Production trick with amiga
 

First of all I apologyze if my english is poor, but I think it's important to all the amiga musicians take know of this trick. I have tested in few modules and works 100%. You get an almost 90's-studio-like sound for jungle, breakbeats and even classic mods.

Amiga has a pair of 8bit stereo channels in a single stereo output, not much useful for production purposes. That's why Urban Takeover and some amiga musicians linked 2 amiga together, to get more channels to work.

But... if we work using the hardware as a pair of MONO CHANNELS with 2 MONO OUTPUTS?

So, tracks 0 and 3 in the left output, and 2 and 3 in the right output could be through different type of effects in pairs.

If you don't understand, please, listen this example mod and you will realise quickly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZrgGTGmQ1c

If you have any question, I can respond.

Thanks to all EAB for inspiring!!! :spin

my A500 was like that, had 2 mono phono outputs (left and right) on the back. Had to use a Y shaped cable to the modulator from these outputs.

I can answer your question

A shitload.

And even in the 2000s, Calvin Harris made his album with an Amiga using Paula output..

I've converted and enhanced the module in this post to Protracker for convenient use. Download attached: Protracker and ADF Bootable Image.

Is still FX friendly. Left for the bass (add some phaser) and right for the accapellas & effects (add some flanger & pingpong delay with reverb).
Thanks for watching! :)

This is kind of ridiculous. Of course you can get 'production sound' by using external mastering on the Amiga L and R channels! :rolleyes
Reverb, chorus, echo, equalizer, you name it...

The Amiga does the raw sample playback job (with some cutoff filters), and that's about it. It's more fascinating when people make good sounding Amiga stuff either with software or hardware mixing, without using external equipment, IMO. :agree

I also like amiga raw sound by itself, but no one used "raw sound" in a studio production. Let's talk about how they improved it, what techniques did they use. Don't think it's ridiculous!

Thanks for the feedback ;)

When I was making music for commercial release using my Amiga back in the early 90s, I had it wired through an external mixer to give all four channels as one mono input (fader up to the top) and another input with the usual Amiga stereo image (fader about half-way up) which worked great. Adding an Alesis Proverb to the quieter stereo image gave a nice depth without drowning the mix.

Here's one of my tracks (from 1990 but released in 91) which was mastered *direct* from the output of my crappy old Maplin mixer. It's just an A500 running Linel's SoundFX without any EQ or post-processing but using the technique described above. Hear for yourself (in glorious YouTube quality) the scratchy result once it hit vinyl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iimSClv1M8

I have tried several times since to update some of my ancient Amiga tracks, deliberately choosing ones that lend themselves to 2013-style post-production, but the results have always been awful. I've got various unfinished Pro Tools/Audition projects lying around because, even after recording all four channels separately using Delitracker and carefully adding pseudo stereo effects/delay/reverb/phasing/filtering to things like strings, synth stabs and so on, I just can't find the "sweet spot" to make the end result superior to the original.

I've tried EQing things individually, cleaning up original samples, attempted various processing/compression settings before mastering, but the eventual mixdown always sounds horribly over-produced and completely unnatural. Maybe it's because I'm so used to how they sound naked that I can't appreciate them covered in studio make-up. And of course, the old adage - garbage in, garbage out :-) It's not nice having your treasured archive masterpieces exposed for the ton of junk they truly were/are. So I've given up :-)

Anyway.

Here's the only experiment I considered to be at least partially successful, and that's only because I propped up the original with more contemporary overlays and FX.

A 2007 mix of a track I originally made in 1990, produced entirely digitally using unenhanced WAV recordings from WinUAE and sexed up within Adobe Audition:

http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/trueenergy2007.mp3

And the original, from my 1990 Silents UK "Full Power Music Disk" written using Linel's SoundFX (I had my Amiga wired mono through a mixing desk at the time - and the voice you hear is a 16 year old me):

http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/trueenergy.mp3

Sorry for the off-topic ramble - maybe I should start a "Remastering Amiga Audio" thread :-)