‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/may/02/poor-man-studio-amiga-computers-modern-music-jungle-calvin-harris

by errozero • 4 years ago

97 52 4 years ago

rob742• 4 years ago

Good article! I dabbled with MOD files myself in the nineties, but until recently wasn't aware that music made on the Amiga actually managed to get into the charts.

However I can't agree with the last paragraph: "Thirty-five years after the debut of the Amiga 500, a new generation of retro-curious musicians will have the chance to experiment with the machines, as the A500 Mini has recently launched. Perhaps it could be as loved as the original..." - since the A500 Mini is just an emulator running on an embedded board, and it doesn't even have a functional keyboard, you're probably better off running an Amiga emulator on your Linux/Windows PC or Mac...

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

The new "Mini" emulators typically support USB keyboards, I assume that the Amiga Mini does as well.

bitwize• 4 years ago

If THEC64 is anything to go by, THEA500 Mini will get a full-size followup with working keyboard. It won't have more functionality than a PC emulator, but it'll be easier/more fun for normies to set up and use.

I've been really impressed with THEC64. It really delivers a retrocomputing experience that's close to the original in spirit.

Jaruzel• 4 years ago

The A500 mini is a pile of tosh. I know because I have one.

It's basically 2 systems in one, the primary system is the nice carousel that lets you select and instantly boot and play the provided games.

The secondary system is an old version of the Amibian UAE based Amiga emulator, which is auto booted when you select an LHA archive containing a games' fileset via the USB drive. It's slow, clunky, and out of the box hardly supports any games or even Workbench. To get it working you have to muck about with XML config files and put games/apps into the archive files correctly. If I wanted to do that, I'd have stuck with a Raspberry Pi and a proper Amiga emulator. I have several real Amigas, so I know what's involved, and in my opinion the A500 mini is just a toy.

jamal-kumar3• 4 years ago

Oh shit there's actually still people who get old Amigas specifically for making jungle. Cool to see an article in a mainstream publication about this. You can legit roll up to a party with two amigas and a mixer and bump an entire jungle set out of them... It's that thick 8-bit bassline and the fact that you're programming the song in a scrolling wall of hexadecimal that makes jungle sound the way it does.

The sound is definitely getting a kick lately. I was playing tech house at a party and some random came up and was like why aren't you playing jungle? Like damn I haven't heard that in over a decade, good question

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

This is a bit silly since good cross-platform trackers are available for free. C64 SID's I could understand, those are actual analog chips and the modern recreations might not be perfect. But making tracked music is not something that needs real hardware.

jamal-kumar3• 4 years ago

You're missing the point though

It's fun

I dunno how much DJ/VJ/music stuff you do but when you have cute 20 year old total babes literally sitting in your lap asking what that is then it starts to click. Plus with the Amiga thing, again with jungle that 8 bit bass really pumps for such a cheap machine.

I think some get a kick out of working under limitations in order to boost creativity too. Personally I would start with renoise though I can totally see myself having a blast with octamed on some computer that doesn't even really have internet.

crtasm• 4 years ago

There was an online event just recently, PT1210 Weekender V : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-QnGutaUuN_ZUc4GOdEc...

jamal-kumar3• 4 years ago

Haha sick

Here's one I remember venetian snares had in his youtube likes like a decade ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_K5DHZlfg

Joeboy• 4 years ago

Cheaper than an actual recording studio for sure, but "poor man's" is overstating it a bit. They were expensive machines.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

The Atari ST was the real "poor man's" version. Though PC-compatible systems with good soundcards, etc. were even more expensive back then.

rob742• 4 years ago

Ok, the Atari ST may have been cheaper than the Amiga 500, but to make music with it, you had to connect a MIDI keyboard/synthesizer/etc., whereas with the Amiga you could get by just with its built-in capabilities. This is true for the original STs, apparently the "STE" models released in 1989 also had the ability to play sampled audio, but I don't know if that was ever used as intensively as on the Amiga...

bluescrn• 4 years ago

The big-box Amigas were out of reach to most people, but the A500/600/1200 hit a low enough price point to become very popular home computers, at least in Europe, with incredible capabilities compared to the 8-bit generation that people were upgrading from.

andybak• 4 years ago

I suppose this depends on your definition of "poor". I had a fairly low-paying job at the time and they seemed just about affordable.

I ended up with an ST instead for better or worse.

