What Was Your First DAW?

Your first car. Your first guitar. Your first kiss.

Certain things mark big transitions in our lives — landmarks that delineate and sometimes determine our future paths. It’s odd to think that selecting a digital audio workstation (DAW) would fit in that same camp, but, as I asked friends and colleagues about their first DAW, it was clear that they all had stories associated with that specific choice in their life. For me, I spent years considering when and what and how much to spend before I finally made my decision. Thankfully, I chose judiciously, and it helped steer the course of my career as a studio engineer, providing me opportunities that might otherwise have eluded me.

So, what was your first DAW, and how did it influence your career? Here are some recollections of people here at Sweetwater, some young and some old. But each with their own story.

Mitch Gallagher

For me, the answer depends on how you define “DAW.” Very early on in the ’80s, at the dawn of MIDI, I was using Roger Powell’s Texture on a PC in the studio and a MIDI sequencer from sonuus with a Passport MIDI interface on my Commodore 64 at home. This was maybe 1983? I quickly progressed to running C-Lab Creator on an Atari 1040ST (again, MIDI only).

The first digital audio system I recall was when I was in grad school at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. It was a super-tweaky, super-rare system that combined esoteric converter hardware (I can’t remember the name) running on a purpose-built DOS PC. We could record short audio snippets and process them in almost unlimited ways — but the catch was that everything had to be programmed by hand in the Csound language. You had to write two separate programs for each “event” in a piece of music: “Orchestra” files to generate or process with sound and “Score” files to play back the Orchestra files. Definitely not user friendly or for the faint of heart, but it opened incredible new worlds for “academic” composers and experimenters.

The first “commercial” system I used was Digidesign Sound Tools, followed by the early incarnations of Pro Tools — I very clearly recall when Dino, our Digidesign rep, came to Sweetwater to unveil this new “Pro Tools” system they were developing. But the first full-featured audio/MIDI DAW I recall using was Opcode Studio Vision — again, I very clearly recall being there when Mac, our Opcode rep, blew us away with Studio Vision at an early demo. Though I was a Mark of the Unicorn (now known as “MOTU”) Performer guy at the time (running on a Mac LC), I quickly switched over to Digital Performer when it became available. The first complete hardware/software DAW “system” I purchased for myself was a Digidesign Session 8 system.

Things have come a long way since then, but the advent of each of those products was so exciting — and so revolutionary — at the time. It seemed the possibilities were simply endless. I spent many, many happy hours making music using those now-primitive-seeming systems. In fact, that simple Atari/Creator system, combined with a Yamaha TX816, a Roland D-110, and an Akai S1000, was what I used to write the music that won a NARAS Grammy award back in the early ’90s.

Chuck Surack

My first DAW came in several parts... 

In 1984, I owned an NED Synclavier II for only 30 days (that’s a different story), but I lusted for the Synclavier Direct-to-Disk recording system and demo’d it several times in Nashville and Chicago. I was doing lots of jingles at the time, and the idea of singing the chorus once and then flying the parts around on the Direct-to-Disk system was intoxicating. I was quoted $450,000 for the whole system, but I just couldn’t pull the trigger. That was a lot of money then — and it still is today! I ended up getting the 16-voice sampling and FM version of the Synclavier for only $200,000! And the optical drive was another $40,000! The system was so intense that it needed to have its own dedicated electrical drop and generated so much heat that it required special air-conditioning.

In 1984, I got Digidesign’s sound-editing program called Sound Designer. This was a $995 program that allowed visual sample editing for early samplers like the E-MU and Akai products. In 1989, Digidesign brought out Sound Tools, and it included Sound Designer II and AD IN and DAT I/O (for backing up source files to DAT tape), which were analog and digital interfaces, to edit audio on the computer in stereo. It cost about $4,000 for 2-track recording. In 1991, Pro Tools with ProDeck and ProEdit came out. This started as a 4-track multitrack system and eventually expanded to 16 tracks. I owned all of these as soon as they were available, and I used Studio Vision and Performer, which eventually became Digital Performer. There would not have been a Sweetwater as we know it were it not for these amazing products and my curiosity about them. I loved being on the bleeding edge and feel fortunate that I grew up during that time. It is amazing how far we have come today.

Craig Anderton

Passport’s Master Tracks Pro (MTP) was MIDI only, but it served me well — my Forward Motion album was done solely with it. Next, I paired MTP with tape, then two ADATs, because hard-disk recording wasn’t viable/affordable with 16 tracks. In 1995, Cubase got the nod because of VST, but I used it mostly for MIDI. Starting in 1998, at which point I was splitting my time 50/50 on Mac and Windows, I bounced projects back and forth between Cubase and Sonic Foundry Acid. Although useless for MIDI, it did hard-disk recording and superb looping.

