7 ms·

Amiga Samplers: Budget dance music in 1990 [video]

191 points by henning 7y ago

themodelplumber 7y ago
Wow, he's done a really impressive job in the tracker, making things seem considerably easier than I remember :-) I remember sending off hard-earned money to a certain Norman living in Norman, to get a paid copy of ModEdit for DOS, waiting for what seemed an eternity to receive a disk in the mail, only to discover FT][ weeks later on a local BBS, downloadable within an afternoon modem session. And featuring Nibbles, no less. It seemed like time and tech were advancing so fast, and yet art was elusive. Anyway I'm looking forward to working on another tracker tune soon. Thanks for the link.
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  If you're into tracked music, check out "Professional Tracker" by h0ffman and Daytripper[0]. To clarify, the linked recording is not from an Amiga but I have played it on my A1200 - it almost completely fills the 2 megabytes of chip-mem so a fast-mem expansion is required to play it. Impressive stuff. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA
  - crtasm 7y ago
    and here's the source file download: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2014/revision14/music_tracked/hoffman_and_daytripper_professional_tracker.zip https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2014/revision14/music_t... "Professional Tracker written by Hoffman & Daytripper for the Revision 2014 Tracked Music Compo. Put together in ProTracker v2.3d on Amiga. As it was for the Revision Tracker Music Compo, it is best viewed in XMPlay on the PC with full screen pattern visualiser. Make sure you use the following settings. No Interpolation. Mono. Mod Mode PT1." https://soundcloud.com/h0ffman/hoffman-daytripper-professional-tracker https://soundcloud.com/h0ffman/hoffman-daytripper-profession...
- contingencies 7y ago
  And featuring Nibbles, no less. Haha, I remember that! The other easter egg I remember from the era was in Budokan. Pong, IIRC.
avyeed_desa 7y ago
A lot of jungle artist have recently resurfaced their amigas and make and release music completely done with Trackers. If you are interested you should check out artists like Bizzy B (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMER0TV8UG1nf5OyzsJewQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMER0TV8UG1nf5OyzsJewQ/vid...) or Pete Cannon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM_kHAd0Q_tWH7OEyF5hcAg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM_kHAd0Q_tWH7OEyF5hcAg/vid...)
- dharma1 7y ago
  you'll enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk
- tjr225 7y ago
  I was just talking about this guy at work the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzF5aUqn-WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzF5aUqn-WY His channel is filled with awesome hardware tracked with MED.
- avyeed_desa 7y ago
  ha i just realized one of the videos from Bizzy B features another producer (DJ D-Lux) that has dusted off his amiga after 25 years and started reusing it for that video and asking Brian how to use and do things on the tracker. Funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A6FCs0Q6iI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A6FCs0Q6iI
  - ahartmetz 7y ago
    This mix on Bizzy B's channel is a really good old schhol jungle mix, thanks for the tip! https://youtu.be/Jg8r3x6lbpA https://youtu.be/Jg8r3x6lbpA
walkingolof 7y ago
The tracker scene did not die with the Amiga, it continued and people still use programs like MilkyTracker today. Here is an excellent overview of MilkyTracker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2s04YYO0Wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2s04YYO0Wg
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  The tracker scene continues on the Amiga to this day. :-) There's also a lot of wonderful music being made on and/or for Commodore 64:s.
EvilGrin 7y ago
If you are interested in picking up some of this music from then and now check out the Mod Archive. https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/ You will need a media player that understand mod file formats to play the majority of the music files on the site. They have recommendations per platform in their FAQ.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jaxb 7y ago
  or https://modlandplayer.net/ https://modlandplayer.net/ -- player for a different archive (http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/ http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/). or listen to the radio -- https://www.scenesat.com/ https://www.scenesat.com/ or https://scenestream.net/demovibes/ https://scenestream.net/demovibes/
72deluxe 7y ago
I remember using FT ][ under Windows 95 as my friend at school introduced me to it. Some of the more complicated songs were bigger than MP3s of the time (that confused my tiny brain) but were playable on my garbage 486 DX2, unlike MP3s (I was poor and using throw-off computers that others had thrown away). Happy times.
- rob74 7y ago
  Well yeah, the samples in the MOD files are uncompressed (or losslessly compressed, no idea), so if you have a lot of different samples, I can imagine you might end up with something bigger than an MP3 file. I guess none of those were modules initially composed on an Amiga though ;)
