Started with Cakewalk Home Studio 5, Immediately jumped to Pro Audio 6 when it came out. Then PA7, 8, 9, SONAR, didn't get SONAR 2, picked up again with SONAR 3PE, 4PE, and now 5PE.

Man, 4-tracking on the old Pentium 166 with Home Studio was some good times. Just learning how to work it and all was a blast. My first ventures were recording in at 11 kHz setting cause my system had such a tiny hard drive. 10 meg a minute for a stereo track at CD quality seemed just so HUGE back then. I'll have to give a big thanks to my next oldest brother Jeff. He just came in one day and said, Hey, you want a computer? He bought me my first whole setup as a gift. I had an extra 100 bucks when I saw Cake Home Studio in a software store and have been hooked ever since. (I think my brother also fronted the cash for the upgrade to Pro Audio 6)

I remember being a little disappointed with Pro Audio 6, cause the mixer window faders weren't real responsive. Was really happy when envelopes got added. That was around PA8 I think?

Anyway, good times! I still have pretty much all my disks and manuals. Can't find PA 8 disk anywhere, think it got lost in a move, but I already had 9 by then.

I still have disks with the first midi stuff I ever came up with. I wish I had all the audio tracks though. Some of that stuff was worth taking apart and finishing off now with all my good toys, but alas, we can't live in the past can we!! Must stop reminiscent rambling now.

Tim Umstead

I might have everyone beat! I was a beta tester for the original Cakewalk for DOS (so that's pre 1.0). I won the prize for finding the most bugs and making the most suggestions to improve the interface and features. Couldn't tell you when it was but I was using an original IBM PC (no hard disk) and an original Roland MPU-401. Haven't a clue what synth I was using with it - maybe a Korg Poly 61M.

Oh dear...all you guys are making me feel REALLY old, great thread though.

I started out ( in '65 beleive it or not) using 2 Gestetner reel to reels (doing the bounce thing) and then progressed up to one of the early Akai reel to reels. Then sorta lobbed out for a while because I was by then a pro muso doing studio recordings in really nice 4 and 8 track pro studios ( was a session muso for a few years).

When I came back to it, Tascam had just released the 144 and I bought one and was in seventh heaven. I then, over the next few years, got 244, 246 and eventually Fostex A80 1/4 inch 8 track with a RAM 16/4/2 Mixer. In about 85/6 I found the most amazing little box that I still have a very high regard for and that was the Roland MC-500 sequencer. I got so good on that thing I was like a checkout girl almost being able to press all those little buttons without looking. But the real eyeopener was when I first saw the Yamaha FB01. Oh boy 8 NOTES OF POLYPHONY OVER 8 SOUNDS. Amazing!!!!! The the Roland D110 came out and things started to get serious so so did I. Long story cut short.... I studied really hard and eventually became very familiar with lots of software (starting on an Amiga with Dr T, Soundscape [yuk] and then Cake Windows 3.11, Cubase, Logic and got about 10 years work fixing other peoples technical problems.

I'm now on Sonar 5 (bloody amazing) and I really cant imagine live without my toys. I got my Masters (at the age of 53) a few years back but that never came close to all the early "big learning curve" years way back when. Great times!!!!!

GH

I came into this part of the music world backwards. (Was also a breech-birth baby-so what can you expect)

Never could get my head around piano or keyboards, being mainly a stringed instrument player, (as my forum name implies) but I've always liked working on electronics stuff and got introduced to MIDI when I got a job in a keyboard store. A friend gave me his old CW Ver 1.2. and showed me how to set it up on my 386 with a Turtle Beach soundcard. I just used it to write toons and create tracks to jam with on my axes. Although I had owned various 4 track recorders in the 80's, I only jumped into computer-based audio recording when PA 4 came out in the 90's. I still depend on 1.2 for throwing song ideas together. Quick and sweet.

Now, in my old age, new gear and new software choices have regenerated my interest in doing something serious with my music and it's all going to be done with CW.

I started out with a Commodor 64 and a simple sequencer program that I think was called Passport. I'm not sure though. I had a Casio CZ-101 and Roland drum machine. It could have been a TR-707. From there I went to a Alesis MMT-8.

When I got a Windows PC someone gave me a copy of Cakewalk 3, which I played around with, but was too busy and fluent with the MMT-8 to spend much time with Cakewalk. Another friend got me an Atari computer with Cubase sometime around '92, but I never took to it for the same reason. I was under the gun to get a bunch of sequences completed each week, so I stuck to what I knew how to use.

I finally got an official DAW running Windows and bought ProAudio6. From there I upgraded to ProAudio9, and have done all the upgrades since.

