How was music created before Digital Audio workstations?

[soultensionbenjamin]

I figured I should research this a bit.

[the4thImpulse]

Analog tape machines!

The reels costed hundreds and would only hold ~30 mintues of audio over 23 tracks (the reels I have used). You would have to cut the tape and tape it back together to make any edits which as you could imagine is no easy feat. Lots of rehearsing went down before the actual recording where as with digital you could record every minute of everything. Some people (very few) still record with tape because of the natural distortion and noise that comes with it and after hearing it myself it would be a great recording medium for some genres.

[nOk]

Here's another question: in retro gaming consoles, ok for example the NES, how was themusic programmed into the soundchip? Was it a program or was it strictly code? Something ive been wondering for a long while...

[ghelded_kultz]

I'm not sure but I am pretty sure it was strictly code. We watched a video in my Electronic Music class from the mid 1980s looking at how synthesizers developed and were being used then and it seemed with the "new" digital synthesizers the music was created entirely with code telling the synthesizer to play what for how long at what pitch, but not with a program (I think). I assume video game music from the same time period would be made in a similar way. I'll see if my teacher knows.

[the4thImpulse]

Here's another question: in retro gaming consoles, ok for example the NES, how was themusic programmed into the soundchip? Was it a program or was it strictly code? Something ive been wondering for a long while...

The methods changed quite a bit from the first arcade machine to the 16 bit generations so going by your NES example this is what I have learned.. "The NES board supported a total of five sound channels. These included two pulse wave channels of variable duty cycle (12.5%, 25%, 50% and 75%), with a volume control of sixteen levels and hardware pitch bending supporting frequencies ranging from 54 Hz to 28 kHz. Additional channels included one fixed-volume triangle wave channel supporting frequencies from 27 Hz to 56 kHz, one sixteen-volume level white noise channel supporting two modes (by adjusting inputs on a linear feedback shift register) at sixteen preprogrammed frequencies and one differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) channel with 6-bit resolution, using 1-bit delta encoding at sixteen preprogrammed sample rates from 4.2 kHz to 33.5 kHz. This final channel was also capable of playing standard pulse-code modulation (PCM) sound by writing individual 7-bit values at timed intervals."

Yes, that was taken completely from Wikipedia. There's a lot more to it I suggest researching it yourself if you really want to know everything about it.

[Kopachris]

Pen and paper.

You didn't specify how far before Digital Audio Workstations.

[Anforium]

Well in the 90s, there were these things called trackers. You input notes in a vertical format and use hexadecimal codes for effects. I use them as my primary software now, my favorite being sunvox, which is kind of a mix between classic trackers (Fasttracker II, ImpulseTracker) and modern DAWs. If you want to get a feel for the old 90s type stuff, download milkytracker and give it a go (it's free.)

Here's a list of modern tracker software you could check out

Old school styled trackers
Milky tracker (Fasttracker II clone)
Schism tracker (Impulse Tracker clone)

Modern trackers
OpenMPT
Sunvox (amazing, my favorite)
Renoise (basically a DAW with a tracker for the sequencer)

So yeah. Trackers rule.

[WavesOfParadox]

[GhostXb]

Some of the earliest iterations of break beats and pattern sequencing was actually very difficult to do. When Talking heads started out, being able to replay the same pattern through the whole song without someone recording it live was actually a new sound to most people. Break beats were made by cutting up cassette tapes and taping them back together.

Aphex Twin started out like this I believe. He's been known for preferring analogue sound, as he says that the slight variation between the recordings was more interesting, as opposed to having thousands of the same digital copy sound the exact same.

[CommandSpry]

as to how old school console music was made, I don't know exactly but I remember programming in QBasic in DOS way back in the day and there was a synthax to make music.

I don't remember the exact syntax but it was like

SOUND (X,Y,Z)

X, Y and Z being numbers up to 999, the first one is pitch, the second one is duration and the third one is color. Or something like that xD I remember there was a pause syntax too; perhaps it was just SOUND(0,0,0) or SOUND(0,Y,0) (to specify how long the pause is) or something like that. So I presume old console music programming worked in a simmilar way.

[Freewave]

Some of the earliest iterations of break beats and pattern sequencing was actually very difficult to do. When Talking heads started out, being able to replay the same pattern through the whole song without someone recording it live was actually a new sound to most people. Break beats were made by cutting up cassette tapes and taping them back together.

Sampling and samplers was key to a lot of electronic music in the day. Some of those tracing back to the importance of drum breaks in particular records that have spawned hundreds of children in hip-hop, drum & bass, etc.



I've got some great documentaries linked on one of my lists
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/TheScient ... on_youtube
from the synth pop era to detroit techno and such.

Synths used to be real and expensive. Speaking of which here's a nice timeline of what synths came out, when, and what they sounded like. http://rateyourmusic.com/list/TheScient ... nstruments