But the 21st century rocked! When SONAR (now Cakewalk) came out and did MIDI, hard-disk recording, and looping, I found my all-in-one recording solution. Then, a year later, Ableton Live became (and remains) my live-performance joyride. When Studio One hit, it opened up mastering. I still use all three DAWs, with occasional forays into Cubase and Pro Tools, but do most recording projects these days with Studio One because of how fast I can create music with it.

Lynn Fuston

The first workstation I experienced was in 1980 at RCA Studio A in Nashville. It was the Synclavier, and it was selling for nearly $200,000 in 1980. By the early ’90s, the shift to digital was beginning and I started shopping for a workstation, but the Studer Dyaxis, Fairlight, AMS Audiofile, and Sonic Solutions systems were all incredibly expensive.

 Image source: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2552-deck-ii

I pulled the trigger in 1994 when I bought a Radius Computing 81/110 (Apple Mac clone) loaded with an AudioMedia II card (NuBus) mated to a Panasonic SV-3700 DAT machine for I/O and chose OSC DECK II for my multitrack software. I added an Alesis AI-1 so I could transfer files to and from ADAT. Using DECK II allowed me to record and edit up to 16 tracks with no DSP card required (assuming a crazy-fast hard drive)! DECK II was amazingly powerful software for the $399 price of entry and offered an impressive list of features, including: 

999 virtual tracks, unlimited playlistsNondestructive recording and overdubsScrub from diskAutomated punch in and outUnlimited named autolocation pointsSticky clip lightsAll playback, sync, and record functions in the backgroundSimultaneous 4-track record and playback on Sound Tools II & Pro ToolsImport and export Sound Designer II, AIFF, QuickTime, Apple SND Resource, and WAV file formats

It used this new thing called “plug-ins” to add equalization and reverb to tracks! I owned Jupiter Voice Processor (JVP) and Multiband Dynamics Tool (MDT), both developed by Dr. Harold (Andy) Hildebrand who founded Jupiter Systems. NOTE: Hildebrand was the one who later revolutionized the music industry by creating Auto-Tune.

Image source: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/32612-multiband-dynamics-tool

This system allowed me to offer services like high-quality vocal tuning (credits in the ’90s called it “digital editing” — years before Auto-Tune) for artists such as Andy Griffith, the Newsboys, Tanya Tucker, Faith Hill, George Jones, and more. I was a beta tester for OSC for years and figured out how to do all sorts of things with it that even the software coders didn’t believe. I made a lot of money with that system until I bit the bullet in 1998 and started mixing records on a full-blown Pro Tools | 24 Mix system (the price tag was north of $50,000), including $6,000 worth of Waves plug-ins (Diamond Bundle).

Jacob Dupre

While not a computer-based DAW, my first system for recording digital audio was a BOSS BR-1600CD. And, believe it or not, my mom ordered it for me from Sweetwater when I was in high school! Who would’ve thought all these years later I’d be working here?! As a late-’90s kid, I started dabbling in recording tech once digital had already taken over. So, when I got my first MacBook Pro before my last year in high school, GarageBand was an obvious first step since it was free and easy to learn. I used that for way too long before I finally switched to its bigger brother, Logic Pro. Now I use a smattering of all the major DAWs. The more the merrier, right?

This was the BOSS I had! It made CDs and everything! Those were the days!

David Stewart

I messed around with Dr. T and, believe it or not, a very early version of Cubase before landing on one called SMPTE Track, which was made by Hybrid Arts in the ’80s. It ran on an Atari 1040ST (upgraded to 2.5MB of RAM) and, through a few other apps, tried to be a whole ecosystem with patch editor librarians, sample editors, etc. The Atari was arguably the best music computer of the day, due in part to how the clocking and MIDI data came in through the DMA architecture, which provided great response and synchronization. A big appeal to me was the simple and powerful scroll-type UI and (at the time) cutting-edge graphical editing of SMPTE Track that is still popular with a lot of apps today. Perhaps the most important capability was how easy and reliable it was to lock it to a tape machine. It had a proprietary audio interface that handled LTC (Longitudinal Time Code) duties befitting of the name “SMPTE Track.” My studio sported a 1-inch 16-track analog tape machine, so I used virtual tracks pretty heavily with racks of MIDI gear, including drum machines (the mainstay was an E-MU SP-12). The whole rig worked brilliantly, but, upon initial boot, you had to go grab coffee while it loaded up the environment and song files via floppy. Hard drives mostly came later.

