New Song

[Plaz]

that's not my genre so I'm probably bad at describing that.

I think Toto-ish is a pretty good analogy. When young I was very influenced by stuff like much of motown and groups like journey, ambrosia, the cars, men at work, little river band, ac-dc, def leppard, the police and many others. Toto had some I liked too.

Greg Hamm of Men At work actually contacted me long ago based on some posting I had made. We traded mail for a while until he got too busy with touring. I think that was around '96-97. One of the songs on their "Brazil" album was completely recorded in his basement on an A3000 with 4 AD516 cards. I'll see if I can look up which it was exactly.

Recently I worked with another friend who's very in to  Euro/Techno. Those samples would probably fit here better.

I almost went this route (but I would only have been able to afford one card.

I had similar trouble. I was looking to go PC, dat or sequencer too at that time because Amiga was fading and the hardware was expensive and hard to find. I eventually got lucky and found two cards at a nice price. Amiga was much more stabel as the early PC and DAT systems were crashing our tracks all the time.

I'm guessing that there was no easy way to back up your AD516 multitrack recording from the Amiga's hard drive

Actually there were ZIP drives. At about 1meg/minute/track/stereo, you could get all your tracks for maybe 3 songs on a 100meg ZIP. I backed stuff up to a second drive and to ZIP. ZIP made it pretty easy to move files from the Amiga to PC. I also used another util to transfer/backup files over parallel cable to the PC.

Later I took some of the Amiga tracks, moved them to PC, used cooledit (now known as adobe audition) to convert them to wav (if I recall) and then remixed them there. From there I could burn to CD, convert to mp3 or whatever.

I still have my A3000 recording machine, still works, all old files still intact. I can't say when or if may use it again. I've thought about selling but just can't bring myself to do it.

Well I hope I haven't dragged this thread too off course.

Plaz

[Ral-Clan]

Greg Hamm of Men At work actually contacted me long ago based on some posting I had made. We traded mail for a while until he got too busy with touring. I think that was around '96-97. One of the songs on their "Brazil" album was completely recorded in his basement on an A3000 with 4 AD516 cards. I'll see if I can look up which it was exactly.

Now that's a neat bit of trivia.  One thing I've always wondered about the AD516...it didn't have too many software effects (just reverb, that had to be applied all at once to a track as I recall).  So how did you apply effects to tracks?  Did you send individual channels to an external mixer and use the AUX/SEND buses on each channel to send it to a hardware effects box?

I assume you weren't mixing down in the Amiga, but rather to an external DAT or something?

I still have my A3000 recording machine, still works, all old files still intact. I can't say when or if may use it again. I've thought about selling but just can't bring myself to do it.

I know what you mean.  I still keep my old MD8, even though it hasn't been used in a year and a half.  It worked so well for me that I just can't bear to part with it.  It was a very capable little multitracker that was cutting edge around 1998 and could still produce nice stuff today if you don't mind being limited to eight tracks.

Here is a pic of my home studio (with the A2000) which I used until 2008, when the A2000 developed problems.  

http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1690

Great system.  Today an IBM PC replaces the A2000, but it runs UAE a lot of the time for Bars & Pipes and other stuff the A2000 used to do.  Because the PC is so very capable of running modern multitracker DAW software (i.e. REAPER) the MD8 multitracker and the external hardware effects boxes are no longer required, although I still use the MD8 as a mixer for synths when recording in the DAW.

[Ral-Clan]

Don't know if you guys have ever seen this old article with a strong Amiga/music/recording slant:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1996_articles/jan96/amiga.html