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    Yes, I think they were modplug era files. I didn't understand how they worked at the time so was baffled needlessly.
Theizestooke 7y ago
What's the best tracker currently for Windows or Linux? Googling I found OpenMPT (https://openmpt.org/ https://openmpt.org/), would be curious about others.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  The other well known, working and portable ones would be MilkyTracker, Schism Tracker and Renoise. MilkyTracker is UI compatible with FastTracker 2, Schism Tracker is UI compatible with Impulse Tracker and Scream Tracker. Renoise is more of a crossover of digital audio workstation with a tracker.
  - geon 7y ago
    Also Sunvox is pretty good and very portable. https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
- tomduncalf 7y ago
  If you fancy the retro vibe, someone has ported Fast Tracker 2 to modern OS's: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. From what I've heard, Renoise is the most "modern" tracker. Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days.
  - dharma1 7y ago
    > Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days. Buzz is great software, the modular concept was fantastic. I don't think Oskari has worked on it since 2016 - http://jeskola.net/buzz/beta/files/changelog.txt http://jeskola.net/buzz/beta/files/changelog.txt It still works though, and there is something of a community - http://forums.jeskola.net/ http://forums.jeskola.net/
- rob74 7y ago
  I used ModPlug Player (https://www.modplug.com/ https://www.modplug.com/), the predecessor of OpenMPT, years ago. I was pretty pleased with it back then, although the alternatives mentioned by the others may be more modern/better nowadays (wow, the latest version of ModPlug Player is from 2002!). I still have an archive of MOD files somewhere in the depths of my hard disk, maybe I should try to find them and indulge in some nostalgia...
mntmoss 7y ago
In this era I was a pre-teen and my brother, a few years older, did make a stab at tracking but ultimately focused on other things. I was a bit baffled by the whole thing and we never learned how to rip samples off other sources even though we definitely had the capability for line in and some sample editing tools(Just record off the radio or our CDs! It seems obvious in retrospect). But it was very exciting to hear other people's work, regardless. Computer music - and it sounded like the stuff I heard in malls and on TV, instead of the synthy chiptune stuff! Gradually I did start experimenting with composition on trackers and that proved to be another mountain climbed only gradually. Even when I had "the sound," it takes a lot of work to understand how to a bring a song structure beyond a four bar loop, but I would have to say that I learned a fair amount from studying tracker music too. A good success story for source availability.
dharma1 7y ago
Good memories. I used to be a part of this crew - https://netlabelarchive.org/netlabels/monotonik/ https://netlabelarchive.org/netlabels/monotonik/ Mods were great. Zero cost beyond the computer, made with public domain tracker software, the music was freely distributed on BBS's (and the web later on). The mod file format was great - small size downloads - note information and sampler instruments were all in one package, typically a couple of hundred kb for the whole song. You could see exactly how people had put the tunes together, access all the note information/arrangements and samples, and learn from that
- cbm-vic-20 7y ago
  MODs (and later tracker formats) justified my purchase of the big red Gravis Ultrasound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_Ultrasound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_Ultrasound
- molotovbliss 7y ago
  B00MER from kfmf (kosmic free music foundation) here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmic_Free_Music_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmic_Free_Music_Foundation Used to love monotonik releases. One thing I liked about tracker days was deconstructing songs to see how it was made. Not as easy to do these days. ReNoise is pretty much the tracker DAW these days. Now that I'm not as broke as before. More gear just less drive to use it. My younger self would of been in heaven with the gear I've got now. Gus was a game changer though back then.
crusty511 7y ago
Not really "budget". I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive. Venetian Snares Renoise > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U
- rvense 7y ago
  > I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive. It cost money, but the next step would have been a rack sampler and probably a mixer which were much more expensive.
  - crusty511 7y ago
    Yeah, an Amiga 500 with RRP £499 in 1987 is about £1440 today.
- mrspeaker 7y ago
