Amiga's role in music on The Guardian today

[Bren McGuire]

made my morning to see my favorite computer in the news today:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...-calvin-harris

and to think this is still used today to great effect. what a computer.

[jizmo]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Amiga's footprint on commercial music may fall behind Atari ST and its Midi, but Amiga had a way bigger impact than any other computer out there in the hobby music scene all around Europe – especially after techno and dance become mainstream. Me and my friends used it to that very purpose, and many people I know bought the system to put together some samples and play it in the local disco.

This part of Amiga history remains strangely not that well documented, but the evidence clearly is out there: tens of thousands (probably hundreds considering that most work was never released) mod files from hobbyists dreaming to be the next Prodigy, Leftfield or Orbital.

Commodore seemed uninformed about this as well as they never quite pushed this aspect in their marketing. Nor did they ever try to cater for this segment by amping up the chip memory or improved the sound chip with bedroom musicians in mind (A600 would've been a perfect opportunity) – so most of these people soon migrated to the PC side after 16-bit sound cards became affordable.

[Peanutuk]

Yes, everyone seems to think the Atari ST was completely dominant.

[ElectroBlaster]

The crazy dreams of being up there in front of millions of people playing music,
yes we were the same lol. A bunch of us would cart our Amigas including tvs and crt screens over to a mates house, setting the lot up on his huge dining table and spending the weekend creating rave and hardcore music.

The Amiga just opened the door, we all had sampler carts, bucketloads of cassettes, some vynil records and lots of messing about.

The Amiga was everywhere in the music world back in the day!
Sometimes you had an incling but could never be sure, bit like this group as a random pick:

Brainstorm Crew.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Nobby_UK]

"grey, ugly" + "looks more suited to tax returns"

Heresy !

[Bren McGuire]

people who think that way were rich enough to buy the shit ton of MIDI equipment you needed to use to make the ST make music.
Lots of music were made in the Amiga by more humble households and people, and pressed on vinyl nonetheless. Take that and eat it, 1%

Originally Posted by Peanutuk

Yes, everyone seems to think the Atari ST was completely dominant.

it's still happening, there's this person playing gigs with amigas today, actually, this weekend in the uk. it's mentioned in the comments in the article.

Originally Posted by ElectroBlaster

The crazy dreams of being up there in front of millions of people playing music,

[rothers]

The comments on the article... the Amiga vs. ST war is eternal.

[Ami_GFX]

Originally Posted by rothers

The comments on the article... the Amiga vs. ST war is eternal.

Each has its place. I own two Mega STs in addition to my Amigas and use them for MIDI sequencing which is the St's strong point. I notice that that the articles emphasis is on music made with the Amiga's internal sound, not with MIDI which was the ST's strong point. Nothing like Notator or Cubase exists for the Amiga but it pretty much trumps the ST in just about everything else.

[rare_j]

They reference the A500 and put up a pic of the A1000.

Lol lamers

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Ami_GFX

Nothing like Notator or Cubase exists for the Amiga but it pretty much trumps the ST in just about everything else.

Notator looks very much like DR T's KCS based on a few quick youtube videos I looked at.

Cubase, not sure if we have a decent piano roll sequencer like that. Bars&Pipes has a piano roll editor, but it is not as central as is in Cubase.

[Ami_GFX]

Originally Posted by Jope

Notator looks very much like DR T's KCS based on a few quick youtube videos I looked at.

Cubase, not sure if we have a decent piano roll sequencer like that. Bars&Pipes has a piano roll editor, but it is not as central as is in Cubase.

It's not just the way it looks, it's the timing and hardware. Amiga serial port midi interfaces can do just a couple midi ins and outs with acceptable timing. Notator with a Unitor cartridge port expansion gives you 3 ins and outs with smpte. There was another port expansion that added 3 more outs that used the serial port and the manual warns that the timing on these ports won't be as good. Notator has just about the best midi timing ever. It can go up to 1536 ppq in resolution and you can modify your sequences as they play. And it will put your sequences into standard staff notation in real time as they play. Not bad for a 68K computer. Notator basically takes over your ST and you can't use a lot of desk accessories and alternate desktops with it due to the way it uses memory.

I don't use Cubase but the Atari version does have its adherents. There's a Cubase vs. Notator thing among those who still sequence with Atari Sts. Notator is pattern based like MPC drum machine sequencers while Cubase is linear. Some prefer one and some the other. Dr T's was a less expensive option back in the day and doesn't require a dongle but doesn't have the extensive features of either Notator or Cubase.

The other thing that favored the ST for sequencing aside from the midi ports was the monochrome display mode which was much better for applications like sequencers where you had to view a lot of data at once. The Amiga needed a flicker fixer to have a good display at that resolution.

[rothers]

The Amiga, by itself, was the best music making machine of the two.

