Technically, my first "sequencer" was the Korg Poly-800 synth that my parents got in the 80's. It was a 256 step sequencer, and it would not record in real time. You had to either play a note, or press the "step" key to insert a rest. And I think you had to start over if you messed up.

Boy, that brings back memories. That was my experience, except for the 'parents' part. So frustrating that I upgraded to a Korg SQ-1 and a Yamaha drum machine with about 8 sounds as companions. The SQ-1 has some obscure diskettes that were only used in some 'word-processer'; a glorified typewriter.

The Poly-800 was as described, but only had one filter that everything got routed through. It made for quite a unique sound; I've still got it (somewhere). And don't get me started on my RS Color Computer 'DAW': I upgraded from 4K to 16K RAM [could it have a couple hundred for the (socketed) chips?], and I've been upgrading obsessively ever since.

I cut my MIDI teeth on Cakewalk v 1.0 or 1.1 back around '87 or '88. I was running it on an original IBM PC (8088) with a monochrome monitor, two 5 1/4" floppy drives and a whopping 384K RAM (I'd upgraded). My mother-in-law worked for IBM at the time and she'd gotten a really good deal on it for us.

It had no hard drive, so I had to put a line in my config statement to have it cache over from A to B if needed.

The day I bought Cakewalk I also bought a Roland RD-300s digital piano, a D-50, an Ensoniq SQ-80, a Yamaha TX81Z, a Yamah RX-5 drum machine and a Yamaha SPX90II. I think I made the sales guy's year!

Needless to say, I was WAY in over my head for quite awhile, but within a matter of weeks I became "Dr. MIDI" to all my friends. I combined all this stuff with a friend's gear (Studiomaster 16 channel mixer, Tascam MSR-16 recorder, etc. slaved to my computer with a Syncman Plus) and ran a smalll project studio for a couple of years.

I actually still have all of my old equipment, except for the RX-5 which I dumped after a couple of years. I don't use anything but the D-50, which I still use as my controller because I've always like it's feel. Well, actually my daughter also uses the RD-300s for piano practice.

I went up through about '93, and Cakewalk 4 PRO when I mothballed everything to focus on family and career. A couple of years ago when I decided to get back into things I found my old Cakewalk 4 5 1/4" diskette and faxed a copy of it to Cakewalk and they upgraded me to Sonar XL 2.2 for $179! I just got 4 PE in last week, but have yet to load it.

Thanks for the memories!

I nearly started out my sequencing career using one of the earliest versions of Cakewalk (I'm talking Sept. 1987). I came very close. Instead, I decided to get an Amiga and Dr. T's (as well as Soundscape and all of its extras). At the time I was more impressed with Amigas (the whole 68000-based series of computers, actually). This all changed around 1997. Support for Amigas had all but evaporated, and PC's were getting much better. I bought Cakewalk 7 and have upgraded ever since.

Cakewalk for Windows 1.0 something... it came with my Soundballster Pro. I think that was in 1989 or maybe 1990... Maybe?

I was just thinking about that today while reading through a post here on the forum that pointed out that S4 (and S3 for that matter) use 32bit float for internal processing. I'm recording audio at 192khz with a 24bit depth...

but when I started out...

I'd hooked up my BOSS DR550 MkI and a really cheezy, but touch sensitive and midi capable Homner keyboard to the pc joystick/midi port and patched everything into my Tascam 424 (also a mk1). I'd sequence the drums & piano and hit 'record' on the 4 track...

That was a lot of fun, but if you were to sit me down and tell me that I'd stop using that old 40mhz AMD 386 machine (with a MASSIVE 120mb hard disk and a MASSIVE 4mb of ram) eventually move on up to something 75 times faster, with 2000 times the hard disk space and 512 times more memory... I'd have passed out I think.

Cakewalk Professional 3.0 for Windows 3.X running on a 486. In 1994 this was miles ahead of my Alesis MMT-8. I could actually have more than 8 MIDI tracks WOW. My Alesis was miles ahead of my previous sequencing solution: sending MIDI notes from my RX17 drum machine to my CZ-101. Make shift step sequencer with no sustain information and definately make shure you turn down the volume on the instruments playing the notes.