  My friend's dad was into electronics. He bought one of the samplers from the local Radio Shack, opened it up, figured out how it worked, and started making his own. He sold them to us for about $40. Which was so much money as a kid (and in the 90s), but damn it was awesome. I ended up recouping the costs of the sampler many times over though: the local radio station had a competition of "guess what this song-played-backwards is and win $100". I'd sample the song snippet as they played it, reverse it in a tracker (like in the video where he reverses the reverse cymbal) and get the song... then it was just a matter of being the correct caller - battling mostly against my other friends with our home-made samplers. I won $500 doing that! [Edit: oh, you mean the computer hardware, not the sampler hardware! My A500 was second-hand, no memory upgrade (grr) - and if my parents got it for me then there's no way it was more than a couple of hundred bucks ;) ]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
louthy 7y ago
Trackers have a mini-resurgence via the modular scene with NerdSeq [1] [2] [1] https://xor-electronics.com/nerdseq/ https://xor-electronics.com/nerdseq/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mShpux61dw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mShpux61dw0
ilamont 7y ago
I laughed out loud at this moment, which came a few seconds after starting the sample: "Aaaand we're out of memory." Explains why samples tended to be really short .. and also why some artists (or their labels) did make the investment in studio time & the professionals who knew how to take this tech to the next level. I worked in a 24-track studio in London in the early 90s where dance music was recorded, mixed, and remixed by The KLF and Nomad, among others, as well as soundtracks by Hans Zimmer, who owned the studio. There was a small army of people who not only knew the studio hardware (the board, Moog, compressors, gates, etc.) but also Cubase, sequencers, and other software, which was quite expensive but utterly necessary to crank out the hits played on the radio and the remixes that were preferred in the clubs.
- ArtWomb 7y ago
  Am curious how you would compare the production quality back in the day. To producers today who seem to eschew the massive studio. Doing everything in Logic. With perhaps a single MIDI controller. Preferring that Billie Eilish in her bedroom vibe ;) My recollection is that even back then, the capital outlay required wasn't egregious. I recall a friend setting up a space with second-hand pro mixing board, amps, mics, etc all for around $10-15K in initial expense. And all sourced on various internet forums. Of course, today the mac book pro alone may set you back $5K+!
  - tjr225 7y ago
    > Of course, today the mac book pro alone may set you back $5K+! I run Ableton Live 9 and Logic Pro along with all of my normal software instruments and effects on a 2009 Macbook Pro that was given to me for free. Upgraded to an SSD and 8GB of RAM and it runs nearly just as well as on my 2013 Macbook Pro - which I would use but the keyboard has started to go out. My point is you could just buy a used MacBook or a lower end MacBook for far, far less than 5k. On the flip side of that I have a synthesizer that has increased in value five fold since I bought it in 2007.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      And if you have a working Yamaha CS 80 even more so ( one of the synths used on blade runner)
parksy 7y ago
I miss the tracker scene, somehow I migrated from trackers to buzz to fruity loops and I guess I've been on that journey ever since. But the simplicity of being able to so swiftly move notes around in a spreadsheet-type format is something I've never really seen since (outside of trackers themselves at least, and I have used a few modern variants). It's like a piano roll on steroids. I owe my love of creating music today to the tracker and demoscene of the early 90's, and it's great that it's still alive and well :)
- unixhero 7y ago
  The tracker scene is not dead. http://pouet.net http://pouet.net http://scene.org http://scene.org
  - doublerabbit 7y ago
    You can also listen to a large archive of modules at: http://modarchive.org http://modarchive.org Truly free music.
bane 7y ago
For people who really enjoy tracking, or want to check it out, but want a very modern environment. I'd encourage people to look at the Renoise tracker. https://www.renoise.com/ https://www.renoise.com/ SunVox is also an excellent piece of software for those who like a more modular setup https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
shams93 7y ago
The only thing is you don't need a vintage amiga to enjoy trackers, I used trackers with linux audio for years, the pi4 is a much more cost effective way to enjoy trackers than trying to find and refurbish a vintage Amiga, although it has to be fun to play with one but for those without those kind of resources you can even do tracking on an android phone or raspberry pi.
squarefoot 7y ago
Anyone remembers Oktalyzer? It could do 8 tracks in realtime when all other trackers were limited to 4 tracks. It produced a bit lower quality and lower volume audio due to software mixing, and its higher cpu demands made it unsuitable for games, but it was perfectly usable alone even on my A500 back then for making more complex tunes. I miss those days! Here's some info. http://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/ http://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/

