Hi Everione. Amiga Music

[nisios]

I have played amiga when i was a kid and i loved it. In the meantime i got involved with music production and i heard about the amiga reputation in music making. I whant to rediscover amiga and i would apreciate if someone could help me. Id like to know what is the best amiga system for music production. Thanks

Nisios

[justthatgood]

Well for what I remember, tons of the people that had Amiga systems did most of there music making in the form of MODS.  That way they would be able to have killer music without actually having to have very fancy Sound Cards.

Yeah the old skool trackers... Makes me all nostalgic, thinking about people making Demos and stuff. Woo hoo.

[anakirob]

The following programs all run fine on an unexpanded A1200 without running patches such as AHI.

There are a million (or damn near to it) progs which make mod. files. All of them are much the same! But ProTracker is the favorite. If you are new to trackers, this is a good program to learn as most other trackers use the same commands and layout.

OctaMED has some useful features. The Synthsounds can be fun, but making new sounds can be a little tricky. Hybrid sounds allow you to do some complex envelopes. And the Hold/Decay can be excellent for 303 type sweeps when used with the sample offset command. JUST DON'T USE 8-ch MODE! it sucks.

Musicline Editor has a powerful and versatile wavetable synth. But it can be quite processor intensive. I use it to make samples for use in other trackers (it's quite a useful tool when used with with AoN/Chorus)

Art of Noise (AoN/Chorus) is my personal favorite. But if you cannot read german it can be quite confusing. It too has a handy wavetable synth. And the FM-generator is awesome! It is especially useful for programmers.

AHX is great if you want that oldschool SID sound. For a unique sound, render the AHX.waves file to disk and mess with it in a sample editor.

Visit aminet or eXotica to find these Apps.
Hope this information helps someone in some way.

[nagaflas]

As for software, try this porgram:

http://www.hd-rec.de/

[Oliver]

Anakirob mentioned a few I haven't tried.

I was sequencing on Music-X 2 for several years.  It's a midi sequencer with some simple sample editing and playback as well.  The features are nothing special, but I liked the interface, as it was very intuitive for me.

Bars & Pipes seems to be the most popular midi sequencer for Amiga.  I believe there is still a Yahoo group/forum dedicated to Bars & Pipes.  I believe the complete program is available for free download now, and there may even be some modules/expansions being developed by some users (I read about this some time ago, but can't remember the details).

There was a nice sounding software 303 emulator which I tried years ago.  It was using 8 bit sound, and had an inherently gritty and raw character (I think even more so than the h/w 303).  However, it was only a sample generator, and not a real time synth, so I didn't use it much.  Also can't remeber exactly what it was called.

I've never used Amigas as a sound source much, so can't comment on hardware.

Do you own a miggy now, or are you just testing the waters?  What music are you working on?

[SamuraiCrow]

Note:  To get Med Soundstudio (the latest in the Med/Octamed series for the Amiga) you have to join the mailing list at MED_Soundstudio_Amiga-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

[anakirob]

First a question. Is there a program which will allow me to edit PSID (c64 tracker) files on the amiga. I have been intrigued by a program called SIDM.O.N. which makes my a1200 crash!

Now...

I love using my amiga for sound generation and composition because I can enter my notes in REAL-TIME from the QWERTY keyboard. I have not found a PC program which is as responsive as ProTracker or OctaMED 4ch. I understand that this is due to fundamental limitations with the standards set by IBM back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Also, I notice that MOD. files just don't sound as cool on a PC as they do on an amiga. The amiga has some nice fat bass!

If you have an accellerator or sound card (or both) then DigiBooster, Symphonie and OctaMED soundstudio are usable. Otherwise you will probably be frustrated with their incredible SLOWNESS! But really, if you want that proffesional sound then you may as well be using PC or MAC.

for 303 type sounds then you would be wanting:

303tracker (or it's earlier incarnation 303emu) does one of the most accurate 303 emulations of any I've heard on any platform. But I think you would be needing some fast-ram to run that one!
or...
The latest version of Kocmu runs nicely in the background, as it does not use the audio channels itself. It uses minimal CPU, and it also includes some C source for the 303 emulation routine it uses. Handy if you want to learn how to synthesize your own sounds (as I have been doing). I seem to recall seeing a REAL-TIME version of this program for 060 Amigas, but have never used it myself.

Both these programs can be found on Aminet. Indeed, you could do far worse than to trawl the aminet for software if you are looking to do ANYTHING on the good old Amiga.

