







Back in 1997 I was regularly visiting a local studio that had Cakewalk version 1 installed on a windows 95 computer, alongside a variety of hardware studio gear. These were the days when it took an entire day to get barely half a track produced due to more often than not having to rig up various midi instruments and sampling vocals into the Akai aswell as recording directly into the harddrive. Back in 1997 I was regularly visiting a local studio that had Cakewalk version 1 installed on a windows 95 computer, alongside a variety of hardware studio gear. These were the days when it took an entire day to get barely half a track produced due to more often than not having to rig up various midi instruments and sampling vocals into the Akai aswell as recording directly into the harddrive.

By early 1998 I had enough money to purchase my own PC for around a grand with a massive monitor included, and it was here I obtained Cakewalk for myself at home.

I was an avid user of the software on a daily basis and preferred it over its rival Cuebase.





After 18 months of banging out demo after demo I finally nailed a number one hit in the BBC Radio club charts and then number 7 in the UK Pop charts. This was all done on Cakewalk in my bedroom and it got me noticed as a producer. I used the software all through the 2000's as it progressed from version to version, but by 2010 there was a number of different platforms offering new ways of producing and performing music, most notably Ableton. I left Cakewalk behind and got totally lost in Ableton's multi usages from DJing to live jamming.









Anyway fast forward another ten years and it has just come to my attention that Bandlab have recently made Cakewalk a free downloadable DAW with all the effects and all of the features you would have got had you purchased a full copy for sale.



