Mine was like the meme; sound recorder and a beige stick microphone put up to an old used Fender practice amp, and a no-name brand guitar from the pawn shop. We’ve come a long way.
 - I’ll match you and raise:  - We could rock the fuck out! 
 - Haha! Go cool music toys! This isn’t mine, just a picture I found online. The little hole on the left held a mic. 
 
 
- Oh 100% the same thing as yours. I still don’t have a real mic like 20+ years later… 
- Ardour with vitalium 
 Build in aux port
 Seaboard midi Controller
 Teufel boomster and/or marshal monitor II as monitor
- Impulse Tracker on a 486 PC. As raw as music production gets. 
- Same with the top picture, but with a clip-on mic. Then I had a pair of those old classic bookshelf speakers that picked up signal interference like your phone when a text is arriving. I also recorded vocal layers by playing a recorded track on those speakers and singing over it by placing the mic close by. 
- Jeskola Buzz Tracker. Making tracks in a vertical midi step sequencer with no mixer was wild AF. - IIRC it came with an awesome drum kit called PSI Drums and a set of proprietary plugins (non VST) which included several cool synths abd Whitenoise Stereodist - the most brutal distortion I’ve ever heard, surpassing Ohmicide, Coldfire and Rift in its ability to turn things into aggressive digital terrain. - Migrated to Fruity Loops pretty soon thereafter - Buzz was my first love as well and tbh I really miss it. I wanted to make industrial music back then and Buzz made it simple, which was good because I had no idea what I was doing! - Same! I have a few of my very early very primitive tracks in Buzz. - Jeskola briefly revived it so if you’re wanting to return to trackers could be worth a look. Renoise is still hyped (haven’t tried it) as is the hardware Polyend Tracker (also haven’t tried it). - I’m more of a (virtual) modular than a tracker mindset these days so a combo of FL, Bitwig, Reaktor, Plugdata etc to make a fusion of industrial and idm– - https://sunthief.bandcamp.com/album/thy-neighbors-looking-glass - Awesome, I will check this out, thanks! I do enjoy some Renoise from time to time. I also still make modular, industrial-esque music, using the Nerdseq tracker hardware, here’s my latest: https://circuit23.bandcamp.com/album/mens-vermis 
 
 
 
- LMMS and a cheap MIDI keyboard - Now it’s FL Studio, the same MIDI keyboard, a guitar I already had but got out of storage and only sorta know how to play, and a Rocksmith Real Tone Cable - LMMS gang! I also graduated to FL, but LMMS will always have a place in my heart as my first proper DAW. 
 
- Windows Sound Recorder was an intermediate step for me, when I left my modest gear behind and was basically homeless. All I had access to was a library computer and the crappy headphones they had and no microphone, but I really wanted to create SOMETHING. I’m proud that I could make some really simple, lo-fi, ambient stuff with just a paperclip in the mic jack and the wide array of processing options that WSR has (adjust volume, add echo). It’s such an uphill-both-ways kind of story, though. - You got any stuff floating around? I’m curious about it. 
 
- a demo of ejay from a cereal box! 




