Free Music Production Software

When I first started producing music I only had free music production software to work with. No cool stuff like Ableton Live or Pro Tools was out either.

I had Master Tracks Pro and a bootleg copy of Cakewalk at it's early stages. We are talking about the year of 1999 here.

The Internet was not huge back then and downloading powerful software programs was not likely to happen.

Why you ask?

Well even though I had Internet it was Dial UP.

That's right DSL and Cable modem speeds were not even close to common back then. So creating royalty free music on pirated software was not likely going to happen either.

The Cakewalk I had was bootleg in the since my friend let me rock it on his Compaq laptop with 3 gigs of ram and Windows 95 with a cracked screen.

I never let that be an excuse for me though. I still learned about audio production and recording. My background music production was still on point.

Another great thing this allowed me to do was get into midi. The board I had back then was an Alesis QS6. It did not have a sequencer on board like the Roland XP-60 which ruled at the time.

Freeware was not at all popular due to the lack of P2P sites like Napster, Limewire or ARES.

You simply had to take your drum machine with limited samples and try editing them in limited software programs. This is why loops are a killer tool to have in your production library.