How did you come to using DP ?

[Michael Canavan]

Back in the day when I was 4 I started out banging two rocks together and yelling a lot.

Two rocks? Ha!

Lemme guess you were one of those 'one rock and your knuckles' guys!

[James Steele]

Moving this topic. Not a Usage or Techniques post, but general discussion.

[kelldammit]

went from 4-track to vs-880 when they first came out. i went to snag cakewalk pro 6 at the local music store (it had a control panel for the vs, so i could automate bounces, etc). the salesguy said, "well, why don't you just do it all on the computer?", and sold me a copy of cubase vst3.5. I returned to the store the next day to get a "proper" audio card (echo darla). That was around '98, and i've been poor ever since.
I went from cubase to nuendo (v1-2), then to samp (v7-9), and finally got my first mac (powerbook g4). DP was the one i wanted, so i snagged a secondhand copy of the v4.5 crossgrade, and loved it. I also picked up logic, and while useful for some stuff, i generally preferred DP. I'd gone from a frustrating focusrite box to a traveler around that time, and later to a duet.
Just prior to v6 coming along, my mac (now a macbook, black) got swiped, and hard times set in. I got a cheap pc, and tried to find anything i liked as much as DP (reaper, PT, and studio one, which i rather liked, and used for a few years). Then, DP came out for PC! So i saved my pennies...it's good to be back, despite the new platform teething pains, which are to be expected.

[monkey man]

Wow, Kell, were you still here?

I hadn't noticed as I've been pretty much absent for several years myself and only returned (both to the fold and the real world) a week or so ago.

At any rate, you know it as well as the rest of us - we're onto the best thing right here with MOTU and our 'Cornie bruthas, bro'.

[kelldammit]

I wasn't really here, but when i demo'd 8 over the spring or summer, i found out that my account still was! I was pretty surprised with the name change...though it's great to see this place (and the inhabitants) is(are) as corny as ever.

[cleamon]

I had been using my 828mkii (fw) with my windows machine running Sonar. When the machine started its long slow death, I started looking at alternatives. I had a MacBook (core 2 duo with 1G ram) sitting around hardly being used, and I remembered the disc that came with the 828 had some software on it called AudioDesk. Mmmm, I wonder if this combination could handle the task. Installed it, fired it up. Created a project and imported the files from Sonar and tada! it worked flawlessly. I created a test project with as many tracks (writing the audio to a usb2 drive) as I could and just hit record. After an hour and not a single drop out I was convinced. After the "honeymoon" (learning curve), I decided I should upgrade to DP (6 I think). I'll never go back (once you go mac, you'll never go back).

[monkey man]

I wasn't really here, but when i demo'd 8 over the spring or summer, i found out that my account still was! I was pretty surprised with the name change...though it's great to see this place (and the inhabitants) is(are) as corny as ever.

Too right, mate.

Let's hope it's here forever.

[Babz]

I was fascinated with music and sound from a very early age. My two heros growing up were Ringo and Snoopy, and before long I taught myself to play all the Ginger Baker drums parts to Cream's Disraeli Gears on my mother's ironing board. Everything had to be self-taught in those days, and anything that could make sound was an instrument.





My brother got a reel-to-reel tape recorder for Christmas one year. It had one of those green magic eye tubes as a VU meter, and I would love to stare into its gaze as it danced to the input of sound. We tried every trick we could think of -- flipping the it over and making sound go backwards, splicing tape, using it in conjunction with a cassette player for overdubbing -- we even plugged a guitar into it and used it as a fuzz box -- which eventually blew it up!

Somewhere along the way, I think I saw Les Paul on like Hee Haw and I ran across the phrase "sound on sound". I immediately wanted to do that. About 1973 I discovered Todd Rundgren and an album called Something/Anything, where he played all the instruments himself, starting with the drums and then overdubbing, bass, guitar, keyboards, and incredible vocal harmonies. I was a drummer in my first teenage band by this time, and this inspired me to learn guitar, keyboards saxophone, and start writing songs. I had written 30-40 songs and some sort of pubescent rock opera by the time I was 14.

My first multitrack recorder was the Teac 3340. In the late 70s, I remember seeing an ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine for something called the Dokorder. It was the first 4-track aimed at the home recording market. It was like $1000 -- a fortune at the time, but within the grasp of mortals. The ad said it could do overdubbing, and I wanted one SO bad. But I ended up with the Teac, which was its main competitor, and which featured something called "Simul-Sync" for monitoring and overdubbing.