Once Cakewalk Professional became Cakewalk Pro Audio I dreamed of eliminating my Fostex R8 in order to do multitrack audio recording. No more head calibrations, no more tape costs, no more SMPTE dropout ... "and no more got damn jerky beef" (Trading Places). I think I got lucky by upgrading in mutliples of 3: Pro version 3 to Pro Audio ver. 6 to Pro audio ver. 9. Accounts from various users said these were the best version of their time. I certainly had very little complaints and provided much more recorder tracks and functions. Don't try cutting and pasting audio clips on a reel-to-reel without a splicing block, patience and a stress ball.

While the recorder functions were great, the mixer functions still left much to be desired. Along somes Sonar. I passed on ver. 1 got version 2, 3 Producer and now 4 Producer. I haven't installed 4 yet, it's sitting on my desk looking like the third-string quaterback saying "just put me in coach". Honestly I haven't used any of the loop functions and it took me a while to get used to the new track view as I used lots of keyboad shortcuts. Version 3 was pretty exciting: VST support finally and better MIDI remote control. I can't wait to test version 4.

To make a long story short, Cakewalk has come a long way from fantastic sequencer to versatile hard disk recorder. I hope version 5 has some features that would really make it a nice recorder AND mixer:

- AUTOMATION SETS: I want to have different automated mixes without having to have different files.

- CHANNEL INSERTS: Let the track signal be sent to an "out" on the sound card and returned to an "in" on the sound card. Some people want to use their Lang, Neve or whatever.

-BETTER REMOTE CONTROL: assign more than 4 parameters per plugin.

I guess that means I'm a late comer then!

Great thread. Very interesting reading everyone's experiences. How similar!

Me, I also never got into PC MIDI/Sequencing until last year with HS2004, then Sonar 3 PE in Apr/04.

I started as a sound guy/Prophet 5 patch programmer (hobby only) in the early 80's, slowly getting exposed to Mac's as musical control devices......then

In 1985, splurged on a MIDI rig because it had come within price price range of the common man.....got an Atari 1040ST (1 meg Ram, no H/D) running Steinberg Pro 24 V1.0, a DX7iiFD with Grey Matter board (made it 8-Voice/64-note Poly with a 16-Track/64000 event Sequencer), Korg DSS-1 12 bit Sampler (still my controller), TX-81Z, SPX90ii, RX-17 Drum machine....I think I also made the Sales guy's year!

I also bought a Sample Editting and Synthesis program in 1987 for the Atari/DSS-1 called Softsynth, made by an upstart company called Digidesign that I believe was the Forefather to Protools. This was "serious" software, at $500, but gave unprecedented control of the sampler. There was no transferring of files...rather, the software controlled all the internal programming parameters of the Sampler in "real-time" via MIDI.

All my music at that time was MIDI-only, recorded straight to 1/4 in. 2-track reel to reel (sitting in boxes somewhere).
All through 1985 to 1992 (when I also shelved music for a IT career), I never trusted the PC as a music "controller", and never really needed to, as the Atari was ahead all that time. PC's never really caught up until the 386, and Windows really only recently (with XP) got to the level of stability and built-in that the Mac's and Atari's had all along, IMO. The PC's were for "tinkerer-types" who didn't mind dealing directly with the O/S to make things work.
And, boy-oh-boy, I have a lot of respect for you guys who dealt with the XT's and 286's through those "growing years", with MPU-101 and MPU-401 intefaces
I remember buying a Joystick to Midi cable for my SB16 card on my 386 and ran some freeware sequencers, but only last year refitted my system and got back into things in a big way.

My, how far we've come!

I remember back then, when I put my system together, that I was trying to do, on a smaller scale, what a $300,000 Fairlight could do, or a $50,000 Emulator.

Now, this year, largely thanks to Cakewalk, my controller Keyboard, $1500 PC, Sonar3 PE and Proteus 2500 + Software synths has surpassed my wildest dreams!

EDIT: typo.

