Steinberg Cubit "Visual Song Processing"full page colour ad from page 65 in the May 1989 issue of Keyboard Magazine and Steinberg Cubase "Buy it! Boot it! Love it! Or your money back!" half page black and white ad from page 112 in the March 1990 issue of Electronic Musician Magazine.
I don't do it often, but today I have two scans. And for good reason!
I had actually scanned each one separately a while back and written little bits to form into future blog posts, but then this morning I noticed a tweet from Steinberg announcing it was Cubase's 30th anniversary. And I thought... heck - that's a bandwagon worth jumping on! So I went back, checked, and sure enough... this Cubit advertisement first showed up in the May 1989 issue of Keyboard Magazine
(Aside: That May 1989 issue of Keyboard Magazine isn't just exciting because of this initial Cubit ad. Its also the now-legendary CYBERPUNK issue.)It wasn't just on this side of the pond that Stenberg was rolling out its successor to Twenty Four III (aka PRO24) sequencing software - Cubit was being rolled out in Europe in magazines such as Music Technology and Micro Music with large three page advertisements as well. Check out Mu:zines for those ads!
But the Cubit advertisements lasted for only a few months before Steinberg shut them down. The reason? According to Cubase's Wikipedia page, a trademark issue was forcing Steinberg to change the name.
And better for it too!
Well, it didn't take long for that name change to happen. How do I know? Well, for one, the Cubase ad includes quotes from three different 1989 magazine reviews - and those aren't the only reviews that came out soon after the Cubase name change.
Music Technology magazine out of the UK was one of the first with their review. It was actually a two-part review that ran in the August and September 1989 issues running in at over 8000 words. And the reviewer Nigel Lord still didn't manage to cover all of Cubase's features.
In his verdict, he writes:
"Quite honestly, this is the most impressive piece of music software I have yet encountered for the ST. And I certainly cannot conceive of it being possible to develop a more sophisticated sequencing package for that machine. As with most genuinely worthwhile designs, the transition from well-crafted tool to creative instrument is quite seamless - the features which give it a claim to both these titles being universally well thought-out and meticulously presented. Not only that, but it's a delight to use and one of that increasingly rare breed of technologically advanced designs which positively encourage the user to experiment and get to grips with it."
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Sound on Sound's review also came out in their August 1989 issue. And I gotta say after reading David Hughes' verdict, we are starting to see a pattern...
"I like this program a lot. Cubase is a natural successor to Pro24 and I would strongly recommend Cubase to any existing Pro24 owners, who should remember that they can save quite a substantial amount of money if they take part in the part-exchange scheme that Steinberg are offering. I would also recommend this program to those musicians looking for a fully professional system with the potential for expansion. Cubase has this in abundance. I've used the review package for over a month now and Steinberg will find it difficult to prise it out of my hands. I feel that I've written some of my best music with Cubase, and consequently don't want to lose a single note of it. I enjoyed the sheer depth of this product. You simply won't exhaust the possibilities in a single night. It will take a great deal longer than that, I promise you."
Keyboard Magazine's October 1989 review by Jim Aikin was a little more low-key, but still very positive. In addition to the quote used in the Cubase ad I scanned, we get a little bit of software sequencer history along with Jim's conclusion:
"The impact made last year by C-Lab's Notator has forced other Atari sequencer developers to put some muscle in their hustle. With Cubase, Steinberg proves that they're up to the challenge; it's fully competitive with anything that Notator has to offer, except in the area of notation printout - and let's face it, that's not Notator's strong point either (me: Ouch!). Dr. T's KCS Level II still leads the pack in terms of sheer editing power, but its user interface is starting to look a bit long in the tooth, though there have been some strong enhancements in version 2.1..."
Interestingly, the ads for Cubase took a while to get into magazines. I'm not sure if this is because Steinberg had spent their 1989 marketing budgets on the earlier advertisements, or maybe they were just waiting for the Mac version slated to come out in early 1990 to be closer to production?
No matter, because according to Steinberg's earlier Twenty Four software advertisement, there was already a base of 30,000 users. And many of those 30,000 users would have read those early positive reviews or started to see the software pop up in music shops.
And the proof is in the pudding - or whatever that saying is. 30 years later Cubase is still going strong.
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