I bought it used from an ad in the paper, and it came with a homemade DBX unit, built by the guy I bought it from. He was an electronics wizard and an engineer at a local TV station. I learned everything about recording by pestering him. We would just keep calling him back and asking more and more questions. Eventually, he came to our basement studio and helped us get set up. I'll bet he came to wish he never sold it to a bunch of teenagers! I even talked him into building a Voltage Controlled Filter with Resonance stomp box effect for guitar for me, trying to recreate a sound I heard on Todd Rundgren's Utopia album. It made sound for a few sweet seconds, before we blew up the prototype. Learning sound in those days was by the method of trial and KABOOM!

Fast forward to the 80s, cassette multitrack, MIDI, DX7s … My first sequencer was a Yamaha QX 21 hardware sequencer, ca. 1985. It came as part of a package along with my DX11 keyboard. It had only 2 tracks and like 7000-note memory, but at the time it felt like having the keys to the starship Enterprise.



Eventually, I got a Mac Classic with its 9 inch screen. I think I had a version of Master Tracks for a moment, but the two main sequencers at the time were Performer and Vision. (Studio Vision, ProTools, hard disk recording would come later). I think the main reason I chose Performer over Vision was that it was more linear, which was closer to the multitrack tape environment I grew up on. I did use drum machines and was familiar with the idea of loops, but Performer could do loops too, if you needed them.



Around the same time, I studied electronic music in college. They had a lab with a modular Moog, tape machines, and a couple of Macs with Performer and Professional Composer. It was an academic approach, and we studied like John Cage and Mario Davidovsky, and acted like Pink Floyd or Rick Wakeman never existed. I think that was the first time I actually used Performer, but I was already reading about sequencer reviews in Keyboard magazine. I didn't get along with the professor (he was an old school, Dickensian, abusive type, esp. toward women) and ended up dropping the class and getting my own Mac and copy of Performer with my little floppy key disk.

Once again, most everything I needed to know I had to teach myself. I learned a lot from an early spiral bound book called "A Guide To Performer" by Alexander Publishing. I learned to stripe SMPTE and sync it to my multitrack. So, with a mixer, racks of outboard gear, and a spaghetti nest of MIDI cables, I finally had three tracks of audio, and virtually unlimited MIDI tracks within my grasp.

I was a fairly late adopter of audio hard disk recording, *Digital* Performer. It was a combination of being unable to afford the most powerful computers at the time, and a general wariness of audio on something as fickle as a hard drive -- and probably an ingrained addiction to tape.

I was also a fairly late adopter of virtual instruments for similar reasons. I started mostly with external PCs, Gigastudio, all that. I eventually got rid of the big console and a lot of my hardware MIDI instruments, but I still have a Roland XV5080, XP80, and a Yamaha TX81Z, and a few others in storage. I am finally now fully "in-the-box", a Mac Mini -- the universe on something the size of a single external hard drive. Now if there were only a music industry left to use it in!



So there you go: A [Fairly] Brief History of Babz with Sound.

I have done a few projects in Cubase and Pro Tools, have been generally phobic about Logic, and lately have been dipping my toes into Abelton and Maschine (because that is just such a contrasting approach, with a massive scene attached to it).

Babz

[BKK-OZ]

Great story Babz, thanks for sharing it withg us.

[wylie1]

What a great machine that TEAC 4 track was I recorded many hours of tape with that so many songs and so much fun.
The inspiration from that deck started the ball rolling for me.
What inspiration and memories I got from that little beauty

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I still have two 2340s and several large boxes of tape (about 350 reels I think) that need to be transferred. All my early stuff and rock days are on those tapes and they all need to be baked and transferred to digital. Ugh! What a great machine it IS!

[wylie1]

I've done all my 4&8 track it was allot of work.
Can you bake cassettes? I've got about 5 shoe boxes of those.
I was thinking of buying a new deck just for the cassettes.

[mikehalloran]

You were right to get the TASCAM -- you can still get parts like drive belts.

My 3440S, Dokorder, 40-4, 80-8, 35-2, 238S and a Sony something all sit in my basement, wondering if they will see the light again. The Dokoder and 35-2 need drive belts replaced. I have the belt for the TEAC; been looking for a Dokorder belt for 25 years. I hope that my dBx units still work when it's time.

Big box of tapes need baking and transferring someday.

I have not had an issue playing cassettes from the '70s and '80s. The high end degrades so I bought a Calrad Dolby B unit with adjustable encode and play back that helps with the high end.

I've a Fostex 4-tr that I intend to use to transfer one project before I sell it. I also have an old Yamaha 2-speed 4-tr that works surprisingly well.

I need to get a beef jerky drier for baking tapes. Large enough, cheap enough and works at a low temperature. I got that tip from Donny Osmond.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Don't forget the metal reels.

[Shooshie]

I need to get a beef jerky drier for baking tapes. Large enough, cheap enough and works at a low temperature. I got that tip from Donny Osmond.

You realize, of course, that Donny uses those for snacks on the road. Little buffalo wings sauce, and they're great!

Shoosh