I started back in about 1989 with a Dos program called Prism - loved it. My roommate and I were able to do a lot of things, but still didn't even scratch the surface of that thing. It went away - and with it, pattern based sequencing, which is all I knew. Cakewalk seemed so linear.

I went with Power Tracks Pro when I got around to Windows because it was so cheap and I didn't like the Voyetra thing that came with my 486. (there was a lot of time and upgrades in between, but Prism got used a long time - until the MIDI interfaces were no longer compatible).

Got tired of PTracks, Cakewalk was looking cooler and now was introducing Audio, where Power Tracks only had a way to statically sample something and was really audio limited. Cake 6.

Then cake 9 PA. Then Sonar 2, 3, 4.

And, boy-oh-boy, I have a lot of respect for you guys who dealt with the XT's and 286's through those "growing years", with MPU-101 and MPU-401 intefaces

You have no idea!
By the time I upgraded to a 486, I was still using my PC for DOS games, and I had a Sound Blaster card, my MPU-401 card, video card, and network card in my machine.

Of course this was still long before PCI slots and plug'n'play (remember VESA Local Bus slots?), and none of these devices could share IRQ's, and you had to set the IRQ's on all the cards using jumpers! And once you finally figured out the magic combination that would make them all work (I think I had to disable my printer port in order to save that IRQ for something else), THEN you had to tweak your config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to make sure you had enough "standard" memory (below 1MB, regardless of how much memory you had in the system).

Let's see, how do we load the CDrom drivers, network card drivers, soundcard drivers, AND still have enough memory leftover to run the programs that use the devices you're loading all the drivers for? Configuring a PC was really an art and a science.

How many remember: devicehigh = emm386.exe noems i=b000-b7ff Yes, that's right, you could free up another block of upper memory by including the monochrome video address region which was unused if you had a VGA video card. Booya!!

....well he had been dead since 1969.... Grandma just used to get behind him and move his jaw up and down... We'd pretend we couldn't see...

I've been here since 1997 and Windows 98. Can't remember which Cakewalk version it was.

I believe I started with version 5 of Cakewalk....and have gotten each upgrade since...I just love it....prior to cakewalk 5.0 I was using Notator on my atari St and atari Falcon 030....now THAT dates me!

Cakewalk Apprentice 1.0 for Windows 3.1, start to earn money, lot of free time to make music and no more DOS to fool around.
Today 2 kids less money and no free time. Bigger computer more possibilties. Well wait for Sonar 26 or 27, because I will be retired, have again a lot of time, better equipment, but how about the ears ??

String Razor... I started out with the exact same line -up. C64 and a Proffet 600. After Texture went to the orphanage and I made the switch to cake. Roger Powell wrote a few batch prcessing programs to convert tex files to general midi that would incorporate track names into cakewalk track names. He even went out of his way to modify the code slightly to get the names to Line up correctly. He was a heck of a guy to go out his way for that. I have a freind who I still co-write with that uses texture to this day religiously. He has sonar and the yamaha - ds2416 but still uses DOS. Back in those days the only real drum module was the linn Drum with we kit'd over to midi and are still stuck with some of those drum maps. Most of this early sequencer work was done just after the midi spec was released, and I'm still using original data captured way back then for library music. It's been a fun time in history for us musician types.

ORIGINAL: Stringrazor1

I started sequecing on a C64 (Sequential Circuits MIDI card w/on-board sequencer, Dr. T's) then moved to Roger Powell's TEXTURE on PC. When TEXTURE was orphaned, I jumped to Cakewalk 4 for DOS.

Wow! I can't believe all the "old timers" here.

I started with Cakewalk 1.0 on the original IBM-PC, a Roland RD-300 then a Kawai K5 then an Alesis drum machine. Over the years the racks grew and I hardly sold anything, just kept collecting until I filled the 4th 24-space rack. And hey, I'm a sax player, not a keyboardist! I just loved the technology and being able to make my own backing material.

I still have the what I consider to be the first "portable" PC that I built into an old oscilloscope chassis. Whopping 6" black and white display and a single floppy drive.