What I really yearned for was an Akai S1000 and they seemed much more out of reach.

type0• 4 years ago

compared to the Fairlight CMI, it was a poor man's machine

detritus• 4 years ago

Two of my best friends were from 'less than well off' families, and they both had Amigas. My fault - I was lucky to come from a comfortably-off family and had one, which they used to come and use on sleep-overs, planting the seed in their minds.

mastazi2• 4 years ago

I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1]

These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music software scene, in particular music trackers [2]

The Amiga was the first mass produced computer where you could make music without plugging in expensive synths or samplers (like was common on the Atari ST for example - I remember my uncle connecting his ST to an Akai sampler and a Roland synth, as a kid I could never have afforded a setup like that). But, if you wanted to sample on the Amiga, you actually needed one external piece of hardware: an audio sampling interface, however these were generally very cheap [3]

Just a few hours ago an article about making music on the Atari ST made it to the HN home page (I also commented there), might be an interesting read for those interested [4]

[1] http://theamigamuseum.com/the-hardware/the-ocs-chipset/paula...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31222980

TacticalCoder• 4 years ago

Yup indeed... The Amiga was the better machine but when a guy would come up with a ST and hook its Roland or Moog synth through the MIDI port, we were in awe! Interestingly enough for the ST had no fan, it's been used for a very long time in some recording studio (where they liked silent recording equipment). To my surprise I saw an ST still in use well into the 2000s.

But, if you wanted to sample on the Amiga, you actually needed one external piece of hardware: an audio sampling interface, however these were generally very cheap

I don't know if I still have mine. In french we'd call it a "digitaliseur" (literally "digitalizer"). I do know though that I still have something much rarer: a 5"1/4 external Amiga floppy drive (when sailing the high seas, for the price of 30"1/2 floppies it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive + 30 5"1/4 floppies). We'd then add a switch on the Amiga to be able to boot from the 5"1/4 as if it was a 3"1/2 and no program would know anything about it (it was working perfectly).

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

Honestly, while the Amiga was a better graphics and sound machine and was better for games and some early video and digital audio stuff (trackers, etc.) -- the ST had a better "productivity" story. 640x400 paperwhite monochrome monitor + MIDI ports + MSDOS-compatible floppy format.

High resolution on Amiga was interlaced and required a scan doubler to be tolerable. Reading MSDOS formatted floppies required special software. DTP and other productivity software tended to find their way to the ST first. Atari made a rock bottom price cheap laser printer. The total package price for a 1Mb ST + high res monitor was lower than anything Commodore ever offered, and far lower than anything Apple offered, but still got you an 8mhz 68000, a GUI, MIDI ports, etc.

I always try to say: the competition for the ST was the Mac and a PC, not the Amiga. Different market segment. Yes, on a low-res colour monitor many people purchased the ST as a games machine, but it wasn't great for that, really. It was a cheap productivity machine, "power without the price". More memory and more Mhz per dollar than anything else out at the time. And that's the segment Tramiel was targeting, he was going after the Mac ("computers for the masses, not for the classes."). The "Jackintosh"

For MIDI sequencing, there's no comparison. The breadth of software on the ST was far beyond anything on the Amiga and some giants of the current DAW software market like Cubase and Logic got their start there.

And honestly, while onboard sampled sound generation on the Amiga was better than its competition, that's kind of a dubious distinction when we're talking about grainy low-bitrate 28khz 8 bit audio. Not exactly CD quality. Within a few years it was outdated relative to what you could get on a commodity PC ISA sound card.

superdisk• 4 years ago

But, if you wanted to sample on the Amiga, you actually needed one external piece of hardware: an audio sampling interface, however these were generally very cheap

Interestingly, an amiga and cheap sampler is how Kanye got his start.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y7SeNjFeeSc

Braini2• 4 years ago

Offtopic regarding [1]

I just love these websites which mimic the Amiga UI or at least show the mouse pointer, instant nostalgia kick. For example also the amigalove forum.

rasz2• 4 years ago

Apple IIGS had Ensoniq ES5503 build in, pretty much half of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_Mirage

timbit42• 4 years ago

Ensoniq was founded by Robert Yannes, the creator of the SID, and Al Charpentier, one of the designers of the VIC-II, and Bruce Crockett, whose history I do not know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq

ahonhn• 4 years ago

Samplers were cheap? I remember the few I might have been able to acquire from the one or two local shops that had Amiga stuff being at least a hundred bucks - a comparative fortune back when I was on $5 a week pocket money.

mastazi2• 4 years ago

Some models were cheaper than that. As an example you can see here[1] this particular model was 30 pounds in 1992, which is equivalent to about 50 dollars[2].

Depending on the time or place they may have been a bit more expensive so it makes sense that in your case you had to spend $100... but let's not forget that a stand-alone sampler was at least 10 times more expensive, so the Amiga was still a way cheaper option than e.g. an Atari ST + MIDI-connected stand-alone sampler.

Also we have to consider that there were sample libraries distributed on floppy - so with an Amiga you could still have "cool sounds" even without a sampler interface - the main point being that audio playback on Amiga was higher quality than most competitors.

