Hi all, new member here.
Well, I share the same heritage as a number of people here, starting out using trackers on the Amiga. OctaMED was the main one. Then I used FastTracker II on the PC for a while. A friend from school used to come over and he would give me ideas and I would implement them. It was fun. If I still had the files, the sound quality would probably sound quite unrefined compared to what can be achieved these days, and it was probably a bit repetitive in places. But the trade off was that I actually finished my tracks and felt good about it, rather than what I do nowadays which is constantly fiddle and experiment with everything and not achieve so much.
Then I had a long time away from it all, doing other things musically like playing flute in a couple of amateur orchestras. More recently I have family commitments and can’t get out in the evenings so much, so I’ve stopped that for now.
In around 2016 I bought a second hand license for Bitwig v1 and had some fun using that. But my music keyboard skills are not the best, and when using the computer keyboard with Bitwig, you only have access to one octave at a time, and there is no step entry functionality, which I find quite poor.
Then I started experimenting with Reaper and the Hackey Trackey tracker plugin. It was quite fun, but I just found MIDI editing with Reaper to be more effort than it should be.
After that I used FL Studio for around 18 months. Note entry is quite good with a computer keyboard, being similar to the method used by trackers. But the keyboard shortcuts can’t be changed and some are hardwired to a numeric keypad, which isn’t great when you use a laptop without one.
In the background I’d been experimenting with Renoise for several years, and I got round to purchasing it recently.
I’m more into synthesis than using samples though, so recently I upgraded my Bitwig license to version 3 and I like experimenting with creating synths inside The Grid. But I still like the tracker way of entering notes. At the moment I’m using Renoise to control Bitwig using MIDI. Then I can use Renoise as the sequencer, which is great. I can still record the MIDI to Bitwig clips if I want to. I have both programs open side by side.
Honestly I must spend more time thinking about and refining my workflow than actually achieving much musically. I have all these short, unfinished tracks, because I find the process of expanding on them to be slow and unmotivating. At least it is a hobby rather than having to do it for a living