191 points by henning 7y ago

Wow, he's done a really impressive job in the tracker, making things seem considerably easier than I remember :-) I remember sending off hard-earned money to a certain Norman living in Norman, to get a paid copy of ModEdit for DOS, waiting for what seemed an eternity to receive a disk in the mail, only to discover FT][ weeks later on a local BBS, downloadable within an afternoon modem session. And featuring Nibbles, no less. It seemed like time and tech were advancing so fast, and yet art was elusive. Anyway I'm looking forward to working on another tracker tune soon. Thanks for the link.

arexxbifs 7y ago
If you're into tracked music, check out "Professional Tracker" by h0ffman and Daytripper[0]. To clarify, the linked recording is not from an Amiga but I have played it on my A1200 - it almost completely fills the 2 megabytes of chip-mem so a fast-mem expansion is required to play it. Impressive stuff. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA
- crtasm 7y ago
  and here's the source file download: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2014/revision14/music_tracked/hoffman_and_daytripper_professional_tracker.zip https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2014/revision14/music_t... "Professional Tracker written by Hoffman & Daytripper for the Revision 2014 Tracked Music Compo. Put together in ProTracker v2.3d on Amiga. As it was for the Revision Tracker Music Compo, it is best viewed in XMPlay on the PC with full screen pattern visualiser. Make sure you use the following settings. No Interpolation. Mono. Mod Mode PT1." https://soundcloud.com/h0ffman/hoffman-daytripper-professional-tracker https://soundcloud.com/h0ffman/hoffman-daytripper-profession...
contingencies 7y ago
And featuring Nibbles, no less. Haha, I remember that! The other easter egg I remember from the era was in Budokan. Pong, IIRC.

avyeed_desa 7y ago

A lot of jungle artist have recently resurfaced their amigas and make and release music completely done with Trackers. If you are interested you should check out artists like Bizzy B (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMER0TV8UG1nf5OyzsJewQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMER0TV8UG1nf5OyzsJewQ/vid...) or Pete Cannon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM_kHAd0Q_tWH7OEyF5hcAg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM_kHAd0Q_tWH7OEyF5hcAg/vid...)

dharma1 7y ago
you'll enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk
tjr225 7y ago
I was just talking about this guy at work the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzF5aUqn-WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzF5aUqn-WY His channel is filled with awesome hardware tracked with MED.
avyeed_desa 7y ago
ha i just realized one of the videos from Bizzy B features another producer (DJ D-Lux) that has dusted off his amiga after 25 years and started reusing it for that video and asking Brian how to use and do things on the tracker. Funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A6FCs0Q6iI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A6FCs0Q6iI
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  This mix on Bizzy B's channel is a really good old schhol jungle mix, thanks for the tip! https://youtu.be/Jg8r3x6lbpA https://youtu.be/Jg8r3x6lbpA

walkingolof 7y ago

The tracker scene did not die with the Amiga, it continued and people still use programs like MilkyTracker today. Here is an excellent overview of MilkyTracker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2s04YYO0Wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2s04YYO0Wg

arexxbifs 7y ago
The tracker scene continues on the Amiga to this day. :-) There's also a lot of wonderful music being made on and/or for Commodore 64:s.

EvilGrin 7y ago

If you are interested in picking up some of this music from then and now check out the Mod Archive. https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/ You will need a media player that understand mod file formats to play the majority of the music files on the site. They have recommendations per platform in their FAQ.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jaxb 7y ago
or https://modlandplayer.net/ https://modlandplayer.net/ -- player for a different archive (http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/ http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/). or listen to the radio -- https://www.scenesat.com/ https://www.scenesat.com/ or https://scenestream.net/demovibes/ https://scenestream.net/demovibes/

72deluxe 7y ago

I remember using FT ][ under Windows 95 as my friend at school introduced me to it. Some of the more complicated songs were bigger than MP3s of the time (that confused my tiny brain) but were playable on my garbage 486 DX2, unlike MP3s (I was poor and using throw-off computers that others had thrown away). Happy times.

rob74 7y ago
Well yeah, the samples in the MOD files are uncompressed (or losslessly compressed, no idea), so if you have a lot of different samples, I can imagine you might end up with something bigger than an MP3 file. I guess none of those were modules initially composed on an Amiga though ;)
- 72deluxe 7y ago
  Yes, I think they were modplug era files. I didn't understand how they worked at the time so was baffled needlessly.

