late 80s/early 90s

[TranceCrafter]

I've done a lot of collecting info about these decades and trying to piece together an idea of what it would have been like to make electronic music in the late 80s or early 90s. I'm honestly just really curious about these old workflows, not because I ever want to go back to those days, but rather because it lets me compare their way of working with limitations to try to push my own creativity to similar levels!

anyway...

as much as I can kinda piece together, some computers that were around before 1991 were the Atari ST and the Amiga line of machines....commodore 64, tandy 1000 etc.

and those machines had a very different approach to computing that did not really involve a gui until late 80s going into early 90s.

I can imagine that it would have been possible to write trance music in 1990ish on an Atari ST, by installing say, a really early midi tracker onto windows 2.x or ms dos... I think.

...and if you could run a midi cable to a hardware synth from the Atari ST via the midi output..... In order to record the sound that the synth would make.

and I'm supposing that in those days you would mic up individual synths up inside a studio and record the synths one at a time onto a form of tape....probably reel-2-reel in order to store the best possible quality.

then those tracks (stored on reel-2-reel) could be routed to a mixer where they would be mixed down to a master and outputted to some kind of master copy.

which at some point down the line would be burned to CD (or I guess recorded onto DAT)


***

I'm kinda curious how accurate this description sounds! I was born in 1991 so I would have not been old enough to understand this stuff. this is just me using the internet as a time machine :3

[nucleon]

Sounds about right except I guess you dont real...

[NikkiA]

1991 brought MIDI on PC into the realms of easi...

[Teksonik]

TranceCrafter wrote: ↑Tue Nov 29, 2022 6:28 am ...

[NextDAW]

Well, in the late 80s, it depends also whether ...

[N_K]

Atari ST was "the Cubase machine", in a sense. ...

[chuck death]

My first music setup around that time was an At...

[N_K]

chuck death wrote: ↑Tue Nov 29, 2022 9:43 pm Mu...