Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

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Shooshie
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Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by Shooshie »

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.
Image

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. 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 I see here to 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
Last edited by Shooshie on Tue Nov 18, 2014 12:43 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Tonio
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by Tonio »

Thank you Shooshie !!

Great historical information.

Pardon me, but you seem to have the most knowledge about Performer or otherwise in MOTU in general. I just consider myself a user and use DP(currently) and its relatives as a means of getting my musical thoughts down.

I have a faint feeling as to Matthews' MOTUNATION user name . I almost posted in regards to that subject, but felt it would be best to leave it alone.

I did subscribe to MOTU-MAC back in 2.5 days, so you obviously and many others have more history and experience then myself.

I just enjoy being part of this community -especially with you around !!

T
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BobK
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by BobK »

Wow - flashback! I went to MIT for my freshman and sophomore years of college, and Roy was there at the time. He was older by at least a year, maybe two or three. I'm pretty sure he played trumpet in the jazz band directed by Herb Pomeroy (I auditioned for that band, but didn't make it, and had to settle for the much-less-hip second-tier group...). In fact, I'm also pretty sure I received a hand-written letter from him the summer before I arrived - the kind of thing where the older students reach out to the newbies and ask if they have any questions. I wouldn't be surprised if I still have it in some box of memorabilia somewhere.
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Shooshie
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by Shooshie »

Small world! I figured some people had to have known him then. Yes, I think he did play trumpet. I've even seen where someone with his name was conducting the musical Oklahoma in the Boston area. Could have been him.

It does show that DP was designed by musicians first. And that's always been my major draw to Performer and DP. It always has felt "natural" in a musical way.

Shoosh
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by jlaudon »

Very interesting, Shoosh. Thanks for the info - it personalizes DP for us (well, more than before.. :) ).
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amplidood
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by amplidood »

I wonder what creative drive made Matthew choose to use the camera as a phallic symbol on his bio....
kinnylandrum
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by kinnylandrum »

Great article, thanks. For me it's always the people, not the technology.
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emulatorloo
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by emulatorloo »

Thanks for the very interesting article. I really appreciate you taking the time to research and write it.
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cleamon
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Re: Creating Digital Performer — the People Involved

Post by cleamon »

An old thread, but interestingly, I was looking at a hex dump of a clipping file, and saw the name Roy Groth imbedded in it. So, the legacy lives on!
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