HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

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

⬐ superdisk

> 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

⬐ rasz

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

⬐ timbit42

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

⬐ rasz

Bruce was logistics.

InfoWorld - Apr 26, 1982 - Page 18: "Bruce Crockett is Commodore's vice-president of systems manufacturing and the man who keeps the Santa Ciara assembly plant running smoothly."

Before that "Liquid Gold: The Story Of Liquid Crystal Displays And The Creation Of An Industry" page 134 "he was a former operations manager for LEDs at Fairchild"

Apparently Tramiel had a thing for not keeping verbal agreements (suppliers being huge example). Whole C64 team was promised bonuses after release, instead they got "be glad you have a job" pep talk and the smart ones left.

⬐ Braini

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.

⬐ ahonhn

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.

⬐ mastazi

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...

⬐ TacticalCoder

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).

⬐ cmrdporcupine

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.

⬐ usrn

I poked around with TOS the other year. It's super easy to write graphical apps that will build on DOS with TCC and also TOS with whatever C dev tools it had.

It's kind of sad how much things seem to have regressed.

⬐ foobarian

It's funny you mention this, where I grew up the ST was known exactly as a DAW because of the built-in MIDI ports. But more interestingly the Amigas were super popular as broadcast TV workstations because they had some kind of v-sync functionality built-in that made it possible to overlay graphics on the TV signal. A bunch of local TV stations had tell-tale Amiga graphics in their transitions / credits messages / news overlays. The ST kids always lamented the lack of this because it made it impossible for the ST to be used this way (never mind the worse graphics capabilities).

⬐ AaronM

With the Amiga it is possible to use an external clock source as the system clock and to switch the video chip horizontal and vertical sync pins to inputs so they can come from external source instead of internal system clock based sync generator.

The addition of the Amiga toaster, meant that Amiga saw use in the TV and Movie Industry in the late 80's and 90's. A number of high profile projects used the Amiga.

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

Here's a listing of some of the famous uses of the Amiga https://www.amigareport.com/ar134/p1-12.html

Some notable ones, were Babylon 5, Titanic,

⬐ LocalH

I actually remember crashing my uncle’s A2000 more than once by feeding a raw VCR signal into the genlock and seeking the tape too fast. It would screw up the timings going into the vertical blank

⬐ cmrdporcupine

Interestingly enough this genlock feature was also possible with the Sharp X68000, which was kind of like an Amiga but on steroids. Or maybe more like a late-80s/early-90s arcade cabinet machine but in a PC form factor. Beautiful machines, too bad Japanese only though they sold boatloads there.

This is what I remember from those times: if you had external gear (synth, sampler etc.) then the Atari was your best bet because of the built-in MIDI ports[1] and consequently having a good ecosystem in terms of MIDI sequencers. (Cubase, for example, was available for ST)[2].

If you didn't have external gear, then you would go for Amiga (maybe using a cheap Amiga sampler interface[3], and a music tracker[4] as the software) due to the fact that Amiga had better onboard audio, courtesy of Paula[5]. (IIRC, it wasn't until the Falcon that Atari caught up with Amiga in terms of onboard audio).

[1] https://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/interfaces.php

[2] https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/tamw/cubase.htm

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

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

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

⬐ jbverschoor

Just last week I came across this gem about Steve Porcaro about MIDI and Synths.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUNqZ9noSLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCurJJoSrS4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFxhm9Geg3k

⬐ nezgar

The STe came pretty close with DMA stereo audio playback, though only at 4 sample rates so software resampling and mixing was still required. I did a lot of my own tracking on an 8Mhz 1040STe then later a 16Mhz MegaSTe.

At 16mhz I could do 25Khz playback with full software mixing, or with the 50Khz playback mode the playback routine would "cheat" by just alternating the samples for the two channels per speaker which used less CPU but produced a high frequency squeal that was easily filtered by turning down the treble on your stereo :)

⬐ mastazi

Nice! Yes, I remember the 50Khz mode! For the high frequency noise, there is actually an easy fix (requires a little bit of soldering), if you still have your STe you may be interested: https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/STEDACFIX/index.htm

Here's also a demonstration of using a sampler and a tracker with an Amiga, all from around 1990: https://youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

“Aaaand we're out of memory.”

(There's also the humor of sampling Coldcut, who themselves were wizards of audiovisual sampling, at least for their time.)

Don't forget to use a sampler to grab sounds for the tracker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

> “Ta-da-da-daa”... aaaaand we're out of memory.

Here's a good recap of what sampling looked like in the time of Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

“Ta-da-da-da... aaaaaaand we're out of memory.”

Likewise apparently DJ Shadow pulled off quite a feat with his Akai MPC60 on ‘Endtroducing’, because the sampler could store something like twelve samples, also not too long.

A sorta related anecdote is how the British ‘mind the gap’ was this terse because it was recorded on a solid-state memory, costing dearly in '68 even for the small amount by today's standards.

There is a great video on youtube that explains how it all works.

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

He gets into the explanation of how the tracker software works about 8min 30seconds in.

