Old DAWs - nostalgia thread

[DollyNipples]

I'm still playing around with Tuareg 1.5 (Free & FAT), Tuareg 2, Tunafish, Moonfish, and Hammerhead. Nice little sampler programs. I don't like the portamento option in Tu2 as much as the 'rubber note' in Tuareg FAT. Also, I like the old sample generators like freeware Simsynth, Drumsynth, Subsynth, Subbastard, Stomper, and TS-404.

This is how I started as well. Bram bos was the man!

Oh yes! The Beatslicer, known as the 'Variator', was awesome! Make your own sliced beats and then use the gate mask on them if you wanted... then apply things like reverb and delay and make some magic! I've preserved the Tuareg Free, FAT, and Tu2, as well as Tunafish and pre-installed Moonfish, on the Internet Archive.

Master-Zap was the man too! He recently gave me his blessing to mirror his awesome drum-generator on the Internet Archive.

Also preserved other obscure wav sample generators like Simmolator, ER-0, and BoaBassdrum - all three of which I thought were lost for good until I found them lurking on several old CD-Rs. Basically uploaded most if not all the old wav sample generators/non-realtime softsynths I could get my hands on because I don't want those good old programs to die.

Also preserved TS-404 because it is a powerful little softsynth in a tiny, unassuming package. TS-404 was my poor-man's Rubberduck that I just didn't appreciate all that much as I didn't know how to utilize it properly - like, recording the riffs with my sound-recorder or Audacity, trimming them, and then using them in one of my DAWs. Like, seriously, if you have never used TS-404 before, you should download and try it out. No install, just open it up and start making some random riffs - the randomizer can really make some good ones, and you can turn off any notes you don't want to be played. Great for Acid House or Trance samples. Use Cakewalk or some other DAW, or even Audacity, to trim the loops to your liking. Just a great program with a few quirks and bugs, and some extremely powerful effects. I mean, you won't believe the sounds that can come out of that tiny program. (sorry for text wall - I just love old treasures like TS-404)

[ferez21]

I still remember Cubase 1 as being a better midi sequencer than any of its more recent incarnations, though there's no way I'd go back to using an Atari. You could make a cuppa, roll a spliff, drink 1 and smoke 2 before it had loaded up.

This pianoroll editor honestly looks like it has more features than most of today's DAWs' pianorolls

[jancivil]

cubase retains all of that with numerous significant advancements over years, tho. some of it is much more prominently displayed there, accordingly

[Reticular]

Cubase 1 and 2 load much quicker in Steem audio engine emulator on Pc

[Monsum]

I've just installed Cakewalk Project5 version 2 on Windows 10 64bit and so far it runs fine.
It still looks like a well-thought sequencer although missing some modern features.
Compulsory screenshots:

[rardier]

how did you learn your daw before internet?with teacher? vhs? books?

Nobody will care, but since we talked about nostalgia...

1999 i was a teenager, my cousin gave me a copy of cubase vst, i installed it, opened it, looked at it for 10 minutes and was wondering "what the f... i m supposed to do with this?" , i desinstalled it and started a football manager game...
2004 i had a basic sony cell phone with a strange funny app when you could put some midi pattern together and build a song, the result was always awful but i liked it.
2006 a new teammate came in my football/soccer team for a tournament, we got acquainted and he told me he made music with cubase and kindly said he could show me how to use it, i spend one week trying to write some lyrics , find melody and chords and i went to his home studio , he opened cubase sx , i beatboxed the beat then he record the same beat but with drum sample in halion, he played the guitar i had in mind and recorded my voice and i add some chords keys (from uvi vsti called plugsound)... during the whole process he showed me all the basics i need to know to record audio and midi...it was so good... like having sx for the first time...it changed a big part of my life

since that day i'm married with cubase, when crashs happen or workflow are not improved where i m waiting i think about divorce, i flirt with other daw...but cubase is the only daw i feel at home, even if, like my wife (the real one) i don t know everything about it and found it sometimes too complicate.

[osiris]

That screenshot of old Cubase is choice. If only IL would put an eraser icon in the Piano Roll of FL it would save a lot of clicking.

[Monsum]

how did you learn your daw before internet?with teacher? vhs? books?

It was mostly a trial and error method. There were also some magazines explaining the basics of sequencing.
And most importantly, lots of time spend on trying things out in a program and then recording the music onto a cassette or sharing the file via a floppy disk.

[syntonica]

how did you learn your daw before internet?with teacher? vhs? books?

