I started out doing multitrack recording back in high school, going back and forth between two cassette decks. A couple of years after graduating college I got my first real 8-track recorder, a reel-to-reel Tascam Model 38. Using that, I started learning about how to bounce multiple tracks down to fewer tracks to get the higher number of tracks that were needed to at least come closer to capturing the arrangements I had in my head. While this was in the early days of MIDI, and I did have a MIDI drum machine (Roland TR-909), my keyboard (Roland Juno 60) did not have MIDI. So, I was basically tracking one part at a time directly to tape.
Cut to a year or two later and, while I still had the Juno 60, I also got a Yamaha DX7 and a Korg SQD-1 (hardware MIDI sequencer). Those helped extend my capabilities a bit, but really only a bit. Not too much after that, probably somewhere in the vicinity of 1987, plus or minus a little, a friend helped me build my first computer, and I got my first MIDI interface, a Roland MPU-401, with the MIF-IPC card to interface it to my 8086-based PC, on which I ran the Texture sequencer. It was nothing like today's sequencers on the interface front -- it only had the event list -- but you could track multiple parts and edit them, albeit in a pretty unintuitive fashion. Also, somewhere around this point I ditched the Juno 60 and got my first MIDI rack modules. From memory, I think one was a Roland Planet P (MKS-10) and another was their MKS-20, which was dedicated to piano sounds. I also got a Roland MT-32 around the same time. I would still have been using the DX7 for a controller keyboard at that point. Oh, I also had an analog mixer made by Biamp (I don't recall the model, but I'm pretty sure it had at least 8 tracks).
A few cool things about my setup at this point:
- The Roland interface, in conjunction with Texture and the MS-DOS operating system of the day, could lay down some kind of control signal on tape, and then follow it on playback. This now made it possible to get even more tracks out of the 8-track tape because you could track multiple MIDI parts at once, using the sequencer to drive multiple modules to track at once, then follow the time code and put down another set of layers. At some point, you still had to bounce down if you wanted more tracks, but you could have more virtual tracks within those tracks you were bouncing. (Unfortunately, my limited number of MIDI sound modules still didn't get me as far as some of my grander ambitions might have wanted.
- The MT-32 was multi-timbral, meaning I could now hear a fair number of parts at once instead of only one sound per MIDI instrument.
- However, crude the Texture interface may have been, it still meant I could edit my parts. That kind of felt like magic back in those days since I'd really had to do my arranging by tracking prior to that point. And now, with the MT-32, I could more or less hear a whole arrangement while doing that editing.
Somewhere in the early-to-mid-1990s, I got a blackface ADAT, "moving up" from the analog reel-to-reel recorder to digital, albeit still only 8 tracks of tape. Somewhere in the same vicinity I upgraded from the small mixer to a Mackie 32*8 (32 channels, 8 buses), which was a lot cleaner on the sound front, which was helpful for the digital. Plus, the much bigger mixer gave me lots of concurrent inputs, and I started getting more MIDI modules, mostly from Roland (I was a big Roland fan, and I know some I got at some point included their U-110, U-220, and MKS-80; I also had an Oberheim Matrix 1000 and switched from the Roland TR-909 to an Alesis D4 for drums). By that point, I'd also switched from the DX7 to a Roland Rhodes (MK-80) as an 88-key controller (and potential sound source) and an 76-key Alesis QuadraSynth Plus Piano (which was also multi-timbral). I basically had the 32-channel mixer fully populated with inputs from all the MIDI gear. My sequencer had also been upgraded, to Passport's MasterTracks Pro, which was one of the earlier Windows-based sequencers with a relatively modern interface (albeit not with audio at that point). So I could basically sequence the whole arrangement and record instrumental tracks to 2 tracks of tape in one go, then have the other 6 tracks available for vocals. Somewhere along the way, the ability to stripe MIDI time code to tape and follow it had been lost (probably a Roland Windows driver limitation), but that was much less important by this point.
At some point audio recording on the computer also started to become a possibility. Passport stitched on a limited audio capability by incorporating SAWse into their new MasterTracks Pro Audio. It had a horrendous user interface, but it at least allowed me to do 4 tracks of vocals in the same program, and, of course, I had to get my first real audio interface (I don't remember if that was the Sonorus STUDI/O or if I'd had something else prior to that point -- the STUDI/O only had ADAT inputs, no analog, so I was using the ADAT for A/D converters).
