thought this was a good place to jump in, heres a recording by me in 1997 done on PC, pasting the notes from my website....
This is the very first track I recorded on a PC, I believe it was done at some time during 1997.
Previously I had been using a portastudio and a Roland TR-505 Drum Machine, there was also a brief period where I would use drums sequenced in scream tracker along with my portastudio.
This track came about only because I bought ans SW60xg soundcard, I had no intention of recording digital audio to the PC when I purchased the card as it is a midi card only (essentially the standalone version of the DB50xg daughterboard.
However the card came with some software, including a beta version of Voyetras Digital Orchestrator, which at the time seemed to be one of the first non hardware dependant Digital Audio Sequncers.
I cant remember how long it took me, but it was a frustrating process, for example, my soundcard, a soundblaster 16 I believe, was at the time incapable of doing full duplex audio at 44.1 khz, so the guitars on this track are actually recorded at 22khz.
The other vital ingredient was a small device called a Korg Pandora, Korgs previous guitar products had been horrible, but the new walkman sized Pandora was somewhat of a revolution, it predated things like the line6 Pod by 5 years, and I thought it was great.
My guitar on this is I believe, a BC Rich Ironbird, a cheap one, Platinum or Bronze series, It was the guitar I used for gigging at the time, it was badly beaten up, but always stayed in tuned. I also think this is the only track in which I have down tuned guitars, again this is due to me being in a metal band at the time.
The drums and synths all come from the SW60xg, and listening today, I think they are quite good still.
Back at the time, there was no audio mixdown or bounce feature in sequencers, so to mix this down I think I used a minidisc recorder, and years later sampled it back into my PC, it sounds like theres tape hiss on it but I suspect thats the Soundblaster hiss.
The track itself, I still like it a lot, the guitar solos are sort of groovy, especially the last one, and I think I did a good job on programming the drums given the experience I had, at the time I was able to sort of fake playing real drums, and I think that helps a lot in programming, its something else I should have kept up.
You may notice a strange pause at 3:48, I had to write that into the track, Digital Orchestrator would lose synch after the slow bit, so I actually would stop and restart the sequencer right at that point to resynch it up.
http://www.lostforever.org/futurism/futurism-faster.mp3
