He is also a member of the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress and an advisor to the Committee for Library Information Resources. In 2013, he was awarded a patent #8,510,361 in the US (as well as other countries) for a variable exponent averaging detector and dynamic range controller. Regularly published in professional journals and trade magazines world wide, George Massenburg received the Gold Medal from the Audio Engineering Society in 2008. In 1982, he founded George Massenburg Labs, an audio electronics company that has released an extensive range of innovative recording technologies, all based on his original designs. In addition to numerous Mix Magazine TEC Awards, in 1988 he also won the Academy of Country Music Record of the Year Award for his production on the album “Trio” featuring Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.įurther, George has designed, built and managed several recording studios as well as contributed to the acoustical and architectural design of many other studios, including George Lucas’ Skywalker Sound. George’s work has gained him world wide recognition and four Grammy Awards, including the Grammy for Technical Achievement in 1998, at the time making him one of only seventeen individuals to ever receive this honor. His work includes milestone albums by Earth, Wind & Fire, Linda Ronstadt, Natasha Bedingfield, Herbie Hancock, Billy Joel, the Dixie Chicks and many, many more. They can be intimidating to begin with, difficult to master, fun to use, and downright powerful in the right hands.Ĭheck out free projects like MilkyTracker (Windows, macOS, Linux, and others), modern clones of legendary DOS and AmigaOS trackers FastTracker II and Protracker 2, an open-source clone of the famous DOS-based Impulse Tracker called Schism Tracker, and modern Windows tracker OpenMPT.Over the past four decades, George Massenburg has been involved in over 400 records. If you have a passing interest in creating chiptune or would like an insight into how electronic music creation was done in the past, there are plenty of trackers that you can download and use for free. This is where chiptune and video game music came from, but trackers aren’t only limited to bleeps and boops, they can also trigger audio samples and hardware or software instruments.

They were instrumental in the creation of early computerized music, where text-based inputs were used to trigger on-chip synthesizers. Trackers are not DAWs, and in fact predate the modern DAW by a couple of decades. You can also apply a ton of effects to your tracks to completely transform the sound. Instruments are essentially samples that are tuned to notes of your choosing, while samples are spliced automatically so that you can “play” them to create interesting arrangements. There are a ton of built-in “instruments” to get you started, as well as samples to cut up and manipulate as you see fit. You can record these parts live using MIDI controllers, or click and drag using your mouse. You can write melodies and bass lines with a piano roll or build beats in a grid-based drum pattern. Add drums, samples, and software instruments to a scene, then move between them to trigger different parts of your song (you’re limited to four scenes in the free version). Serato Studio is focused on scene-based music creation.

This is no surprise since Serato is a big name in the DJ world, offering digital vinyl system (DVS) apps like Serato Scratch and Serato DJ.

Serato Studio is a free DAW for Windows and macOS that’s heavily geared towards beat-making and sample-based music production.

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