The photo above is of my studio in an interim period while it was at my residence. SMPTE Track is on the screen behind me. The other screen is the UI for a VCA-based automation system. I moved into Pro Tools (1.1!) and Opcode software in the early ’90s. I still have the Atari and all the SMPTE Track stuff. I kept it for a while in case I needed to remix something. It’s all been collecting dust in boxes for decades now.

Shawn Dealey

I started on Cubase 4 on a PC I built, circa 1999. I was 15. I had a 4-channel Aardvark Direct Pro 24/96 that I bought from my high-school teacher who taught a music production class where I spent a lot of time hanging out. I added a Behringer mixer to get more drum inputs into my interface. I had JBL Control 1s as monitors that my dad had lying around, and a dbx 160X was my first piece of outboard gear.

Jeffrey Green

My first DAW was Vision by Opcode (RIP) on a Power Mac G3 (that I still have in my attic). I believe it was 1992. I remember how easy and revolutionary it was to move chunks of MIDI data around, seeing an uncluttered visual representation of the notes and CC data in the same window. And how fast and easy it was to draw in automation curves and do quantization, etc. I know a lot of folks that were using it way back then look back on this software with rose-colored glasses, but it truly was quite intuitive and powerful at the time. I’m not certain that DAWs since have ever surpassed its ability to do MIDI recording and editing so quickly and easily.

Image Source: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/opcode-vision-102

I then remember upgrading to Studio Vision Pro not long thereafter in order to do audio recording(!) as well as MIDI. I purchased a miniscule SCSI hard drive for probably several thousand dollars in order to record a handful of audio tracks to go alongside the MIDI data. MIDI and audio both in one program? Amazing!

If I look further back in my digital closet, I actually used Sound Tools in college (late 1980s) as my first computer audio editor. I remember I could instruct it to make an edit on a stereo file and then go get a cup of coffee in the studio kitchen and come back, and it still wasn’t finished. Wow. Good times.

Kenny Bergle

What a fascinating timeline this recalls. My first system was just MIDI. It was a Commodore SX-64 (the first color-screen portable computer!), a PreSonus MIDI interface and Emile Tobenfeld’s Dr. T’s Algorithmic Composer software.

This was the first system I set up for BB King in 1985. He gave me a blond Lucille guitar for a few days, and I put a MIDI pickup on it. He then played all the horn licks into the computer to give to the bandleader for arrangement and orchestration for rehearsals. Before this, a single song took eight hours to rehearse. After this, the bandleader would walk into the rehearsals with the books under his arm like other bands... 

My first audio DAW was the Kurzweil K250; I could record on it, edit on it, sample on it, key map on it. It was $25,000 brand-new with all the options, and Chuck’s QLS software (Quick Loading System) was critical to its success both in my studio and in the pro studios in Hollywood. At the time (1985), Nashville could not be bothered with anything digital. This was 12-bit floating point technology. Huge, bulky, and super slow, but it could record and edit actual audio!

My first PC system (1985) was an IBM PC, running at 4MHz with a $2,000 20MB (megabyte!)

Seagate “Hard Card” PCI-based hard drive, and two floppy drives that had a capacity of 300MB and cost $500 each. The Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface and a dot matrix printer were the peripherals. On that, I ran the first PC notation-based software, Personal Composer by Jim Miller of Hawaii.

My second audio DAW was a Mac Plus running Digidesign’s Sound Designer 2.0 software, the precursor to Pro Tools. I also had a Total Music MIDI interface with SMPTE running Music Mouse, a fantastic algorithmic mouse-based software that was simply a gas. That was 1986. Then Vision, Performer, Studio Vision, and Digital Performer.

Don Carr

I was a latecomer to the DAW game. I was rockin’ DA-88s until I got a Digi 002R, a Mac G4 tower, and Pro Tools 6 in about 2004. It was a big financial investment at the time. Doesn’t seem that long ago, but I remember burning CDs and DVDs full of guitar tracks and mailing them to clients. We have come a long way in a crazy-short period of time!

How About You?

If you haven’t made the jump yet into a workstation of your own, then there’s never been a better time. Computers are so powerful, and software options are more plentiful than they were “way back when.” Call your Sweetwater Sales Engineer at (800) 222-4700 to get advice on what system will work best for your needs. And start writing your own story.

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