Flashback: Digital Orchestrator (1996)

I remember a warm summer day in mid-1996 I purchased a Creative Sound Blaster sound card bundled with (wait, there's more) a CD-ROM drive and a new music sequencing software package: Digital Orchestrator, by Voyetra Turtle Beach. I would like to share with you my thoughts on this amazing software from back then, including my experience with it.
 
Here is the box cover and an assortment of terribly dated retro screen shots from the software:

 
Does this ring any bells to any of you? Even vintage, 90's 16-bit ones?
 
Now hold on to your hats, the minimum required specs would knock your socks off. To get this baby off the ground, you needed 8 MB of RAM and 10 MB of hard drive storage. Your processor speed had to be 66MHz, and it would help (greatly) if you had a mouse and a sound card. But the nice thing was that you could run this bad boy on Windows 3.1.
 
Okay, on a more serious note. Now, what was my first thought upon discovering this software? Well, music composition was a very unlikely would-be hobby of mine. I cannot read, write, or interpret music, let alone have I ever mastered an instrument. But somehow, DO immediately piqued my interest. So I blindly ventured into the software, taking my first ever step into music composition and learning as I went. I'm as much of a music composition newbie as there is...but I can tell you, I eventually developed some interesting melodies in my head that I was anxious to bring to life.
 
Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator, as you may/may not know, completely surrounds the General MIDI 1 patch set of 128 instruments, divided by eight categories. And oh, only one drum patch. But back then, it was the most innovative thing I've ever seen! I found it quite exciting, and not too difficult to learn. This project, from someone who was technically musically illiterate, was quite daunting but rewarding once the tracks were finished. My work was/is entirely done in the Piano Roll! So you can imagine the way I describe my work to everyone is as follows, "I draw lines and dots on the screen that represent notes. I do that thousands of times...and I have a song!"
 
So this was July of 1996. Over the course of the next several months, I composed over three dozen MIDI tracks. Somewhere down the line, I upgraded to Digital Orchestrator Plus or Digital Orchestrator Pro, but i don't remember which. Semantics shemantics. I mean, don't worry about it, really not relevant.
 
Along the way, I discovered my style, for the most part, encompassed much use of the piano, distortion/overdriven guitars, electric guitar, brass section and string ensemble. I composed every new tune that came into my head between rock, pop, classical, techno, ballad and rubbish. And I loved it! My stint in digital music composition lasted until 2003...and I finally became burned out. That's when I retired the project and moved on to other creative hobbies for the time being. But I will remember and thank Voyetra Turtle Beach for guiding me into the hobby of digital music composition (in which, shameful for me to say, I am still an amateur.)
 
That's where my story ends! So how many of you remember Digital Orchestrator? What did you think about it?
 
If you'd like to download a demo of Digital Orchestrator Pro -- well, you can find it all over the internets. It's only a demo, but I'm sure that if you Google search really quick, you can locate the developer and buy it before their offices shut down. Just go find it, do it! It's a lot of fun.
 
This has been my badly-written flashback to Digital Orchestrator. Please feel free to contribute and comments/observations/qualms! Thanks for reading.

I came from Bars & Pipes and Octamed on the Amiga to Orchestrator on the PC just after Win 95 came out.

I had used PC's much earlier but it was purely for work. Music was the Amiga. It's demise pushed me to the PC. The Mac was far too expensive and as work had given me familiarity with Windows, it seemed much easier.

Then I found Cakewalk Pro 7 and I've been with them ever since.

I could have been the author of this post! Only, I quit in 2001 and never found my way back to composing. Still have all the hardware left (keyboards, synth modules) and thought I would make a final attempt to compose something before I get rid of it all. Searched for DOP and found this post. I guess you all use Cakewalk now. Did not like it back then. I still seek the simplicity of DOP...

So, what tool should I be trying out if I want to focus on quick and effortless midi composing on Windows 10 with a feature set resembling that of DOP and not tons of bells and whistles. I particularly dislike tools like Garageband, without being able to put my finger on why. I need no crazy advanced arpeggiator, sound libraries, soft synths etc. But the user experience has to be top notch. No unpolished, mediocre, opensource stuff that will drive me crazy to set up with my hardware. Thanks

subtlearts
I love this post (OP). An example of music software doing something awesome that is *not* related to pro users or features: democratising music production, making tools available to 'newbies', hobbyists, etc. And I say that as a professional musician of long standing. I've never understood the elitism some of my colleagues seem to feel about tools aimed at non-professionals. So much great, creative music has been made by people who came to it through non-traditional channels, why would we want to discourage anything that brings more voices to the party, making more potential great music? Who knows where the next genius will come from, and what he or she will use to create great music? (Well, likely not Digital Orchestrator at this point, but you know what I mean...)

Eloquently stated.
 
