My first experiences of using MIDI software to write music actually came right in the middle of The Unknown era. Late in 1997 my old Amiga 500+ died and there was a period of maybe 10 months before I managed to get hold of a second-hand Amiga 1200 to replace it. During that nightmarish spell I found myself trying to use my brother's PC instead. Once again, it was magazine cover-disks that made it possible, supplying me with a range of software to experiment with. I remember a demo of the first version of Fruity Loops, something by Magix, a demo of Rebirth that always drove me mad as it was time-limited to 30 mins usage. There was also a full version of Cubasis Lite that I would come back to later, but during this time I mostly worked with something called Music Works 2. This was a total headfuck for me as it used actual traditional music notation, which I knew next to nothing about, and though I technically had a MIDI keyboard, I still lacked the technical know-how to set it up, so I had to draw the notes in manually with the mouse. Nevertheless, I persevered with it, in no small part because at this time I was getting increasingly mired in problems with depression and anxiety, and writing music was how I coped. Unfortunately, the files of the tracks I did at that time got deleted and all that remains are a handful of untitled tunes I recorded to tape.
For all the frustrations involved though, it did give me some further experience of being able to write relatively more complex compositions. One of the major limitations of using samples and a tracker as a musically clueless dunce is that I generally had no idea what key or chord a sample was and so didn't understand what I was doing, just in terms of writing melodic parts that were in tune. Now, to be honest, my ear for pitch-recognition is quite poor and I'm still to this day occasionally prone to writing unintentionally discordant parts, but using MIDI did allow me to start improving a bit in this regard.
Anyway, at some point in 2001 I had saved up £350 and bought the parts to build my own PC. With this, I started using Cubasis Lite and over the course of 2 or 3 years made two albums, neither of which ever saw any sort of public release. I found working with Cubasis (and for the second album, Cubase 3) very slow and frustrating. I was drawing notes into the piano roll with the mouse and I didn't like the General MIDI sounds I was getting from my crappy Soundblaster soundcard: I particularly hated the drum sounds. What was more, for some reason when I tried recording the playback – I don't remember if this was to tape or some digital recording method – the soundcard would produce some really weird random noises, some of which were kind of cool but maddeningly inconsistent. This was still before I had internet access and so I had no notion that VSTi's existed. I did try using some drum samples with Cubase but the latency of the Soundblaster was fucked (or perhaps more likely, I just had no idea how to adjust and set it up properly) so the samples were always out of sync with the GM MIDI parts.
So yeah... two albums in as many years, lots of frustration. Thankfully things changed for the better in 2004 when, now I was online, a websearch for tracker programs introduced me to Renoise.
Discography
COMING SOON-ish