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‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#41

Post by boboche »

My first encounter with an amiga audio as a music/audio tool was at an amiga-specific computer store that had Audiomaster running off a sampler with some demos.

I was totally blown away watching waveforms and simple audio editing, speeding up, etc.. Remember, this was back when PCs were 4 colors, and sucking at best, for anything audio or video related.

It looked like magic from my, kid's eyes, perspective.

I ended up with a "Perfect Sound" parallel port sampler and messing around with MED, later OctaMED on my A1200 with ECE Midi interface and good ol PSS synth. Good memories.

In some parts of the world, electronic music was a thing, where I was however, you looked like a complete weirdo if you were into that stuff. Seriously.

"Its not real music" up until the PC could catch up and do the same eh ;)

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#42

Post by detritus »

Joeboy wrote: post #8

Cheaper than an actual recording studio for sure, but "poor man's" is overstating it a bit. They were expensive machines.

Two of my best friends were from 'less than well off' families, and they both had Amigas. My fault - I was lucky to come from a comfortably-off family and had one, which they used to come and use on sleep-overs, planting the seed in their minds.

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#43

Post by cmrdporcupine »

AaronM wrote: post #34
foobarian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny you mention this, where I grew up the ST was known exactly as a DAW because of the built-in MIDI ports. But more interestingly the Amigas were super popular as broadcast TV workstations because they had some kind of v-sync functionality built-in that made it possible to overlay graphics on the TV signal. A bunch of local TV stations had tell-tale Amiga graphics in their transitions / credits messages / new…

With the Amiga it is possible to use an external clock source as the system clock and to switch the video chip horizontal and vertical sync pins to inputs so they can come from external source instead of internal system clock based sync generator. The addition of the Amiga toaster, meant that Amiga saw use in the TV and Movie Industry in the late 80's and 90's. A number of high profile projects used the Amiga. https:…

Interestingly enough this genlock feature was also possible with the Sharp X68000, which was kind of like an Amiga but on steroids. Or maybe more like a late-80s/early-90s arcade cabinet machine but in a PC form factor. Beautiful machines, too bad Japanese only though they sold boatloads there.

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#44

Post by philjohn »

Bradlinc wrote: post #26
philjohn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be utterly rock solid in a live setting

Is this a statement that the emulators aren't particular solid or that the Amiga hardware is very reliable?

The Amiga hardware was very reliable, an emulator running on another platform would give me pause if I were still performing live.

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#46

Post by rasz »

mastazi wrote: post #10

I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1] These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music so…

Apple IIGS had Ensoniq ES5503 build in, pretty much half of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_Mirage

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#48

Post by timbit42 »

rasz wrote: post #46
mastazi wrote: post #10

I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1] These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music so…

Apple IIGS had Ensoniq ES5503 build in, pretty much half of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_Mirage

Ensoniq was founded by Robert Yannes, the creator of the SID, and Al Charpentier, one of the designers of the VIC-II, and Bruce Crockett, whose history I do not know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#49

Post by usrn »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20
TacticalCoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup indeed... The Amiga was the better machine but when a guy would come up with a ST and hook its Roland or Moog synth through the MIDI port, we were in awe! Interestingly enough for the ST had no fan, it's been used for a very long time in some recording studio (where they liked silent recording equipment). To my surprise I saw an ST still in use well into the 2000s. > But, if you wanted to sample on the Amiga, you…

Honestly, while the Amiga was a better graphics and sound machine and was better for games and some early video and digital audio stuff (trackers, etc.) -- the ST had a better "productivity" story. 640x400 paperwhite monochrome monitor + MIDI ports + MSDOS-compatible floppy format. High resolution on Amiga was interlaced and required a scan doubler to be tolerable. Reading MSDOS formatted floppies required special so…

I poked around with TOS the other year. It's super easy to write graphical apps that will build on DOS with TCC and also TOS with whatever C dev tools it had.

It's kind of sad how much things seem to have regressed.

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