TECHNO SOUND TURBO

September 4, 2023 3:30 AM

debuglive asks the big question: an Amiga 500, Stereo Master and handful of $1 records from a 1990 Sunday market: can we make a dance track on a budget home computer?
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (17 comments total)

You might also enjoy some of Pete Cannon's videos, e.g. this one - he uses an A1200 with OctaMED 4 both for sampling and MIDI sequencing.

I did a lot of music with Amigas back in the 90s, and one of my projects this summer was to rebuild my Amiga music setup (which included a Stereo Master sampler!). It's nice being able to use MIDI as well now that MIDI kit is a lot more affordable.
posted by offog at 5:54 AM on September 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

That was fun. Best of the web, indeed.
posted by NoMich at 5:56 AM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

i recently watched this video of someone making a drum n bass track with octamed and a roland, and it was good fun. link
posted by atom128 at 6:04 AM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

That was fun! I had forgotten how neat the trackers sounded and how simple the format was.

The parallel port was also a fascinating piece of I/O -- officially for outputing 8-bits of data to printers, except that it was bidirectional and as a result became the way to get high bandwidth data into computers. The problem is that there was usually no FIFO, so you had to poll the device in hard realtime or else it would skip samples. Note that when he hits record the UI stops updating until it stops sampling. I had a NewTek slow scan video digitizer that would drop pixels if you wiggled the mouse due to the high interrupt load, so importing an image required holding your breath while the raster lines appeared on screen. Full color required an RGB filter wheel, so you had to do it three times!

The disclaimer at the end is an indictment of the retro community's need to nit-pick every possible detail... "I am well aware that everyone has a different story and version of how they remember history. This was my experience, growing up in a town in regional Australia, pre-internet, with no modem (BBS calls too expensive), and geting public domain floppies was a monthly "swap meet" event".
posted by autopilot at 6:30 AM on September 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

I had an Amiga 2000 which was my primary computer from 1990-1996. I discovered tracker software accidentally by futzing around on the demo machine at my local Amiga store (there was actually such a thing!) and became obsessed. I sneakily copied it to a floppy and took that software home, where I slowly learned how to use it. The software itself was all in French, I believe, which I did not speak. Eventually I started to BBS and downloaded Protracker, which opened the door to making all of the music I wanted to. I didn't have a sampler (or "digitizer" as they were called back then) so I depended on the samples that came with MODs I downloaded. As a result, many of my tunes were derivatives of other tunes. I was practicing techniques (like combining the bass and drum tracks, simulating echoes, etc) and getting a feel for what worked and what didn't. I did, however, have a MIDI interface - a MIDI Gold 500. I used that in concert with (a pirated version of) Bars & Pipes Professional and my Korg M1 to score a student film when I was in 10th grade. Then in college, when I had some synths and a sampler, I used OctaMED and the MIDI Gold to do "live PA" shows of what was then just called "techno." I loved that computer so, so much.

If anyone was a BBSer in the 516 in the early 90s, I ran Metallic Dreams BBS. And my MODs, which I uploaded to lots of other BBSes, were under the handle "The Dark Man."
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:10 AM on September 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

takes me back too, thanks for posting. i was an isolated, self-taught FastTracker 2 kid, on my 486sx, and i fucked around blindly with that software for a year before i finally figured out how to actually start inputting notes and programming patterns, and it was, in the parlance of our times, a real galaxy-brain moment. talk about some halcyon days of youth, there were none greater for me.
posted by glonous keming at 9:21 AM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

This blows my mind. I grew up on an Apple ][+ but never got anywhere close to doing music. I never had regular access to a modem either, so BBSes were foreign to me. This stuff is like an alternate timeline to me.
posted by slogger at 10:02 AM on September 4, 2023

And it is true, BBS calls were expensive. Even to call ten miles away! The phone companies at that time had the concept of "local long distance" which meant that calls were free to a select number of exchanges (the 3 numbers after the area code) and then a sliding scale beyond that depending on the distance between you and that exchange. And woe be to the person who dialed into a different area code, even if that area code was right next door! There there be dragons. It took one $300 phone bill for me to become an expert on those exchanges and the fees incurred. On the bright side it meant that BBSes had strong locality of userbases, and actual user meets were a thing.

