Advice on composing music

[Karlos]

mooncloud wrote:
Hi.

I had an Amiga back in the glory days and just acquired another A500 from Ebay with a 1mb upgrade.

The question is, now I am wanting to get back into composing and want to compose using the computer solely (I don't play an instrument I can hook up) and would like to know: WHAT DO I NEED? I am thinking of getting an A1200 also - should I really bother? What's the best piece of software I need and where can I get it?

Thanks in advance to anybody who can help!

If you want to make stuff a bit more complex, I can't recommend OctaMED soundstudio enough. However, you'll need a somewhat expaned machine to run it to anything like its full potential.

If you fancy something a little different, MusicLine Editor is great. Another tracker, but this one is based around synthesised sounds rather than samples (which it can still use, of course).

[Karlos]

@mooncloud

OctaMED Soundstudio uses samples like most trackers. It also supports MIDI quite well, I have have no problem controlling MIDI gear with it. Also, it does also support a type of synthesis that, IMHO isn't very good. You can make some quite interesting sounds with it, but they aren't that useful IMO. However its support for up to 64 channels, 16-bit direct to disk rendering etc more than make up for it.

MusicLine Editor is again a tracker but this one focuses more on synthesis, as I said. It uses very short waveforms that can be morphed about with envelopes, phasers, mixing, resonant filters etc into some really cool sounds. I only wish it too had some sort of direct to disk recording :-/

[Karlos]

To be frank, you will struggle with OctaMED SS on a base A500. It'll eat a good chunk of memory 1MB is about enough to load the program and maybe a few small samples only, in fact I had problems on a 2MB A1200.

If you want to use anything more than the 4 basic sound channels (ie the hardware sound channels) you will find the stock 68000 in there doesn't have the muscle to mix sounds at a decent rate.

If you can expand the memory of your A500, that is the very least you should do if you want to make any serious tunes with OctaMED.

Alternatively you could go for a lower spec tracker like Protracker which manages better in lower memory situations (used to run it on my old 1MB A600 booted from floppy).

Whatever creative thing you do with your amiga, upgrading can only help ;-)

Versions of octamed, protracker etc have been given away on magazine coverdisks many times. If you can find someone with one you are away. I am not sure where you can download them from but aminet is the first place to look :-)

[Karlos]

mooncloud wrote:
Hi Tomas.

This sampler business.........what exactly does a sampler allow you to do? - bearing in mind I don't play any instruments. I'm thinking that you hook up a keyboard, for example, to your Amiga...??

Nah, it's just a little gizmo that plugs into the parallel port and allows you to record sounds as samples. The quality is invariably quite bad (typically 8-bit up to 56kHz in mono, 27kHz in stereo) but at the same time has a unique 'mod' sound without having to buy that expensive LoFi effect's unit :-D

[Karlos]

mooncloud wrote:
Thanks, Zero.

Are there external hard drives you can hook up to the A500 to increase memory size etc? I'm new to this and the jargon goes over my head a little.

Well, the memory we are talking about here is RAM, hard drives  are media storage. However there were some decent sidecar expansions for the A500 that gave you not only a hard drive, but a faster CPU and also more RAM too. A company called Great Valley Products (usually abbreved GVP) made a range of such expansions if I recall correctly.

If you can find one of those, it can transform your A500 in one step :-D

A hard drive will make your amiga a lot more productive, however. No swapping floppy disks all over the place for starters.

[Karlos]

@mooncloud

Okay, I'm getting there! How about, in terms of memory, if I whack in an 'Amiga A600/A1200 2.5’’ IDE Hard Drive - 2160MB (2.16GB)' - as I've heard about. Only about £10. Of course I then need an A600 or A1200 - but as they are cheap, I don't mind as much. more......

An A1200 with a hard drive is a much better starting position:

You'll start with at least version 3.0 of the operating system which opens up more software options.

The A1200 comes with a 2MB of RAM (called Chip RAM as it is shared between the CPU and the sound / graphics chips) as opposed to the 0.5MB or 1MB an A500 typically has. Chip RAM is important for many older music packages as this is where the sound samples are held during music playback. Note that OctaMED SoundStudio is not restricted to using only Chip RAM for sound samples, you can use as much memory as you have fitted. And speaking of memory...

The CPU in the stock A1200 is 2-3x faster than the one in the stock A500. Just adding more memory to the A1200 (via the trapdoor slot) can double that too. The reason for this is that in a Chip RAM only A1200, the CPU has to share access to the memory with the sound and graphics chips. This  basically slows the CPU down since it has to wait for the graphics/sound chips to have their share, which is usually 50% of the time (or more). So just adding 4MB of memory to the trapdoor not only gives you 3x more memory than you had to start with but can double the performance to :-)

However, it doesn't stop there. Many cards exist for the trapdoor slot that add not only more memory, but an even faster CPU to start with. If you get a 50MHz 68030, you can happily use OctaMED soundstudio with 16 sound channels at once and have enough CPU power left to comfortably use the system. With a 25MHz 68040 I've had 32 sound channels without problems, and that's good for making some noise :-D

Also, a faster CPU in your A1200 with a hard drive gives you more scope for mixing your finished many-channel song to hard drive for, perhaps burning to a CD later? :-)