Being an impatient teenager, I did brute-force the note-key layout, but I didn't have to - each context/screen had it's own help page. You could view all screens (and their respective shortcut) by pressing ESC.
I'd rather label it "experimenting" than "brute-forcing", testing what would happen if I were to put this or that value to this or that effect. Perhaps others would do it differently but I'd go by ear almost all of the time and adjust bit by bit.
Since you could save samples from downloaded modules, you could quickly build a starter library - although "ripping" samples was considered "lame". In lack of (expensive) synthesizers, some musicians would buy Sample CDs.
In my experience (90s Sweden), of those fortunate enough to have a home computer (usually a 486 66 MHz w 8 MB), few also had MIDI. I knew of one person who ran Cubase on Windows 3.11 with hardware samplers etc, which I found immensely exotic!
I'd rather label it "experimenting" than "brute-forcing", testing what would happen if I were to put this or that value to this or that effect. Perhaps others would do it differently but I'd go by ear almost all of the time and adjust bit by bit.
Since you could save samples from downloaded modules, you could quickly build a starter library - although "ripping" samples was considered "lame". In lack of (expensive) synthesizers, some musicians would buy Sample CDs.
In my experience (90s Sweden), of those fortunate enough to have a home computer (usually a 486 66 MHz w 8 MB), few also had MIDI. I knew of one person who ran Cubase on Windows 3.11 with hardware samplers etc, which I found immensely exotic!