Pictures of
Vintage MIDI Sequencers
The history behind today's
marvelous music technology
by Tweak
The origins of popular midi
sequencers go back go back to the 1st wave of home computers in the 1980s.
This was right around the time the Commodore 64 was released, shortly
followed by the very first Macintoshes, and of course the venerable Atari ST. Sure you can look at some of these and make fun of
them from the vantage point of modern sequencers, but you would be missing a
fundamental point. These early programs were stocked with
incredible features that no longer exist on the modern platforms. The code
behind these sequencer had to fit into as little as a 1 meg machine, and you can
bet the programmers squeezed every bit out their bandwidth. Finally, many of
them are easy to use and don't have the massive learning curve that modern
programs do. Every sequencer has its own perspective on music making, and
in the early days they often took extreme, experimental approaches to music
making.
Did you know you can run
old Atari MIDI programs on your PC? Complete with MIDI i/o? You can
by installing the Atari Emulator STEEM on your PC. It's a free
download and many of the programs you see can be downloaded legally as
well. While Notator and Cubase are not available (and please don't ask me
about them), you can try your hand on Dr. T's KCS, TuneSmith, Master Tracks
Pro and many more! STEEM works very well, even in Windows XP.
You can find out all the details on
Tim's
Atari Site.
If you really want to try your hand on a vintage sequencer this is the ticket.
Find out why some European artists still use their Ataris as the midi platform
of choice.
Atari Cubase (ancestor to Cubase VST/SX)
This is the ancestor of Cubase
VST32. It ran on the Atari ST, TT and Falcon series and was one of the
only sequencers to successfully record and playback audio tracks on the
platform. Steinberg claims it was the 1st sequencer maker to have the
graphical arrange window as you see below. Today, all the major sequencers
have this horizontal arrangement for constructing songs.
screenshot courtesy of Tim's Atari Midi World :
http://tamw.atari-users.net
Atari Notator (ancestor to Logic)
This is the program the Tweak
and many others cut his teeth on. It is the ancestor of Logic Audio
Platinum. Notator was basically a pattern based sequencer. You built your
pattern in the center if the screen and linked them in the arrange screen to the
left. Simple and effective.
read about the history of Logic
here
Download an mp3 of one of
my early Notator Industrial tunes
City Rails
Cakewalk Professional 4.0 (ancestor to
Sonar)
screenshot courtesy of the Cakewalk and Sonar Users website
Cakewalk started as a DOS
program, one of the earliest MIDI programs. There's more Cakewalk screens at the
above URL so go check them out.
M Interactive Composition program
Click to enlarge
One of the better algorithmic
editors of the 80's. You used the mouse to paint the lines in the Cyclic
Editor. Even today, we don't have one of these built into our top flight
sequencer. This program was fun to use. I used to just sit
back and let M play my MIDI system.
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screenshot courtesy of Tim's Atari Midi World :
http://tamw.atari-users.net
Dr. T's Tunesmith Algorithmic Phrase
Generator
One of my early favorites, as
it generated melodies and harmonies to many exotic scales. The cool thing
was that you never knew what Tunesmith was going to come up with. While
the interface text-based and required quite a bit of reading to get up to speed,
once you did there were many musical mysteries.
Dr. T's Keyboard Controlled Sequencer.
Click to enlarge
This was the arrange page of an
early sequencer. Where's the grid? It was in your imagination.
I don't have a Commodore screenshot unfortunately, but it looked much like the
one above. The Keyboard controlled sequencer is called that because you
pressed keys on your computer keyboard to trigger the sequences, and the program
remembered your moves. It took quite a bit of thinking to figure out KCS.
The songs I made with it were quite intense.
Click to enlarge
Protezoa
This is a shot of Protezoa, an
editor librarian for the Emu Proteus series modules. Before XoR, which
later became Unisyn, and before Sound Surfer (which became SoundDiver) there
were individual editor librarians for popular synths and modules. Protezoa
was one of the best of these, and if you find a master disk of one someday note
that there are 64 early patch creations by your resident TweakMeister bundled in
the directory.
Excellent resources on Vintage Sequencers!
Like these screenshots? There's tons more
at Tim's Atari
Page
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