From
another thread, but one which I think would weather well in this one.
Digital Performer has its roots at
Berklee College of Music:
David Mash, of Berklee wrote:We were using computers in the curriculum back in late 1982, with the Apple II, so when the Macintosh came out, we were probably one of the first music schools to jump on the bandwagon and see its value. One of my students was involved with writing the first sequencer program for the Macintosh– his name was Roy Groth and he worked at Mark of the Unicorn [
www.motu.com] developing a program called Performer, which is now called Digital Performer.
Groth was an employee of MOTU from 1984 through 1989, being the force behind the creation of the original Performer, from version 1.0 through version 2.3.
The Performer you see in this flier was apparently Roy's work.
He seems to have left MOTU at the time when Performer began to go through some major changes. It was not long after he left that we had a Graphic Editing Window for MIDI, which gave us our first taste of the now familiar "piano roll" editor.
- [Incidentally, piano rolls were not actually the "performance" of the artist who played the piano. A piano which could punch holes in paper would seriously affect the pianist's technique. Instead, the piano left faint marks on the roll in something like a pencil, then the REAL creator of those rolls came in and made the punches. He would base their sustain and loudness on his own familiarity with the artist, meaning that every piano roll you've ever heard as "authentic" was actually the interpretation of the technician who made the roll. Only a few people really knew about this, or were familiar with the punching/editing machines they used. It was very possibly these editors which inspired the piano roll editor for MIDI sequencers.]
For reasons known only to himself, I suppose, Roy Groth now goes by a different name, but here is his résumé on Linked-In:
Roy Groth/Procops The interesting part for our purposes is near the bottom, back toward the beginning of his professional programming experience. But it also gets interesting after he leaves MOTU, for he goes to work for AVID, and eventually designed the MIDI component of ProTools, then modifying it for OSX.
This link takes you to a PDF of an article about a product at AVID for which Groth was the programming lead. (Groth is in the middle of the first picture) It's kind of interesting in its own light, though it has little to do with what we do. It's a multi-media tool for compiling and composing news for publishing or broadcasting.
This page includes a story about an original beta tester for Performer. Down the page a ways, he says:
John Andrew Parks wrote:Around the same time, I was also involved with some computer geniuses from M.I.T. and they had made me a beta tester for the first music sequencer on a Macintosh. The lyric premise was a work of musical science fiction and fantasy. Nothing like that was going on at the time. 'Planet Texas' was a milestone both musically and technologically. I would work on the song until the program crashed and then Roy Groth, the inventor of the 'Performer' software, would send me the fix over a 300-baud modem. The whole thing was done on a 512k Fat Mac with the use of only floppy disks. It was very exciting on so many levels.
Groth went on to bigger jobs and larger paychecks when Digital Performer was just getting started, leaving us with a huge blank space from 1989 through 2001, during which we know very little about who worked on DP. At least, *I* know very little. Maybe someone else can fill in some history. I knew about people in the other departments, for I talked to them periodically, or communicated by mail. Those included people like Danny Rose, Jim Cooper, and Les Quindepan, who as far as I know are still with MOTU.
In the late-1990's, another name joins the team, and every one of us is familiar with his work.
Matthew Davidson began designing GUI interfaces for MOTU, first designing the "new" plugin interfaces for the Masterworks Limiter and Compressor (1998), and then doing the same for DP's entire range of plugins, released in version 2.7 (1999). Over the next year (2000) he designed the GUI for DP 3.0, released in January of 2001 if memory serves. Davidson designed many other interfaces for MOTU, including CueMix, Masterworks EQ, the bundled VI's, MX4, and ultimately, DP 6. He was also responsible for most of the packaging for MOTU's products.
Davidson, by the way, has been a somewhat active participant at MOTUNation. I'll leave you to guess his forum identity. [2014: the link above does not work, but the 404 error page is from his server. You can still guess his forum ID] It's just nice to keep that in mind when venting loudly and rudely proclaiming about the "unusable interface" or those "terrible VIs" produced by that faceless company that goes by the name of "MOTU." Personally, I can't believe the resistance proclaimed by some members of this forum in regard to MOTU's updating to the latest versions of DP. Every day there is some variant of "does DP7 work?" Of COURSE it works, for goodness sake! And the bundled synths are ingenious, to say the least.
I've known about Matthew for a long time but haven't had any particular reason to mention his website or to single him out. But when I discovered the story about Roy Groth, it seemed like nice "bookends" to the DP story if I included someone involved in recent development, too. So, what caused me to look up Roy Groth? I was trying out
"File Juicer" on some old Performer documents, just to see if by some chance they might yield a standard MIDI file (of course they didn't). Instead, I got a single text file that said nothing but "Roy Groth, Performer" at the top. Every one of them said that, so I decided to look him up. Didn't take long to figure out why his name was hidden in the Performer files.
I thought you might enjoy learning what I found. It's nice to put names and faces with the development of things we use.
Shooshie