Theizestooke 7y ago

What's the best tracker currently for Windows or Linux? Googling I found OpenMPT (https://openmpt.org/ https://openmpt.org/), would be curious about others.

AstralStorm 7y ago
The other well known, working and portable ones would be MilkyTracker, Schism Tracker and Renoise. MilkyTracker is UI compatible with FastTracker 2, Schism Tracker is UI compatible with Impulse Tracker and Scream Tracker. Renoise is more of a crossover of digital audio workstation with a tracker.
- geon 7y ago
  Also Sunvox is pretty good and very portable. https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
tomduncalf 7y ago
If you fancy the retro vibe, someone has ported Fast Tracker 2 to modern OS's: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. From what I've heard, Renoise is the most "modern" tracker. Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days.
- dharma1 7y ago
  > Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days. Buzz is great software, the modular concept was fantastic. I don't think Oskari has worked on it since 2016 - http://jeskola.net/buzz/beta/files/changelog.txt http://jeskola.net/buzz/beta/files/changelog.txt It still works though, and there is something of a community - http://forums.jeskola.net/ http://forums.jeskola.net/
rob74 7y ago
I used ModPlug Player (https://www.modplug.com/ https://www.modplug.com/), the predecessor of OpenMPT, years ago. I was pretty pleased with it back then, although the alternatives mentioned by the others may be more modern/better nowadays (wow, the latest version of ModPlug Player is from 2002!). I still have an archive of MOD files somewhere in the depths of my hard disk, maybe I should try to find them and indulge in some nostalgia...

mntmoss 7y ago

In this era I was a pre-teen and my brother, a few years older, did make a stab at tracking but ultimately focused on other things. I was a bit baffled by the whole thing and we never learned how to rip samples off other sources even though we definitely had the capability for line in and some sample editing tools(Just record off the radio or our CDs! It seems obvious in retrospect). But it was very exciting to hear other people's work, regardless. Computer music - and it sounded like the stuff I heard in malls and on TV, instead of the synthy chiptune stuff! Gradually I did start experimenting with composition on trackers and that proved to be another mountain climbed only gradually. Even when I had "the sound," it takes a lot of work to understand how to a bring a song structure beyond a four bar loop, but I would have to say that I learned a fair amount from studying tracker music too. A good success story for source availability.

dharma1 7y ago

Good memories. I used to be a part of this crew - https://netlabelarchive.org/netlabels/monotonik/ https://netlabelarchive.org/netlabels/monotonik/ Mods were great. Zero cost beyond the computer, made with public domain tracker software, the music was freely distributed on BBS's (and the web later on). The mod file format was great - small size downloads - note information and sampler instruments were all in one package, typically a couple of hundred kb for the whole song. You could see exactly how people had put the tunes together, access all the note information/arrangements and samples, and learn from that

cbm-vic-20 7y ago
MODs (and later tracker formats) justified my purchase of the big red Gravis Ultrasound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_Ultrasound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_Ultrasound
molotovbliss 7y ago
B00MER from kfmf (kosmic free music foundation) here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmic_Free_Music_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmic_Free_Music_Foundation Used to love monotonik releases. One thing I liked about tracker days was deconstructing songs to see how it was made. Not as easy to do these days. ReNoise is pretty much the tracker DAW these days. Now that I'm not as broke as before. More gear just less drive to use it. My younger self would of been in heaven with the gear I've got now. Gus was a game changer though back then.