My local exchanges were 757, 754, 261, 368 and... well, there was one more, but I forget. I think 266. All completely irrelevant today in the world of the internet and free long distance and the relative meaninglessness of area codes!
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:17 AM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Heh. I had a 699 number and my high school girlfriend in a directly adjacent township had an 882 number and thus long distance.
posted by slogger at 1:14 PM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

On one hand, that tracker interface looks absolutely inscrutable. On the other, I got into this via a Mac IIsi, using relatively user-friendly then-modern software, and looking back I wonder if the constraints of the early stuff both gave it its charm and made for more fertile creative soil.

Anyway, this video is great. Just great.
posted by TangoCharlie at 1:46 PM on September 4, 2023

Sampling drum loops was the thing I did not understand when I was playing with tracker software in high school. I was making full drum patterns from scratch, while the real artists were assembling compositions from much larger pieces. Wish I’d known, I might not have given up so easily!
posted by migurski at 2:02 PM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Same same, Migurski. 50 years of hip-hop looping happened on a different continent to people who aren't me.

Good video, cheers.
posted by k3ninho at 2:54 PM on September 4, 2023

Seeing those colour-fade level bars took me waaay back ... I had that exact sampler, plus an A500. I also was singularly musically inept, so none of the cool stuff ensued.

Oh, and feeling so much the anti-gatekeeper warning at the end. Retro computing guys (and they're almost all guys) have got so grumpy about the right way to do things. This video was fun and light, and unlike the grumpy retro guys, a joy to behold.
posted by scruss at 3:05 PM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had to doublecheck and see if this was actually Zack from Aunty Donna, after a shave.
posted by FatherDagon at 8:01 AM on September 5, 2023

I love seeing this stuff, but it makes me realize how much cool tech stuff I missed out on just because access to how-to information just wasn't available back then. Ah well.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:18 AM on September 5, 2023

I'll spare you the details of my 1985 Amiga 1000 that became totally buff assed. I had the clear sampler from the video and built from scratch my own MIDI controller to play around with my roommate's Casio and drum machine and 4-track recorder and a whole set of guitar effects pedals and microphone and amp and yadda. Neither one of us was musically inclined enough to do anything more than make fart/orgasm stuff to liven up a party.

Back in the early days in my small town there was one BBS (mostly PC) and one computer store. Pirated a whole bunch from the computer store, they left out a big box of demo stuff. I would bring in magazine disks and Fred Fish disks and leave with Deluxe Paint or something, didn't matter, dad bought all of his stereo/TV/etc stuff there, it was take some leave some it's OK.

By the late 80's I was at university and had USENET and FTP sites. Every Fred fish disk and more on 1/2" tape.

I actually missed the whole bit of mostly euro Amiga 500/1200 stuff, far too much into UNIX land. Played around with an Amiga 3000 running their UNIX for a bit....

The saddest thing is that around 1992 or so I was in Topeka Kansas and walked past the NewTek office all the time but was too afraid to go in and maybe get an intership or something. I could do 3d and 68k assembly and knew my Amiga inside and out... didn't think they'd actually take me. Evidently as I heard at the time Will Wheaton was working for them in some capacity. Should have at least fucking tried.

MIDI interfaces were actually trivial to make, one chip and a few resistors and jacks. They were 90% just optical isolation so you didn't accidentally fry anything.

I really wanted one of those NewTek video things, and a fucking Genlock to to video stuff. That old 1000 ended up a 68020/68881/4MB/80MB little screaming like a 2000 machine by the end. I programmed a lot, wish I had the chops to do more than blast out 8 channels worth of Toccata and Fuge in D Minor with random samples.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:27 AM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh zengargoyle, someone I can tell about my modded up A2000! I upgraded it with 7mb of RAM (on a bazillion little 16kb chips, what an enormous PITA), a 68030, a Fat Agnus, Workbench 3 ROMs and two hard drives. Pretty amazing how those things were built to keep up with the times, relatively speaking. But it was such a weird Frankenstein that the guy at the Amiga store told me to never bring it back after I had them do emergency repair surgery on it (during the RAM installation, which due to my incompetence rendered it inoperable.) That said, he was kind of a jerk.

You ABSOLUTELY should have tried to go work for NewTek! My Amiga programming skillz were limited to ARexx, sadly. I used that to create doors etc for my CNet Amiga BBS.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:32 PM on September 6, 2023