Mine was like the meme; sound recorder and a beige stick microphone put up to an old used Fender practice amp, and a no-name brand guitar from the pawn shop. We’ve come a long way.
a demo of ejay from a cereal box!
I’ll match you and raise:
Haha! Go cool music toys! This isn’t mine, just a picture I found online. The little hole on the left held a mic.
We could rock the fuck out!
Oh 100% the same thing as yours. I still don’t have a real mic like 20+ years later…
Ardour with vitalium
Build in aux port
Seaboard midi Controller
Teufel boomster and/or marshal monitor II as monitorImpulse Tracker on a 486 PC. As raw as music production gets.
Jeskola Buzz Tracker. Making tracks in a vertical midi step sequencer with no mixer was wild AF.
IIRC it came with an awesome drum kit called PSI Drums and a set of proprietary plugins (non VST) which included several cool synths abd Whitenoise Stereodist - the most brutal distortion I’ve ever heard, surpassing Ohmicide, Coldfire and Rift in its ability to turn things into aggressive digital terrain.
Migrated to Fruity Loops pretty soon thereafter
Buzz was my first love as well and tbh I really miss it. I wanted to make industrial music back then and Buzz made it simple, which was good because I had no idea what I was doing!
Same! I have a few of my very early very primitive tracks in Buzz.
Jeskola briefly revived it so if you’re wanting to return to trackers could be worth a look. Renoise is still hyped (haven’t tried it) as is the hardware Polyend Tracker (also haven’t tried it).
I’m more of a (virtual) modular than a tracker mindset these days so a combo of FL, Bitwig, Reaktor, Plugdata etc to make a fusion of industrial and idm–
https://sunthief.bandcamp.com/album/thy-neighbors-looking-glass
Awesome, I will check this out, thanks! I do enjoy some Renoise from time to time. I also still make modular, industrial-esque music, using the Nerdseq tracker hardware, here’s my latest: https://circuit23.bandcamp.com/album/mens-vermis
Same with the top picture, but with a clip-on mic. Then I had a pair of those old classic bookshelf speakers that picked up signal interference like your phone when a text is arriving. I also recorded vocal layers by playing a recorded track on those speakers and singing over it by placing the mic close by.
LMMS and a cheap MIDI keyboard
Now it’s FL Studio, the same MIDI keyboard, a guitar I already had but got out of storage and only sorta know how to play, and a Rocksmith Real Tone Cable
LMMS gang! I also graduated to FL, but LMMS will always have a place in my heart as my first proper DAW.
Windows Sound Recorder was an intermediate step for me, when I left my modest gear behind and was basically homeless. All I had access to was a library computer and the crappy headphones they had and no microphone, but I really wanted to create SOMETHING. I’m proud that I could make some really simple, lo-fi, ambient stuff with just a paperclip in the mic jack and the wide array of processing options that WSR has (adjust volume, add echo). It’s such an uphill-both-ways kind of story, though.
You got any stuff floating around? I’m curious about it.