Typically though if you got a cracked game at that time it would have the crackers group name and there would be a little graphical demo and some tracker music.

⬐ avyeed_desa

A lot of jungle artist have recently resurfaced their amigas and make and release music completely done with Trackers.

If you are interested you should check out artists like Bizzy B (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOMER0TV8UG1nf5OyzsJewQ/vid...) or Pete Cannon (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM_kHAd0Q_tWH7OEyF5hcAg/vid...)

⬐ avyeed_desa

ha i just realized one of the videos from Bizzy B features another producer (DJ D-Lux) that has dusted off his amiga after 25 years and started reusing it for that video and asking Brian how to use and do things on the tracker. Funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A6FCs0Q6iI

⬐ ahartmetz

This mix on Bizzy B's channel is a really good old schhol jungle mix, thanks for the tip!

https://youtu.be/Jg8r3x6lbpA

⬐ dharma1

you'll enjoy this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk

⬐ tjr225

I was just talking about this guy at work the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzF5aUqn-WY

His channel is filled with awesome hardware tracked with MED.

⬐ dharma1

Good memories. I used to be a part of this crew - https://netlabelarchive.org/netlabels/monotonik/

Mods were great. Zero cost beyond the computer, made with public domain tracker software, the music was freely distributed on BBS's (and the web later on). The mod file format was great - small size downloads - note information and sampler instruments were all in one package, typically a couple of hundred kb for the whole song.

You could see exactly how people had put the tunes together, access all the note information/arrangements and samples, and learn from that

⬐ cbm-vic-20

MODs (and later tracker formats) justified my purchase of the big red Gravis Ultrasound.

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

⬐ molotovbliss

B00MER from kfmf (kosmic free music foundation) here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmic_Free_Music_Foundation

Used to love monotonik releases. One thing I liked about tracker days was deconstructing songs to see how it was made. Not as easy to do these days. ReNoise is pretty much the tracker DAW these days. Now that I'm not as broke as before. More gear just less drive to use it. My younger self would of been in heaven with the gear I've got now. Gus was a game changer though back then.

⬐ EvilGrin

If you are interested in picking up some of this music from then and now check out the Mod Archive.

https://modarchive.org/

You will need a media player that understand mod file formats to play the majority of the music files on the site. They have recommendations per platform in their FAQ.

⬐ crtasm

If you have VLC installed already it's handled every mod/tracker file format I've thrown at it.

⬐ jaxb

or https://modlandplayer.net/ -- player for a different archive (http://ftp.modland.com/pub/modules/).

or listen to the radio -- https://www.scenesat.com/ or https://scenestream.net/demovibes/

⬐ themodelplumber

Wow, he's done a really impressive job in the tracker, making things seem considerably easier than I remember :-) I remember sending off hard-earned money to a certain Norman living in Norman, to get a paid copy of ModEdit for DOS, waiting for what seemed an eternity to receive a disk in the mail, only to discover FT][ weeks later on a local BBS, downloadable within an afternoon modem session. And featuring Nibbles, no less.

It seemed like time and tech were advancing so fast, and yet art was elusive.

Anyway I'm looking forward to working on another tracker tune soon. Thanks for the link.

⬐ contingencies

And featuring Nibbles, no less.

Haha, I remember that! The other easter egg I remember from the era was in Budokan. Pong, IIRC.

⬐ arexxbifs

If you're into tracked music, check out "Professional Tracker" by h0ffman and Daytripper[0]. To clarify, the linked recording is not from an Amiga but I have played it on my A1200 - it almost completely fills the 2 megabytes of chip-mem so a fast-mem expansion is required to play it. Impressive stuff.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9ErmKpTcFA

⬐ crtasm

and here's the source file download: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2014/revision14/music_t...

"Professional Tracker

written by Hoffman & Daytripper for the Revision 2014 Tracked Music Compo. Put together in ProTracker v2.3d on Amiga.

As it was for the Revision Tracker Music Compo, it is best viewed in XMPlay on the PC with full screen pattern visualiser. Make sure you use the following settings.

No Interpolation. Mono. Mod Mode PT1." https://soundcloud.com/h0ffman/hoffman-daytripper-profession...

⬐ parksy

I miss the tracker scene, somehow I migrated from trackers to buzz to fruity loops and I guess I've been on that journey ever since.

But the simplicity of being able to so swiftly move notes around in a spreadsheet-type format is something I've never really seen since (outside of trackers themselves at least, and I have used a few modern variants). It's like a piano roll on steroids.

I owe my love of creating music today to the tracker and demoscene of the early 90's, and it's great that it's still alive and well :)

⬐ unixhero

The tracker scene is not dead. http://pouet.net http://scene.org

⬐ doublerabbit

You can also listen to a large archive of modules at: http://modarchive.org

Truly free music.

⬐ walkingolof

The tracker scene did not die with the Amiga, it continued and people still use programs like MilkyTracker today.

Here is an excellent overview of MilkyTracker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2s04YYO0Wg

⬐ arexxbifs

The tracker scene continues on the Amiga to this day. :-) There's also a lot of wonderful music being made on and/or for Commodore 64:s.