 
Before discovering music software, all of my midi composing was captured on a Yamaha TQ5. Somebody shared some software with me - prompting me to beg my family to get me Cakewalk software for Christmas - Studio 8 I think it was. Seems like a gazillion upgrades ago!
 
Brian

I was very impressed with Waveform too, and was tempted to pick up a license just on principle because I feel like it's got so much potential and momentum. There are so many good options right now... But there a lot to like in Waveform for sure.

I think my first 'sequencer' was the memory function on a Casio PT-1... But that hardly counts, even though a friend and I had a ton of fun programming a pair of them to play the left and right hand parts of Bach Two-Part Inventions and trying to start then in sync... Then I went vintage before vintage was cool and played nothing but a Rhodes, a Moog Rogue and a CS80 for a few years. Then the was an Ensoniq SQ-80 which got me started on sequencing again. Finally a Kurzweil K2000 and an early version of Cubase...

Got my first sequencer in the mid-90's, and it was a hardware unit, Alesis MMT-8.  From that one, moved up to a Korg X2 workstation with on-board sequencer.
 
But I found pushing a cursor around a small LCD screen by pushing buttons to be a mind numbing task.  It worked, but there had to be a better way...
 
So one day I was looking over the new gear at my local music store (we still had those back then), and I noticed they had set up a demo with a Mac and MOTU Digital Performer (I think that is what was running that day).  Well that gear was way above my pay grade, but the impression stuck with me.
 
So after I acquired my first Windows PC (Pentium 1 - 133 MHz - 16MB RAM), I picked up Digital Orchestrator at my local Computer City store (we still had those back then, too).  Didn't know anything about computer music yet, but that was my first encounter with computer sequencing.  And then promptly learned that I would need a full duplex sound card, because that onboard sh*t just didn't cut it.  Cue up a Creative Sound Blaster! 
 
I learned about computer recording, and even attempted recording a song that my buddy wrote, for acoustic guitar and vocals.  The program was nice in concept and features, great with MIDI, but turned out to be a bit unstable with audio in my PC, to say the least.  It ate a weekends worth of audio takes, with no apparent recovery possible, ugh!
 
So I started asking around about music software for Windows.  Somebody in a computer store suggested Cakewalk, and so that is how I ended up with Cakewalk Professional, then upgraded to Pro Audio.  And that was a good 20 years ago! 

 I still have DOP but when XP came out they never bothered to upgraded it.

TheMaartian

Pasi Sivula
So, what tool should I be trying out if I want to focus on quick and effortless midi composing on Windows 10 with a feature set resembling that of DOP and not tons of bells and whistles. I particularly dislike tools like Garageband, without being able to put my finger on why. I need no crazy advanced arpeggiator, sound libraries, soft synths etc. But the user experience has to be top notch. No unpolished, mediocre, opensource stuff that will drive me crazy to set up with my hardware. Thanks

I never used DOP. That said, if I hadn't already been so invested in Studio One Pro when SONAR folded, I'd have given Tracktion Waveform a real shot. I'll always have Reaper as a secondary DAW, but it definitely does NOT fall into your easy-to-use out of the box requirement.
 
Waveform is modern and focused on music production, kind of a lean, mean, fighting machine. Ha. They have a demo. I think it would be worth a try.
 
https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform
 

I really like Waveform, but rather than demo that for starters I would suggest Tracktion T6, with less bells and whistles.  Full version for free!  The MIDI editor is inline in the track clip in T6, but the track can be expanded to show the piano roll for editing.
 
For MIDI folks, the main new feature in Waveform that is not included in T6 is the separate MIDI piano roll editor that can be docked/undocked, resized, moved to a 2nd monitor. 

Creating music with a PC in the 90s was very frustrating. I've used Voyetra DOP back in the day to back up my trusty Roland PMA-5 SYSX data. Recently I've restored all my work and transferred it to MIDI using Sonar. Hope to get back to it some day and turn it into good sounding records.

Resurrecting this thread about an obsolete software, for whatever it may be worth. Also trying to clean out my archive of programs not used for decades, so not to post something about something surpassed and irrelevant.
 
Record Midi Producer still remains one of the most powerful midi drum loop creators available. Such a pity they decided not to evolve the project. The Voyetra bastards are still online selling headphones and tee shirts, but won't let you do the online activation or license transfer if you were alive when they sold it to you. Their excuse for shutting down the online activation server...to protect you from old software and possible data loss. Bastards...
 
Have the damned thing cracked wide open, and runs fine in win 10. Can PM if you want to try it.
 
Latency can be a **** if your soundcard doesn't have a ROM chip. In which case the program is useless. Down side to old stuff.
 
Workaround is to get a return path to a hardware external unit, simple as the keyboard you are inputting data with.
 
In which case latency is cut to near zero and you can hear the loop you are creating in about real time. Haven't yet found something that works so good.
 
John