I started with Dr. T's Tiger Cub. It was an incredibly painful buy at US$99, but, man, what a freaking fantastic sequencer it was. The key shortcuts were quick, easy and made total sense. I spent years getting over it and getting used to "modern" sequencers.

My first DAW was Logic 5 Silver, which i got over Cubase and DP. I don't like dongles and DP offered no demo, so Logic it was.

I was so pissed when v6 came out. With a frigging z dongle! Apple finally got rid of it, but it was too late--they had already ruined Logic.

[Raddler1]

how did you learn your daw before internet?with teacher? vhs? books?

I started with Dr. T's Tiger Cub. It was an incredibly painful buy at US$99, but, man, what a freaking fantastic sequencer it was. The key shortcuts were quick, easy and made total sense. I spent years getting over it and getting used to "modern" sequencers.

My first DAW was Logic 5 Silver, which i got over Cubase and DP. I don't like dongles and DP offered no demo, so Logic it was.

I was so pissed when v6 came out. With a frigging z dongle! Apple finally got rid of it, but it was too late--they had already ruined Logic.

When you say Apple ruined logic, what do you mean by that? (serious question).

What I noticed was that the sound changed when logic was ported to apple.

[syntonica]

how did you learn your daw before internet?with teacher? vhs? books?

I started with Dr. T's Tiger Cub. It was an incredibly painful buy at US$99, but, man, what a freaking fantastic sequencer it was. The key shortcuts were quick, easy and made total sense. I spent years getting over it and getting used to "modern" sequencers.

My first DAW was Logic 5 Silver, which i got over Cubase and DP. I don't like dongles and DP offered no demo, so Logic it was.

I was so pissed when v6 came out. With a frigging z dongle! Apple finally got rid of it, but it was too late--they had already ruined Logic.

When you say Apple ruined logic, what do you mean by that? (serious question).

What I noticed was that the sound changed when logic was ported to apple.

They slapped on a new coat of paint, changed a lot of the interface specifics, but I'm not convinced that they actually made any improvements under the hood. They may have fine tuned the audio engineer a bit, but it's still the the same. Try to use too much CPU, it stops and throw up an error window.

Aside from Alchemy, all the plugins have not really changed in almost 20 years. They were cutting edge when Emagic originally released them, but now they're just old and tired.

I bought Logic X so I could open up old projects. Unfortunately, they got destroyed and I no longer have them, so Logic is really if no use to me.

[beely]

Given the choice between using Logic as it is now, or Logic 7/8/9 Mac, or Logic 4, or 5 PC, or Logic 1 or 2 Atari ST, I would pick Logic now in a heartbeat.

And yes, for those of us following along, the changes, improvements (and in some cases, arguably regressions) have been too numerous to mention.

For someone who's been on the C-Lab/emagic/emApple train since the late 80s - and always intensely disliked Cubase - Logic has never been better.

(Doesn't mean it's perfect of course, like any DAW or longstanding app we have an intensive relationship with, especially professionaly, we all have our laundry list of things we'd like changed/improved/fixed/etc).

I still marvel at what we can do today so easily. For younger generations who grew up with powerful computers, the internet, infinite resources and free downloadable instruments, it's easy to take this stuff for granted - they've never had to struggle to make something decent with a Casio, a 70 quid drum machine and bouncing between two tape decks... which was my first DAW system - "Distorted Audio Workstation" for sure...

[kritikon]

We also used to have real manuals, which we used to actually read. I learnt most of how to use Cubase that way, and obvs lots of trials and errors. RTFM is a real thing, not a meaningless phrase. I know I can access manuals etc online but I still miss the proper books Cubase came with. Somehow, reading a page on a PC or laptop screen isn't as obvious to me as when reading it on paper. I dunno why, because nowadays my studio screen is way bigger than any manual I've ever had. Same way I don't like reading online books and it slows me down, whereas I can rip through a paperback book even with my old man eyesight.

I know I could print out a Cubase manual, but god knows how many printer ink replacements it would need...

[Weasel-Boy]

Those old Cubase Atari tool icons were adorable…particularly the two “kicker boots” to tweak note positions. Straight out of the Sunday funnies.

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[jancivil]

how did you learn your daw before internet?with teacher? vhs? books?

There was internet in 2003 when I bought a copy of Cubase SX1. But it was dialup and I didn’t do a lot. I borrowed a book on Cubase pre-SX from the library. Then, I printed out the entire damn manual from SX.
None of this meant much, I had to get in there and start to make things. I started off thinking RTFM but as it turns out I changed as a person to someone that doesn’t rely on it, that is unless something complex baffles me.