Early Daws
Digital audio workstations are now the mainstay of most producers’ workflow, but despite their cutting-edge credentials, you might be surprised at just how far back their roots can be traced. In the early 1980s, the first, primitive versions of what we now call digital audio workstations began changing the way musicians could express themselves.
The musical landscape looked very different back then, with computers just starting to become a viable option for making music, and the introduction of MIDI was a revolution when it came to controlling synths, drum machines and samplers. The idea of recording or editing digital audio on a computer was still a long way off, but even the earliest music programs offered new options that had never existed before.
Why does this matter? To many of today’s musicians, what happened more than three decades ago might seem irrelevant to the way we make music today. We wouldn’t go so far as to insist you must learn your history to understand how good we have it today, but it really puts into perspective just how far we’ve come in such a short space of time. Asking a few basic questions can help us understand the incredible music-making power we have at our disposal in software today. What was a sequencer, and how did that evolve into a DAW? How important was MIDI? What about trackers, chiptune and the demoscene? How did newer DAWs change the game? What about the computer platforms and programs that didn’t make it?
Join us, then, as we take a nostalgic look back at the origins of some of the most popular DAWs and tell the story of how computer music was born.
As Bob Marley put it: “In this bright future, you can’t forget your past.”
The godfather of DAWs: Steinberg Cubase
How far back can we trace the story of modern DAWs? At least as far as 1983, when keyboard player Manfred Rürup met engineer Karl ‘Charlie’ Steinberg and conceived the idea of a software MIDI sequencer. They were truly ahead of the game: the MIDI specification had only been formally announced the same year.
The duo founded