Sure if you added thousands of pounds of equipment to the ST it was better but... that's cheating. I'm sure if you hooked 4 Amigas together you could have made a near studio level digital tracking machine, but no one is saying that.

a 16/32 channel digital mixer at the time was upwards of £32,000 (over £100k in todays money) so the Amiga was really punching above its weight, and that's what the article is about.

[Tigerskunk]

The Amiga was to Jungle Music what the Roland TR-909 has been to Techno.

Cheap to get and easy to work with for those young producers back then to produce the sample based music that was Jungle

[rothers]

Absolutely. Up to 8 channels of stereo sampled music for £399 was amazing. There were whole albums made on the Amiga. Albums which were in the charts and hugely successful.

For £399!!

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Ami_GFX

It's not just the way it looks, it's the timing and hardware. Amiga serial port midi interfaces can do just a couple midi ins and outs with acceptable timing. Notator with a Unitor cartridge port expansion gives you 3 ins and outs with smpte. There was another port expansion that added 3 more outs that used the serial port and the manual warns that the timing on these ports won't be as good. Notator has just about the best midi timing ever. It can go up to 1536 ppq in resolution and you can modify your sequences as they play. And it will put your sequences into standard staff notation in real time as they play. Not bad for a 68K computer. Notator basically takes over your ST and you can't use a lot of desk accessories and alternate desktops with it due to the way it uses memory.

Yep, especially 1.x Amigas had terrible problems with timing when using OS routines for timers. The author of Music-X has a writeup about this on Medium.[1]

Also now your superior MIDI Atari has an expansion cartridge for better MIDI. This could have been doable with an Amiga too, but alas it was cheaper to use the Amiga's slow to access serial port, so nearly all the Amiga midi interfaces were rs232.

But this is a different thing to what I thought we were discussing, I was focusing on what kind of MIDI seqs we had on the Amiga, not how well they kept time depending on your CPU/OS version. It would be interesting to hear about the differences in features and workflow from someone who lived on both sides back in the day. :-)

Thankfully the OS timer problem was solved later, but of course by then it was too late and everyone who wanted MIDI had an Atari. The timing problems were not there for more hw banging programmers, they instead synced to video refresh which is very stable.

[1] https://dreamertalin.medium.com/music-x-b4abc68d6f78

[saimon69]

The article talk of the Jungle scene but i know for sure on other sectors the power of Paula was used; in example i did at least three commercials jingles for italian local televisions and one (plot) show opening; plus i did cooperate with other artists that needed soundtracks for their animations.

[d4rk3lf]

It was grey, ugly and had 0.0128% of an iPhone’s memory.

Why? Oh God why (almost) everyone thinks A500 keyboard is ugly?
It's beautiful to me.

Much more then A1200 (just to be clear: my first Amiga was 1200, now I have 500), and it's keyboard, that looks like "A500 for poor", and I always hated that side extrusions from the upper part on A1200.

A500 looks was just perfect for former C64 owner... even in keyboard you could see what improvement that was, and when you turn it on, you're fascinated even much more.

CDTV is my another favorite Amiga design.

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

I love the A500 design too, especially the plus.

[Ami_GFX]

The Amiga does have one trick that even the professional samplers of the day didn't do, 8 bit stereo sound. With one of the Sunrise 12 bit audio cards, it can also do 12 bit stereo. All the stereo samples made by Akai, Emu, Ensoniq and others were 16 bit and the 12 bit samplers were all mono as is the only professional 8 bit sampler I can think of, the Ensoniq Mirage. The 12 bit samplers go for more than the 16 bit ones these days. I had an Akai S612 that I sold in the early 2000s. It's trippled in value since then to the 900 dollar range. S950s go for over 1000. I've bought both of Akai's most advanced samplers, the S6000 and Z8 for around $600 total for both. I could have bought an S1000 in really nice shape with some expansions for $400 last week. The samplers that were used extensively in 90s music are going for what Amiga 4000's cost about 15 years ago. The only exception to that are the Ensoniq samplers, especially the ASRs which go for prices similar to A4000s these days.

Irony of ironies, the money from my S612 was used to fund my first A4000. And to add to the irony, the relationship between Amiga's and electronic music goes way back for me. In the late 80s, I was taking a course in electronic music and the studio had an A500 in it which was the first Amiga I ever played with. My A2500 came with a DSS sound sampler and I'm going to have to dig it out and hook it up again. Now that lofi sampling in in vogue, the Amiga actually has some relevance to electronic music these days as well as back in the 90s, weak midi implementation and all. It hadn't occurred to me to get a midi interface and try playing Notator sequences on an Amiga but it could be interesting.

[Jope]

I have a few old Roland samplers in my rack. An S-330 and an S-550. 12bit/30kHz. 15kHz for double the sample time. Fun things, you really need a video monitor + mouse to get the most out of them. :-)

Akai S2000s seem to still be quite cheap, but the user interface in those is not the best Akai had to offer..

An A4k wasn't such a bad deal I guess? They're more expensive than S612s now. :-)