No talk of DAW's would be complete without
mentioning one of the first - 1979.
None other than Roger Nichols - Steely Dan, John Denver, Johnny Winter
(great story about how how was doing all three at once)
But anyway:
Roger Nichols...
Dang that guy was good.... check out the Wendel:
Thank you Connie, Cimcie, and Ashley
for putting this back up:
http://rogernichols.com/wendel
If for some reason it's down here's a pdf I made of the original
Digital Atomics site version:
http://www.ajawamnet.com/ajawam5/Wendel.pdf
1978-80 - used on Gaucho. Scroll down that page and look at the
screenshots... now look at ProTools, Sonar, Nuendo; any DAW today.
This guy was doing it back in 1978 using a Teledyne S/H card on a lunch
box PC. Actually better sample rate (125kHz).
But no fancy GUI Mac-a-Fag here... you had to write stuff in 808x
assembly.
And did you ever read about his motivation for being an audio engineer?
Wanted better stuff than crackly fucking vinyl. Started a studio part
time while working as a nuke engineer.
You really need to listen to the Aja title track on some new Events or
similar studio monitor. Fucking amazing; low to today's RMS levels, but
put it in a mastering suite and pop it a bit with some peak limiting,
and it sits well with the overprocessed shit of today. And sounds
better. Oh, and if you find the 2" multi-track master for it, Mr Fagen
will pay $600.00 (seems the record company lost it or maybe aliens took
it.)
A bit of published tidbits on making Gaucho tho:
They burned through 300 reels of 2" tape at $100.00 a reel
They paid Mr. Nichols $150,000 for Wendel development - out of their
RECORDING BUDGET!!! Fucking recording budget for one record...
And he was recording/tracking it while doing Johnny Winter and John
Denver...
If they did it here - the guy should have been Knighted - Sir
Roger...
Check out more about this amazing guy here:
http://rogernichols.com/
Note to the guy that posted a comment
on the wiki DAW "talk" page stating that the Wendel wasn't one of the
first
DAW's:
"...I haven't
fully
reverse-engineered it yet"
It's an old x80 PC. Not much to reverse engineer...except the
code, which most CS kids (probably like yourself) nowaday wouldn't even
understand (Roger knew what a CPU register was...)
"...is it is a
drum
sampling/replacement device, and not a hard disk recorder/DAW"
DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. I see no mention of it having to have
a hard disk.
Let's see - it's
digital since
it digitized incoming audio with a sample and hold card . It
manipulates
audio, and it's a
PC
workstation, state of the
art at the time.
Sounds like it has it all covered
"I
presently own more DAWs than
anyone who ever stepped on the Earth, so I'm very sharp on the topic."
OK..
when someone states
something like that, I just
tune out of
the conversation...
You may want to look at one of the
stories from Tao:
Ch'ing the master woodworker carved a
bell stand so intricately graceful that all who saw it were astonished.
They thought that a god must have made it.
The Marquis of Lu asked, "How did your
art archive something of such unearthly beauty?"
"My Lord," Ch'ing said, "I'm just a
simple woodworker — I don’t know anything about art. But here’s what I
can tell you.
Whenever I begin to carve a bell
stand, I concentrate my mind.
After three days of meditating, I no
longer
have any thoughts of praise or blame.
After five days, I no longer have any
thoughts of success or failure.
After seven days, I'm not identified
with a body. All my power is focused on my task; there are no
distractions.
At that point, I enter the mountain
forest. I examine the trees until exactly the right one appears. If I
can see a bell stand inside it, the real work is done, and all I have
to do is get started. Thus I harmonize inner and outer. That's why
people think that my work must
be superhuman."
Maybe that's why Roger was called
"THE IMMORTAL" by the guys in Steely Dan.
He is...