[Oliver]

I believe 303emu is the program I was talking about before.  It really does have a nice raw sound.

I have used AXS with MSDOS, playing notes from QWERTY keyboard, and would have to agree that it can suffer from slow response.  I think the midi latency on PCs is generally fine though (depending on how much software load there is, and the interface hardware).

anakirob: have you tried using these progs you mentioned on UAE?  Do they sound OK with ordinary PC sound cards?

Haven't tried any c64 tracker editing, but will try the sid box from midibox.org this year.  It's an interesting project.  Anyway, I never liked using trackers very much.

[anakirob]

have you tried using these progs you mentioned on UAE? Do they sound OK with ordinary PC sound cards?

Do the sound OK? If by "OK" you mean "not bad" then yes, if you mean "like a bona fide Amiga" then sadly no, an emulated amiga just does not have the same punch as a real one.

When mastering tracks composed on an amiga I find I get much better results recording from my amiga onto minidisc (via a nifty little behringer PA) than I do rendering my mods as WAV from windows or AIFF from my Amiga.

Oh, check out the recent uploads on Aminet for some of my tracks (or search for "WAR_" in the MODS/MPG directory).

[nisios]

Hi everyone...and thaks for all your advice!!!
And sorry for taking so long to reply.

Well.....I was looking on ebay for an amiga....i was aiming to the 1200 when a friend of mine (the mc for my hiphop project) ame to the studio with a commodore full 49 keys midi keybord. He told me then that hes girlfriend father had a computer shop with tons of amiga equipment in the warehouse. I managed to meet the guy in the warehouse and it was full of boxed amiga 1200, 1200hd, 600, monitors midi keybords memory and everithing you can imagine. Then it came the bad part of the story. The guy was asking for 400 euros for a 1200 and 100 euros for the midi keyborg. So i whent home with nothing in my hands. I whent back to ebay and before i knew my MC enterd the studio with a present to me: a disassembled amiga 500 and a brand new A600 and  couple of accessories like mouses and tv connector.....
So.... i have a A600 in my hands but sadly i dont have working power suply yet. im waiting for it.

So i have a question.....can i connect an hrd drive to the a600? Can i make music with it, even limited?

Thanks

[nisios]

Oliver wrote:

Do you own a miggy now, or are you just testing the waters?  What music are you working on?

To answer to what music i make question:

I make mostly minimal techno....its my favourite style i have a couple of record in the market but i like to do lots of different stuff.....im making hiphop with a friend,i have a breackbeat record in the market i made with another friend of mine and im starting a new project with my studio neighbour mostly aimed to live performance (hardware based music). I love music and i love exploring new and old things. Im becoming a bit of retro affictionated....heheh...
Well thats all for now.....i hope i can say i have an amiga music project soon.....lets see how his develops.

[HopperJF]

Isn't Bars And Pipes being developed for OS4, or was that just a dream?

[kd7ota]

nisios wrote:
Can i make music with it, even limited?

My brother actually made lots of music using Octamed V4 which came on the cover of a disk magazine CU Amiga I believe....  :-D

He only had a 1mb expansion card to it though. You may be limited on the sounds, but even then, im sure you can pull some really good techno with just the stock A600. Chip tunes just rule.  :-D

[Oliver]

nisios wrote:
... He told me then that hes girlfriend father had a computer shop with tons of amiga equipment in the warehouse. I managed to meet the guy in the warehouse and it was full of boxed amiga 1200, 1200hd, 600, monitors midi keybords memory and everithing you can imagine....

Hmm, seems he would rather let that hardware gather dust.  Seems a crying shame to have a lot of new (unused) hardware just sitting around, wasted.  Maybe you should offer to sell it all on ebay for him, and take a healthy commission.

As for making music with an A600, yes you can.  It will not be as pleasant an experience as using a thoroughly expanded machine, but it certainly can achieve a lot of the retro style sounds which miggies have been famed for.  If you're doing midi sequencing, I found slower machines had some difficulty drawing scrolling events smoothly, but this doesn't really effect the music much.  It just means you can't easily watch the midi events scroll as you listen.  I can't remember my amigas having latency problems or dropping events.  You will most likely be using 8 bit sound, up to four channels (IIRC), which is probably what miggies have been best known for.

Have fun, and let us know when you finish some music.  Would be glad to hear it.

-Oli

[nisios]

can anybody give a link or so to some kind of tuturial on putting a hard drive in the a600?