Your First Sight Of A Sequencer / DAW

[classic]

I had an old atari computer and on of the first Cubase versions.
I was so happy, that a friend of mine gave it to me, because he did not use it.
I got it connected to my T1 keyboard and..........I had no clue what to do......until today
After that I bought a tapedeck, something like this.
I could record on both sides of a normal tape, that we used to listen to our music in a walkman that time.
Funny times

[Bombadil]

A friend of mine was running Cubase on a Mac, mid-90's. Only saw it for a minute. My first hands-on was midi only Cubasis for Mac, circa 1998. It was buggy as hell. Had to write in the program changes for it to remember which patch from a JV-1010 to play.

[jens]

ca. 1991 or '92, I think - it was Steinberg 24, which I used on my newly obtained Atari ST (that I got for that exact purpose) - I switched over to Notator Alpha soon after (I still have the box to this day - it's sitting in the bookshelf in our living room)

[jancivil]

a sequencer, not a DAW:

early 1986

I was able to install a copy I bummed off of Leuenberger on a ca '02 or '03 Power PC Mac running 10.2, somehow.
I'm fuzzy as to exactly what I was thinking.

[Danno]

Similar to mine.. a buddy had Cakewalk running in DOS.. but with an MT-32. I tried multitracking something because I vaguely understood this was the whole point of sequencing, but I never figured out that the different parts needed to be on different midi channels.
So we played Quest For Glory instead. It sounded amazing compared to my Apple ][.

Mine was seeing a friend's set up usiñg Cakewalk by Twelve Tone on a DOS OS controlling a Korg O1/w. It was playing a midi file for Billie Jean. 1986

[BONES]

I had a free, cut-down copy of Cakewalk in the late 90s. It must have come bundled with some hardware instrument or other I'd bought, but I honestly can't remember how I got hold of it. All I remember is that it couldn't make sound on it's own (pre-VSTi) and I had no interest in hooking my hardware up to a computer so I went back to using the sequencer in my 01/W or Trinity (whichever I had at the time).

A couple of years later I bought a full license of Cubase VST (v3.7, I think) but I absolutely hated everything about it and ended up returning it to the shop I'd got it from. I didn't really get into a proper, full-blown DAW until Cubase 9.0 a couple of years ago, after almost 20 years with Orion. If Orion was still being actively supported, i.e. if someone was fixing problems with newer plugins and such, I'd still be using it quite happily. I can live with Cubase and Studio One but neither offers the extreme ease of use of Orion, r the mixer-centric workflow that I prefer.

[jancivil]

I had that Musicworks thing sending to a DX7, an Ensoniq Mirage, and a Yahama drum machine. Via a serial port off the beige 128k MacIntosh; there were no MIDI interfaces for a computer I don't think.

[FrettedSynth]

Alesis MMT8 in around 1988 running a crap kawai keyboard on board speakers, by 1989-90 moved up big in the world LOL Cakewalk DOS running on an 8088 and got my first rack synth Korg M3R still using the crappy Kawai keyboard as a controller. At least by 1991 I was able to get a good controller Roland A-30. They were some fun times that's for sure, everything was so new and exciting.

[Guenon]

In 1990, as a junior elementary school student, I explored the brand spanking new computer classroom at our school (which included an Adlib FM synthesis sound card and its software package installed on one of those MS-DOS machines), encouraged by a great music teacher who was also interested in this stuff and showed me how a piano roll works ... The software was Adlib Composer:



Fun fact, just met with him some days ago for a cup of coffee, also reminiscing this stuff, and I told him what a huge influence it all was for me down the road

[AnX]

Pro24 or something on Atari, them a few diff ones on Amiga

[cryophonik]

I don't actually recall for certain what the first DAW I saw was. I was using an old Korg multi-track digital hardware unit in the early 2000s, then started looking at different software DAWs. I recall seeing old versions of Cubase, Sonar, and Ableton early on. I bought one of the "lite" versions of Cubase at first, hated the way it worked with my many hardware synths I owned at the time, and then went with a basic Home Studio version of Sonar and upgraded to full version shortly thereafter. I also discovered Project5 a little after that and used both Sonar and P5 as my main DAWs for several years.

[legendCNCD]

All mentioned already

Saw C64 midi/internal seq in early 80's used, then Amiga and Atari ST sequencers, made music on some obscure PC stuff like AdLib Composer, early Logic, Notator + synths. On C64 there were already trackers and of course on Amiga, SoundFX/SoundTracker/...

Was on Amiga + OctamedPro/PT2.3 until 2000 I think, though I edited samples and processed mixes&masters on PC already. After that it was Reason 2.0 that catched me, combined later with Cubase (SX), moved to Cubase completely, and in 2007/2008 moved to Ableton Live completely and still on Live.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

In 1990, as a junior elementary school student, I explored the brand spanking new computer classroom at our school (which included an Adlib FM synthesis sound card and its software package installed on one of those MS-DOS machines), encouraged by a great music teacher who was also interested in this stuff and showed me how a piano roll works ... The software was Adlib Composer:



Fun fact, just met with him some days ago for a cup of coffee, also reminiscing this stuff, and I told him what a huge influence it all was for me down the road

Man ....great teachers are everything!!!

[Ploki]

i think i was 9

[bk]

Yamaha QX7 hardware sequencer. 1985. MIDI only. Two tracks. One for recording and editing. One for mixdown. Cumbersome, clunky editing. No such thing as unquantized. Cassette tape interface for saving songs. It took 30 to 60 seconds to load, and often failed to load.

I actually had the audacity to gig with this box. Since it wasn't used for every song, I had time to load the next one from cassette while playing another song. Jesus.