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.