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The DAW - Digital Work Station is really just a tool and one needs to go back to the start way before the DAW to truly understand why the DAW was created. How did people 1st record the sound? On April 9, 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville made a recording on a "phonautograph," which worked by tracing sound waves onto paper blackened by smoke. Unplayable for more than a century, the recording was recently brought to life by new audio technology. On the recording, Scott is heard singing a snippet from the French folksong "Au Clair de la Lune." Listen to it just click play.

There it is the first known recording of a human and that was just 164 years ago from today 1/20/2024. It would be another 17 years before the phonograph would be invented and from that day it would be another 10 years before the gramophone would become the Record Player we all grow up with and tons of the greatest music was played on for many years only to fall to the wayside for digital Media which is the staple of today. So that is a little history of mostly how sound was played but we need to understand more about how the sound was recorded.

When Record Players hit the market in 1957 the records they played were made out of plastic and the Mother stamper that molded the sound groves into the plastic made by the Master Record and it was made in a studio with musicians playing and being recorded to the Master Record. It's cool know and look back on this technology which is the history of sound recording. Here is a cool video showing a modern way this process is done.

Master Records were phased out when Tape fully hit the market in the 1950's which was then used to record the audio, Master Recording, and then play it back to make the Master Record. Crazy how the evolution of all this happened. So when did the CD start to take over? Well, we all know that year - 1982, if you were at least a teenager. In 1982 we all started getting our favorite music on CD, it had no skips or pops it was amazing! By the end of the 80's we had Tons of CD's and music was now being recorded and distributed in digital format, the age of analog was over. Soon the internet came in 1995 and .mp3 soon after and that is where we are today, from a Vinyl Analog Disc to a Cellphone with excess to every song/album with us all the time at a press of a digital button and you can record your band on your cellphone, mix and master it and distribute it all on your cellphone....I need a beer!