(Image credit: Steinberg) The godfather of DAWs: Steinberg Cubase 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.
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?
Asking a few basic questions can help us understand the incredible music-making power we have at our disposal in software 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. 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. 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.
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 best DAWs 2020: the best music production software for PC and Mac