Way back in 1982 i watched a film called the Fog by John Carpenter. I think i had a very basic DAW called Cakewalk in 1991 on Windows 3. So i set out on the mission to reproduce the films main theme with zero sequencing knowledge. On it it had a few sampled drums and basic sounds a woodblock and basic synth. And in two days i had sequenced the whole theme tune from the Fog. I didn’t keep it but wish i had as i thought it was pretty decent. The pleasure of having a complete track finished felt really good. How about your experiences?
It’s not the very 1st. but it’s over a decade old. Drum and Bass, you might want to skip forwards a minute, the bass near at the end sounds pretty decent through cans. It doesn’t sound as bad as I thought it would. The main Kick I made in Zebra, the rest would have been Camel Audio Alchemy, might have resampled bits through the e6400, not sure. Would have been Logic 9 on Core2Duo Imac.
Edit: Just listened to it through the tiny eris’s, that kick thumps. I better re-install Zebra.
Hah, yes, because it was only in 2018 when I started making music. I had made a bunch of one minute loops before attempting a “real” track with the time pressure of only having the Ableton live trial. I’m still pretty happy with it, I learned a lot and i think it’s better than a bunch of tracks that came after it!
Mine (Hardware, not tracker, SID, etc.) was in around ‘94. A couple of friends and I were up really late multitracking my MicroMoog to a Tascam 1/2” 8-track reel. Turned out like something between Kraftwerk and Plastikman Sheet One
1980s, using a Roland SH-09 (which I still have), a Digitech delay, and a cheap microphone that I recorded sound-on-sound with a consumer reel-to-reel and a Radio Shack mixer. I did an entire album of material this way, which I then duped for friends and used as a demo.
My first electronic track was made for a 24h Ableton contest in 2012. Took me 3h to assemble the samples given for this, and 21h to work on the mix.
I learned a lot from it.
Before this I had recorded several tracks with different bands. Most of them were one shot impro sessions, like this one.
It would take us a month to analyze it, structure a song from it, and another one to be able to replay it live. Few made it to a decent recording though.
I guess it would have been mid 1990s. Bass, junk percussion “drum set”, borrowed Roland d20 through a big muff, radio static, assorted kids toys, etc (basically everything at my disposal).
All recorded on a pile of cassette recorders and a couple of reel to reel dictaphones in an attempt to multi track. Record on one, record that and another instrument into the next one, repeat. All with the built in mics. I wanted a four track so bad. Haha.
It was my attempt at experimental industrial. It actually turned out better than you might think. I wish I still had a copy.
Mid-90s, me as a 6 year old with a fisher price cassette recorder and a guitar built from lego and rubber bands, chanting and humming, experimental af. It all went downhill from that point.
Oh yes…
I started with a 4 Track Recorder (Korg CR4), a Yamaha Guitar and a Boss DR-670 Drum Computer. One of the very first tracks was “triviality”, when I was 18:
After years of playing in Bands and making different home recordings my first experience with electronic music was a track that was made on the Korg Electrobe MX only, inspired by the movie “Arrival”:
First track every completed was on an Asus eeepc with Ableton Live Lite and free vsts.
I can’t remember the number of times I had to freeze and render stuff to be able to fit in the number of tracks that allowed that computer/DAW combo:
And this is the second one, never made another track on that computer
Yep! I actually started a tracker and sampler on my Atari ST as a kid, but I don’t think I ever really finished anything. I tried again with Fruityloops on an old Dell laptop in maybe 2005 or so, but gave up because if I tried to do anything complicated (like run maybe two factory plugin instances at once, or add FX) the laptop would crack up. Plus the 12" screen was pretty difficult to work with Finally got back into it 3 or so ago, and all of my finished tracks are on my Soundcloud. This is the first one, an intro I made for my end of 2017 mixtape, it’s kind of a melancholy slow evolver, but isn’t all that bad imo:
First one I ever sent to a record label was 1989, made on a 101, 202, 606, 727 and Poly800, I still have it on cassette tape.
I sent it to about 5 labels at the time, the only one who replied was Kickin Records who said it was a good stuff but not the kind of thing they were looking for, they said to send them any future tracks though, which was quite encouraging for a younger me.
I cant really remember what the first one sounded like, It would have been 94 maybe? I was drummer in a band with some school mates. We went round to the bass players house to record it all on a tascam 4 track.
Been making music ever since. In some form or another
My first that i ”completed” was on a A4 mk1 and AR mk1 recorded straight to a Zoom H6.
Everything was made in song mode on both machines and recorded in a single take.
Not the best music but Im pretty proud of it. Normaly i would gravitate to more techno/psy stuff but this track just flowed out of me with No thinking of genre or style.
all 9 of them! we recorded them in a single evening live in a studio.
it was 1992, i was a singer (!) and wrote lyrics in a basement punk band.
a year later i started another semi-punk, semi-industrial band and switched to drums.
What a weirdly coincidental topic! Just last weekend I was digging through an old backup drive and came across my first solo album from 2001 - I’d been in bands before that which the less said about the better… It was weird listening to it again and hearing melodies I just would never write now as I was just guessing most of the time back then. Also weird to hear how some things have persisted ot this day… sample and hold modulation of filter cutofff is something I seem still to be obsessed with. As is making ropey attempts at a Raster-Noton style sound…
I also found the original Buzz files for it… it might be fun to do some “cover versions” of my own music to see if I can turn them into something half-listenable… because I’m not sure I’m brave enough to upload the originals!
I don’t remember much about my first finished track, apart from it was shit and mostly done on a cracked copy of Ableton and Reaktor (which I didn’t understand at all).
If I remember rightly I posted it to MySpace, where it was never heard from again, thank god. This must have been some time around 2005 or something. I used to drink a lot back then, memory is a bit hazy.