Off topic a bit: Around '86 I was in a band that auditioned a keyboard player who brought in a couple of rackmount synths along with his DX-7. After he left, the guitar player and drummer accused him of being some kind of fool trying to tell us that those little boxes were sythesizers. I was the only person in the band who knew what they were, but they didn't even believe me when I explained that they were, in fact, synthesizers.

I recently heard Funkytown by Lipps Inc. which I believe must have been released around '79. It sure sounds sequenced. What sequencers were around at that time?

ORIGINAL: Katnip

I recently heard Funkytown by Lipps Inc. which I believe must have been released around '79. It sure sounds sequenced. What sequencers were around at that time?

A lot of disco productions were tape loops and the products of hours of grease pencil and razor blade edits, and you could build a whole song out of one loop with some judicious mutes and eight or ten sets of hands on those pre-automation mixing boards. There were also some sequencers at that time too, mostly built into keyboards or interfacing with proprietary, pre-MIDI hookups.

You guys make me feel young even though I started in '84 and did a lot of the same portastudio/sound-on-sound experiments that some of you did. I wouldn't trade those days for anything, and when you learn how to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you never lose those skills even though everything is so easy now. Usually easy. OK, sometimes easy.

PRO AUDIO 9 then sonar 3 and 4 then logic 5 then cubase sx2 and 3

at this stage using only sx3

only use sonar for old projects that needs to get completed

ORIGINAL: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew
... You guys make me feel young even though I started in '84 ... There were also some sequencers at that time too, mostly built into keyboards or interfacing with proprietary, pre-MIDI hookups.

Quite right, Doctor... As I recall, Oberheim was making a big deal around that time with their sequencer box, which hooked up to their drum machine box and their synth(s) using their proprietary interface (what did they call it... maybe OB-Link or something like that). Of course, it seemed to fade away into obscurity once all of the MIDI madness kicked in.

ORIGINAL: NYSR
But I had to buy a MIDI cable to convert the joystick port. The cable I bought came with a bundled version of Voyetra for DOS and Cakewalk Aprentice version 1. I still have the floppy disk and the manual. ... I was imediately hooked and a year later I bought Cakewalk version 3.

How funny... that's exactly how I got onto the Cakewalk gravy train. It was a copy of enticeware (Cakewalk Express, I think) that came bundled with a MIDI joystick cable for a (dare I admit it?)... Soundblaster card. I'm telling you, some marketing person at Cakewalk had a stroke of genius with that one.

you people must be really old. j/k, i rode 3 hours from wpb to orlando to pick up cakewalk 4. i was 14 at the time and if i remember correctly it was running on a 386, w/ 16mb ram. 133mhz. that machine was so powerful.

I guess I'm the noob here. I started DAWing with PA 9.

Before that it was the trusty old fostex 4 track.

Roger Powell's TEXTURE on PC.

LoL...Me too, I still have Texture on a 286 with a Roland MPU, I started out with Cake at V2 for DOS.

Great thread! Talk about bringing back memories...both good and bad!

I started out on an Commodore Amiga 1000 running Dr. T's Keyboard Controlled Sequencer (KCS). KCS still had one unique feature which I sorely miss, the ability to mute/unmute individual tracks with a single alphanumeric keypress for each track. KCS was actually an 'upgrade' from another Amiga sequencer program called 'MIDI Magic'. MIDI Magic was so cheesy that you had to load each midi 'track' individually (from floppy) each time you wanted to load a song.

I finally realized that the Amiga's days were over when I first loaded up a beta of Windows '95, immediately after which I sold the Amiga. I actually made a killing on it by parting it out to European Amiga users. I then took that money and bought my first PC (90Mhz Pentium!) which I ran Cakewalk Pro 3.0 and eventually CWPA9.

--Early gear list--

Ensoniq Mirage DSK Digital Sampler (...8 seconds of 8 bit sampling heaven... :-)
Tascam 4-track Portastudio
Ensoniq VFX-SD Synthesizer
Yamaha FB-01 4-Op FM Synth

-eB

Cakewalk 1.0 for DOS. It came on one 5 1/4" floppy, and the manual was held together with staplers.

I used it on an 8 MHz 8086 PC with a massive 20 MB hard drive. The keyboard was an Ensoniq VFX.

I thought I had a pretty cool rig!

Version 2 DOS. My keyboard was a used Roland D-110 and my main sounds were from a Proteus 1XR I had scrimped and saved for--cost me almost a grand and you can now get the sounds in soundfont form for about thirty bucks.

I remember importing a twinky melody I had been working on in Cakewalk into Band In A Box (probably version 1, and which I still highly recommend) and then playing that back for the first time--my first fully arranged song. I almost wept...