At some point prior to 2000, Passport Designs went out of business, and I was looking for a new sequencer. Also, audio recording on the PC was advancing quite a bit, so I was wanting to do more of that. I started looking around, trying most everything available for the PC that had a demo version. I won't name names, but pretty much everything seemed like it crashed early, and the ones that didn't crashed later. Pro Tools LE was being advertised at that point, and the ads looked interesting, but it wasn't available yet. It was around then that I tried a trial version of Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. I think they gave you 30 days, or maybe it was just that you couldn't save. It seemed to me to be rock solid, and reasonably intuitive. In fact, it seemed a lot like what I'd seen in the Pro Tools LE ads, so I bought it, initially thinking I'd just use it to replace the MIDI side of things, hooking it up with a separate audio program later. (At the time I'd been using a low-end version of Samplitude that was included with my STUDI/O board. It had a highly unintuitive interface, but was really good on the sound quality front. I was thinking I might save up until I could afford a full version of that for the audio side of things.) As I started to use Cakewalk, though, I found it was doing well enough on the audio side, especially once I added a few third party plugins to compensate for areas where its included plugins were quite weak.
The next big development came not too much later, when a version of Nemesys' (later Tascam's) GigaPiano was included in the Cakewalk Pro Suite upgrade to Pro Audio 9. This streamed acoustic piano samples from disk in real time, allowing bypassing some degree of PC memory limitations to get a much more realistic piano sound than even the MKS-20 I'd mostly been using to that point. This was prior to the point of having virtual instrument plugins within the DAW (at least for Cakewalk), but it got me better piano sounds (and I'm mainly a piano player on the instrumental front), and served as a major tease of what was to come.
Cakewalk's SONAR came out a year or two later, and it finally added virtual instrument plugins, and that began my decade and a half plus addition to virtual instruments. All the MIDI modules I had were good in their own ways, but having to turn them all on, turn a mixer on, use hardware audio effects, deal with tape, etc. was a real drag on productivity for me, especially when I had a day job and a family, thus highly limiting my time for music. It wasn't like I could just get a few minutes in with all this gear to get ready to go. Also, all that hardware generated a lot of heat in my small bedroom studio. Over time, I replaced all the hardware modules with virtual instruments, to the point where, in the end, I was only using the 32-channel Mackie mixer for a single microphone input (and to feed the power amp I had to drive speakers). I eventually sold even that off, using a few different audio interfaces at different stages. This made for much less efficiency, lower power bills, and pretty much no studio-generated heat.
I stuck with SONAR for many years, beta testing for Cakewalk from SONAR 2 through 6, and still use its successor, Cakewalk by BandLab today, though I also now use Cubase 10.5. Everything is on the computer (except that I do use an outboard mic preamp for recording vocals) with virtual instruments and plugins (
http://rickpaulmusic.com/equipment-and-software/ gives an idea of the extent of my addiction). The net is I can do my arranging and recording way more efficiently than could have ever been possible back when I was starting, and the sound quality is quite a bit better -- for example no tape hiss (unless I want to add it via a plugin anyway). While I've spent a good deal on "virtual gear" over the years, if I were to have anything even close to the level of capability using actual hardware, we'd almost certainly be talking about million dollar plus budgets. (I'd hate to think about my actual expenditures -- certainly at least in tens of thousands of dollars over the decades, but I'm not sure if it would have reached $100K.) To put it another way, my arsenal of "virtual gear" is beyond anything I could ever have imagined having in the physical world with any degree of "gear lust" I might have had. Just to give one example, I remember reading about the Synclavier back in its early days, seeing price tags upwards of $100K, thinking it would be really great to have one, but knowing that would never happen for me. Yet, in the virtual instrument world, it did a few years back when Arturia added the Synclavier V to its V Collection of virtual instruments. My wide-eyed 1980-something pipe dreams became reality.
I've really only been talking about the creative front to this point, but the advent of various download and streaming services over the years, music distributors like CD Baby, and so on has also let me get my music out in to the world in a way that only convincing record company gatekeepers to let me do could have accomplished in the past. Of course, it's also allowed many, many others to do the same, and maybe what I put out there mostly becomes part of the noise. I certainly haven't broken through to any significant degree to date, no less made any significant money from music. I have also noted that the small amounts of money I made over the years took a significant downturn when streaming pretty much totally replaced downloads. (I also haven't bought CDs in a long time. Though I have a fairly big CD collection, I don't even listen to those for the most part, just going to ad-supported Spotify to stream anything I may want to listen to at any given time. I listen to over-the-air radio when I'm in my car long enough to bother and don't have my own mixes in need of a car listening test.) For me, though, the primary benefits the technology has had over the last few decades have been on the creative front, allowing me to do much more than I'd have been able to do with earlier technology.
Rick
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