Spectacular Soft Synths of the Commodore Amiga (Awesome Sounds)

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Hey

Here’s a YouTube documentary in which I delve into the world of software synthesis on the Amiga; expect some amazing sounds!

It’s split nearly 50/50 between real-time & non-real-time synths, and covers most major synthesis types. Enjoy!

[ Show youtube player ]

[gimbal]

"Why are you always going on about the Amiga?"

...

Well that's when life was last known to be good.

[TCD]

I'm 4 minutes in and I love the way the video is produced Lots of interesting visual bits that accompany the information. Really well made

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by gimbal

"Why are you always going on about the Amiga?"

...

Well that's when life was last known to be good.

I think computing afterwards never excites me as much as that first A600.

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by TCD

I'm 4 minutes in and I love the way the video is produced Lots of interesting visual bits that accompany the information. Really well made

Lol thanks. I wanted to really put the viewer in that Amiga frame of mind

[Aulapatchuc]

Great Sonix sounds you made in there. Great video. You're very talented and I appreciated very much the content, PAB.

[TEG]

Very good video Thanks to make me discover softwares I didn't know and features of Paula.

[Karlos]

Shameless plug for a real-time* software synth and sequencer I wrote entirely in PHP, lol... [ Show youtube player ]

*due to pushing the generated audio down a pipe to Sox or aplay this statement is only partially accurate, the sound generation is up to 1-2 seconds ahead of playback which is why I haven't managed to fully incorporate it into the parent "PHP demo engine" project for anything significant yet.

[riker77]

Wonderful video.
Also enjoy your guest appearances on Sonic Talk.
Kepp the Amiga music spirit alive!

[A500]

This is very very good, thank you! I had no idea there are so many programs to do subtractive synth on the Amiga. Now I have an itch to go back to Sonix after three decades and actually try and learn to do something meaningful with it

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by Aulapatchuc

Great Sonix sounds you made in there. Great video. You're very talented and I appreciated very much the content, PAB.

Thanks so much! I made the video that I thought our community was missing, and also, wanted to show these pieces of software to another community, the synthesizer community, who tend to believe that software synths started in 1995.

[pandy71]

I can name at least two free softh synth environments before 1995 - Csound and Pure Data

Csound is even available for Amiga (Aminet) but this is quite old version (around 1996) - definitely Csound offers most complete set of synthesis methods.

Also i think there is no available for Amiga real time subtractive soft synth...

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by pandy71

I can name at least two free softh synth environments before 1995 - Csound and Pure Data

Csound is even available for Amiga (Aminet) but this is quite old version (around 1996) - definitely Csound offers most complete set of synthesis methods.

Also i think there is no available for Amiga real time subtractive soft synth...

I agree on those two, although people I talk to constantly try and move the goalposts and the say “oh, they weren’t commercial”…

That’s the difficulty when trying to talk about these things, semantics.

Subtractive wise, Aegis Sonix has a filter but it’s non resonant, I’d personally still class it as subtractive though. Sonic Arranger has a couple of low pass types too, although they sound quite individualistic

[Sani11]

Nice shoutout to Csound and Pure Data! They are indeed pretty awesome and versatile software for sound synthesis.
About your Amiga question - unfortunately, real-time subtractive soft synths for Amiga are quite limited. I guess it's because the tech back then wasn't quite up for it. We're talking about a time before VSTs after all!
Still, there's some cool stuff out there for Amiga, like the Music-X MIDI sequencer, though it's not quite a synth.

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by Sani11

Nice shoutout to Csound and Pure Data! They are indeed pretty awesome and versatile software for sound synthesis.
About your Amiga question - unfortunately, real-time subtractive soft synths for Amiga are quite limited. I guess it's because the tech back then wasn't quite up for it. We're talking about a time before VSTs after all!
Still, there's some cool stuff out there for Amiga, like the Music-X MIDI sequencer, though it's not quite a synth.

I tend to think the best Amiga sounds are wavetable based, I then filter these with my Eurorack system, it’s a nice hybrid thing.

[torturedutopian]

Wow, thank you so much, that's super enlightening :-)
BTW, just tried Synthia 2 on my A1200 and get a "audio device already in use" error. Any idea ?

[saimon69]

We are in the pretracker and KLANG era, but once in a while i wonder if there is a way to reuse the .instr Sonix file data in a tracker ^^

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by torturedutopian

Wow, thank you so much, that's super enlightening :-)
BTW, just tried Synthia 2 on my A1200 and get a "audio device already in use" error. Any idea ?

That’s super odd! I’m not sure why it would say that.

[DanScott]

surprised you didn't mention Aklang or Pretracker, as now these are pretty much the standard for soft-synth.

Aklang is immensely powerful due to it's modular setup, allowing all sorts of operators to interact and output a truelly amazing quality sample

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by DanScott

surprised you didn't mention Aklang or Pretracker, as now these are pretty much the standard for soft-synth.

Aklang is immensely powerful due to it's modular setup, allowing all sorts of operators to interact and output a truelly amazing quality sample

I haven’t looked into these too much actually. Whilst definitely interesting, and designed to complement the Amiga way of working, they’re not actually running on an Amiga, so outside the scope of my video.