k, which was not cheap. Ran voyetra sequencer plus with a roland mpu interface. Yeah, dos sequencing
Was fun.
School and gigging tookmup the 90's, memory is a bit fuzzy but dabbled with acid, fruity loops orion, before settling down with cubase.

camsr · Post by **camsr** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 12:18 am

I started with FL studio in high school and been using it ever since. I know it like the back of my hand. Had a Soundblaster Live 24-bit board and ran it out via RCA to a Sony multi-media home system with a built in spectrum meter. The Sony came with small 3-way speakers with 6 inch ported woofers. Believe me when I say all this stuff was dirt cheap, yet surprisingly good quality for digital. Later I upgraded with a Sony A/V receiver and sealed two way speakers and sub, being fed digitally by the soundblaster. The DAC sounded a lot nicer that the SB so I stuck with it.

zerocrossing · Post by **zerocrossing** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 12:51 am

I think my first "DAW" was Metro (MIDI sequencing only at that time) which synced to Deck a multi-track audio recording app. If you go on my website a lot of the music that's there was recorded this way using a cheap Korg audio card. At some point I scored a copy of Studio Vision because we got a NFR copy at the music store I worked in and we had no Mac to run it. I actually used to schedule appointments to demo it from my home. Good times... At some point my Korg card stopped working and that's when I went MOTU. I'm only just selling that old 828, but I still use Digital Performer from time to time.

seismic1 · Post by **seismic1** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 1:33 am

1984 - BBC Model B + Music 500 synthesizer

Became a Tax Exile

2009-2013 - EnergyXT

Filthy Habit

Phase47 · Post by **Phase47** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 1:58 am

Started on an Apple ][e. Still with Apple.

ontol · Post by **ontol** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:32 am

debra1rlo · Post by **debra1rlo** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:35 am

Phase47 wrote:Started on an Apple ][e.

I'm sure you could have got a much cheaper but comparable PC for half of what you paid for that back then. You probably bought it because it was sexy and you are a fanboi.

camsr · Post by **camsr** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:39 am

cron, nice work, I really like the outro on that track and the rhythmics.

I like to avoid limiters as much as possible, and hearing an unmastered track is always refreshing!

havran · Post by **havran** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 2:47 am

hmm, about ten years ago this month I thought there must be something like Photoshop for music that could let one paint notes in, and so I looked for software that could do that ...

ntom · Post by **ntom** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:03 am

my first REAL introduction to computer music (although I didn't realize I was scratching the surface of the daw) was using the premade loops that came with Mixcraft 4. I had no idea it was a DAW and had MIDI capability. I didn't know it had VSTs - hell, I didn't know what MIDI or VST was!
Some of the tracks, I will admit, although using premade loops entirely, I still think were kind of impressive because I would cut the loops on instruments to make them play different melodies than originally intended. I really got down and dirty with those loops.

-I'll be more than happy to share them if anyone is interested, I just don't want to go plugging myself unnecessarily, since the songs would be as impressive as cron's

Eventually I discovered MIDI - although I didn't know that's what it was called - on Mixcraft 5, and about 3 months later, I joined KVR (October of 2010)

MaxSynths · Post by **MaxSynths** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:58 pm

For me it all began when I was 12 years old. I sold my Sega Master System console to buy the new Amiga 600 computer: the aim was to became an avid game player

My career as a gamer abruptly stopped (almost soon) when I started to look inside the floppy disks with the aim to discover what a video game is made of.
I've started by analyzing the MOD files, the source of that beautiful music and sound effects... My reverse engineering attempt stopped there

It took me some time to figure out that in order to read and write those files I needed a software called Protracker

I bought a hardware digitizer and got a copy of it bundled with it:

Some time later I've decided to try something different and bought an obscure software called "Musical Enlightenment". I have still to understand how it works...

In the following picture there are the original disks of OctaMED v.5!
(I still remember the day I bought it... I went at the office of the italian dealer and paid for the software with a hoard of coins

)

This has been a big leap: 8 tracks for samples (insted of the 4 offered by Protracker) + MIDI support. I bought a serial MIDI interface for my Amiga and a 2nd hand Yamaha TG-100 module. In those years I had a lot of fun combining samples + MIDI tracks (everything was bounced down on common cassetes

).

Later OctaMED v.6 was released for free with the Amiga Format magazine and some time later again they offered a free version of its successor: SoundStudio.

Then someone gave me an used 486 PC which became a digital recorder (with Cool Edit). The move from the Amiga to the PC has been very slowly for me... For some time I used both Cakewalk and the Amiga to compose music (I used a little software to convert the MED files in midi format called MidIt! by Mario Bianchi which I've found a ton of years later here on KVR

).

Then Steinberg developed the VST technology, I became a VST addicted like everybody else in this site, and to keep track of all the things downloaded, installed, played, used and abused has become impossible!

Thanks for this thread, it's always a pleasure for me to remember the early days

foosnark · Post by **foosnark** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 4:15 pm

Commodore 64. I don't recall the names of any of the software I used, except for Music Construction Set, but there were a few. No trackers really, but there was a cool grid-based sequencer with some crazy sync sounds. I'd love to mess with that today.

After that, nothing until a crazy combination of Sound Forge, Acid, soundfonts, and secondhand MIDI-controlled outboard stuff. That was a pain in the ass and I gave up on it. Then a few years later my brother showed me FruityLoops and ruined my life

Quietinthedark · Post by **Quietinthedark** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 4:27 pm

some kind of gray atari in the early 90s. Sequencing but mostly was recording to tape still.

Desktop with a Terratec EWS88MT around 2001 or 2. First 24 bit device I had that made me drop tape. Still hadn't dropped most outboard rack stuff.

Samplitude at first. Later Reaper.

All the while collecting VSTs which have been more important than any DAW (which had to be wrapped in early Samplitude

iirc)

deastman · Post by **deastman** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 4:37 pm

My first computer music was on an Apple II computer with Music Construction Set and a Mockingboard .

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 6:20 pm

A housemate bought the original beige '128k' MacIntosh in I think 1985. I worked with a notation program and ported midi out from the serial port to a DX7, later an Ensoniq Mirage, and a Yamaha drum machine that was mine. Recording that onto a Teac 4-track cassette recorder.

In 2003 I bought a Pentium 4 box. At first I tried to get something going with a Roland module and Cubase SX1 but resorted to Kontakt {1} in favor of that experience. I bought Gigastudio but never had enough machine to run it really. Then Absynth was a revelation. By late 2005 I was getting familiar enough with Cubase's piano roll to be actually realizing some ideas.

What is your computer music history?