[1] https://youtu.be/i9MXYZh1jcs?t=184

[2] https://fxtop.com/en/historical-exchange-rates.php?YA=1&C1=G...

Bradlinc2• 4 years ago

Is there anything that the original Amiga hardware can do that can't be done in an emulator?

philjohn2• 4 years ago

Be utterly rock solid in a live setting

Bradlinc2• 4 years ago

Is this a statement that the emulators aren't particular solid or that the Amiga hardware is very reliable?

mlindner• 4 years ago

Amiga emulators are quite finicky in my experience and generally have a lot of audio output problems and glitches.

mister_tee• 4 years ago

this is probably cheating-it's beyond "original Amiga hardware"-but there were various expansion boards like the Video Toaster which did video switching and effects, and later editing.

I was originally going to suggest the Amiga's video genlock that enabled products like the Toaster, but it looks like WinUAE can simulate genlock via an external AVI file.

disclaimer: was not an Amiga user or analog video professional; some of that might not be totally accurate or use the correct terms. And iiuc, the 1000/500 series for example didn't have the expansion capabilities of the 2000.

midislack• 4 years ago

Is there an Amiga emulator which isn’t subject to the scheduling vagaries of modern operating systems?

snvzz• 4 years ago

Anything involving low latency, be it playing Pinball Dreams or anything to do with audio production.

ant6n2• 4 years ago

There’s this great documentary about the history of tracker music by “Ahoy” on YouTube: https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

cubefox• 4 years ago

Just came here to post it, great documentary!

ant6n2• 4 years ago

Ahoy did a bunch of really great documentaries. The best is probably the one about trying to pin down the first ever video game. I just posted it in its own thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31235102

Braini2• 4 years ago

You beat me to it, this is highly recommended and was a joy to watch.

btbuildem• 4 years ago

even the software was free!

This brings back memories of dank school basements with "software flea markets" where everything, anything (ok maybe save for hot new releases) cost 5zł per floppy. There was a whole sub-genre of programs dedicated to copying disks, with various counter-techniques to work around each copy protection advancement.

The software definitely wasn't free, but piracy was king, and us teens just rolled with the waves. It was the only way to get warez, there was no internet nor BBSs there/then. Quaint to look back on now.

imchillyb• 4 years ago

The Amiga wasn't a "poor man's studio," it was the "EVERYMAN's" studio.

The affordability, community, and platform itself created a creative environment that wasn't separate from the music itself.

This ambitious platform combination of creativity, hardware, software, and community made the Amiga a superior music production environment for every home audio producer.

rbongers• 4 years ago

If you'd like to hear more Amiga music, there is one channel I enjoy that puts out a lot of great mixes:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQnWIt2N1hnWszI2d-j-6Aw

greenn• 4 years ago

Great collection, this channel is what got me into Amiga music. One late work night a coworker and I played these mixes in the office!

Kim_Bruning• 4 years ago

I haven't seen it mentioned here, but Bassoon Tracker is a web-based tracker that can play most old MOD, XM, etc files: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

There's a few demo-mods along the left side, several mod archives listed in the File menu, and you can load your own as well.

That and I figured out you can actually use it to compose your own tracks if you like, just like the old days!

pflanze• 4 years ago

There's a nice clip "Retro Jungle Production With Pete Cannon" from 2020 where he showcases both the Atari ST with MIDI and the Amiga with the OctaMED tracker, and is getting an LP pressed with some new Jungle of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0 (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/retro-jungle-product...)

pjbk• 4 years ago

I was delighted to discover "Bars and Pipes" which was a very well designed software for comping and far superior than using trackers. Even the earlier versions of Cakewalk on the PC were still missing some of the interesting features that made you productive in BnP. To this day some people still fire up BnP and use it to create music!

boboche• 4 years ago

My first encounter with an amiga audio as a music/audio tool was at an amiga-specific computer store that had Audiomaster running off a sampler with some demos.

I was totally blown away watching waveforms and simple audio editing, speeding up, etc.. Remember, this was back when PCs were 4 colors, and sucking at best, for anything audio or video related.

It looked like magic from my, kid's eyes, perspective.

I ended up with a "Perfect Sound" parallel port sampler and messing around with MED, later OctaMED on my A1200 with ECE Midi interface and good ol PSS synth. Good memories.

In some parts of the world, electronic music was a thing, where I was however, you looked like a complete weirdo if you were into that stuff. Seriously.

"Its not real music" up until the PC could catch up and do the same eh ;)

mrpf1ster• 4 years ago

If your interested, Ahoy made a very good Youtube documentary on the rise of trackers and their impact on music: https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

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