crusty511 7y ago

Not really "budget". I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive. Venetian Snares Renoise > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

rvense 7y ago
> I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive. It cost money, but the next step would have been a rack sampler and probably a mixer which were much more expensive.
- crusty511 7y ago
  Yeah, an Amiga 500 with RRP £499 in 1987 is about £1440 today.
mrspeaker 7y ago
My friend's dad was into electronics. He bought one of the samplers from the local Radio Shack, opened it up, figured out how it worked, and started making his own. He sold them to us for about $40. Which was so much money as a kid (and in the 90s), but damn it was awesome. I ended up recouping the costs of the sampler many times over though: the local radio station had a competition of "guess what this song-played-backwards is and win $100". I'd sample the song snippet as they played it, reverse it in a tracker (like in the video where he reverses the reverse cymbal) and get the song... then it was just a matter of being the correct caller - battling mostly against my other friends with our home-made samplers. I won $500 doing that! [Edit: oh, you mean the computer hardware, not the sampler hardware! My A500 was second-hand, no memory upgrade (grr) - and if my parents got it for me then there's no way it was more than a couple of hundred bucks ;) ]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

louthy 7y ago

Trackers have a mini-resurgence via the modular scene with NerdSeq [1] [2] [1] https://xor-electronics.com/nerdseq/ https://xor-electronics.com/nerdseq/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mShpux61dw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mShpux61dw0

ilamont 7y ago

I laughed out loud at this moment, which came a few seconds after starting the sample: "Aaaand we're out of memory." Explains why samples tended to be really short .. and also why some artists (or their labels) did make the investment in studio time & the professionals who knew how to take this tech to the next level. I worked in a 24-track studio in London in the early 90s where dance music was recorded, mixed, and remixed by The KLF and Nomad, among others, as well as soundtracks by Hans Zimmer, who owned the studio. There was a small army of people who not only knew the studio hardware (the board, Moog, compressors, gates, etc.) but also Cubase, sequencers, and other software, which was quite expensive but utterly necessary to crank out the hits played on the radio and the remixes that were preferred in the clubs.

ArtWomb 7y ago
Am curious how you would compare the production quality back in the day. To producers today who seem to eschew the massive studio. Doing everything in Logic. With perhaps a single MIDI controller. Preferring that Billie Eilish in her bedroom vibe ;) My recollection is that even back then, the capital outlay required wasn't egregious. I recall a friend setting up a space with second-hand pro mixing board, amps, mics, etc all for around $10-15K in initial expense. And all sourced on various internet forums. Of course, today the mac book pro alone may set you back $5K+!
- tjr225 7y ago
  > Of course, today the mac book pro alone may set you back $5K+! I run Ableton Live 9 and Logic Pro along with all of my normal software instruments and effects on a 2009 Macbook Pro that was given to me for free. Upgraded to an SSD and 8GB of RAM and it runs nearly just as well as on my 2013 Macbook Pro - which I would use but the keyboard has started to go out. My point is you could just buy a used MacBook or a lower end MacBook for far, far less than 5k. On the flip side of that I have a synthesizer that has increased in value five fold since I bought it in 2007.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    And if you have a working Yamaha CS 80 even more so ( one of the synths used on blade runner)

parksy 7y ago

I miss the tracker scene, somehow I migrated from trackers to buzz to fruity loops and I guess I've been on that journey ever since. But the simplicity of being able to so swiftly move notes around in a spreadsheet-type format is something I've never really seen since (outside of trackers themselves at least, and I have used a few modern variants). It's like a piano roll on steroids. I owe my love of creating music today to the tracker and demoscene of the early 90's, and it's great that it's still alive and well :)

unixhero 7y ago
The tracker scene is not dead. http://pouet.net http://pouet.net http://scene.org http://scene.org
- doublerabbit 7y ago
  You can also listen to a large archive of modules at: http://modarchive.org http://modarchive.org Truly free music.

bane 7y ago

For people who really enjoy tracking, or want to check it out, but want a very modern environment. I'd encourage people to look at the Renoise tracker. https://www.renoise.com/ https://www.renoise.com/ SunVox is also an excellent piece of software for those who like a more modular setup https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

shams93 7y ago

The only thing is you don't need a vintage amiga to enjoy trackers, I used trackers with linux audio for years, the pi4 is a much more cost effective way to enjoy trackers than trying to find and refurbish a vintage Amiga, although it has to be fun to play with one but for those without those kind of resources you can even do tracking on an android phone or raspberry pi.

squarefoot 7y ago

Anyone remembers Oktalyzer? It could do 8 tracks in realtime when all other trackers were limited to 4 tracks. It produced a bit lower quality and lower volume audio due to software mixing, and its higher cpu demands made it unsuitable for games, but it was perfectly usable alone even on my A500 back then for making more complex tunes. I miss those days! Here's some info. http://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/ http://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/