⬐ bane

For people who really enjoy tracking, or want to check it out, but want a very modern environment. I'd encourage people to look at the Renoise tracker.

https://www.renoise.com/

SunVox is also an excellent piece of software for those who like a more modular setup https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

⬐ shams93

The only thing is you don't need a vintage amiga to enjoy trackers, I used trackers with linux audio for years, the pi4 is a much more cost effective way to enjoy trackers than trying to find and refurbish a vintage Amiga, although it has to be fun to play with one but for those without those kind of resources you can even do tracking on an android phone or raspberry pi.

⬐ mntmoss

In this era I was a pre-teen and my brother, a few years older, did make a stab at tracking but ultimately focused on other things. I was a bit baffled by the whole thing and we never learned how to rip samples off other sources even though we definitely had the capability for line in and some sample editing tools(Just record off the radio or our CDs! It seems obvious in retrospect).

But it was very exciting to hear other people's work, regardless. Computer music - and it sounded like the stuff I heard in malls and on TV, instead of the synthy chiptune stuff!

Gradually I did start experimenting with composition on trackers and that proved to be another mountain climbed only gradually. Even when I had "the sound," it takes a lot of work to understand how to a bring a song structure beyond a four bar loop, but I would have to say that I learned a fair amount from studying tracker music too. A good success story for source availability.

⬐ 72deluxe

I remember using FT ][ under Windows 95 as my friend at school introduced me to it. Some of the more complicated songs were bigger than MP3s of the time (that confused my tiny brain) but were playable on my garbage 486 DX2, unlike MP3s (I was poor and using throw-off computers that others had thrown away).

Happy times.

⬐ rob74

Well yeah, the samples in the MOD files are uncompressed (or losslessly compressed, no idea), so if you have a lot of different samples, I can imagine you might end up with something bigger than an MP3 file. I guess none of those were modules initially composed on an Amiga though ;)

⬐ 72deluxe

Yes, I think they were modplug era files. I didn't understand how they worked at the time so was baffled needlessly.

⬐ squarefoot

Anyone remembers Oktalyzer? It could do 8 tracks in realtime when all other trackers were limited to 4 tracks. It produced a bit lower quality and lower volume audio due to software mixing, and its higher cpu demands made it unsuitable for games, but it was perfectly usable alone even on my A500 back then for making more complex tunes. I miss those days! Here's some info. http://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/

⬐ louthy

Trackers have a mini-resurgence via the modular scene with NerdSeq [1] [2]

[1] https://xor-electronics.com/nerdseq/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mShpux61dw0

⬐ crusty511

Not really "budget". I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive.

Venetian Snares Renoise > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

⬐ rvense

> I imagine that hardware was relatively expensive.

It cost money, but the next step would have been a rack sampler and probably a mixer which were much more expensive.

⬐ crusty511

Yeah, an Amiga 500 with RRP £499 in 1987 is about £1440 today.

⬐ mrspeaker

My friend's dad was into electronics. He bought one of the samplers from the local Radio Shack, opened it up, figured out how it worked, and started making his own. He sold them to us for about $40. Which was so much money as a kid (and in the 90s), but damn it was awesome.

I ended up recouping the costs of the sampler many times over though: the local radio station had a competition of "guess what this song-played-backwards is and win $100". I'd sample the song snippet as they played it, reverse it in a tracker (like in the video where he reverses the reverse cymbal) and get the song... then it was just a matter of being the correct caller - battling mostly against my other friends with our home-made samplers. I won $500 doing that!

[Edit: oh, you mean the computer hardware, not the sampler hardware! My A500 was second-hand, no memory upgrade (grr) - and if my parents got it for me then there's no way it was more than a couple of hundred bucks ;) ]

⬐ mrspeaker

[Edit: oh, you mean the computer hardware, not the sampler hardware! My A500 was second-hand, no memory upgrade (grr) - and if my parents got it for me then there's no way it was more than a couple of hundred bucks ;) ]

⬐ Theizestooke

What's the best tracker currently for Windows or Linux? Googling I found OpenMPT (https://openmpt.org/), would be curious about others.

⬐ AstralStorm

The other well known, working and portable ones would be MilkyTracker, Schism Tracker and Renoise.

MilkyTracker is UI compatible with FastTracker 2, Schism Tracker is UI compatible with Impulse Tracker and Scream Tracker.

Renoise is more of a crossover of digital audio workstation with a tracker.

⬐ geon

Also Sunvox is pretty good and very portable. https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

⬐ loudandskittish

I've recently tried to get back into tracking and I've found OpenMPT to be one of the worst modern trackers. Yes, it adds lots of modern features but its very poorly documented, there are barely any tutorials and what few do exist are more focused on "drawing" samples than actually using the program to make music. I also dislike that I can't quickly go through my samples directory and try a melody on each sample like I could with the trackers of yore.

So far, Schism Tracker is more usable I've found, but it feels like running Impulse Tracker in DOSBox, which, granted, it not necessarily a bad thing.

In the end, I may just suck it up and pay for Renoise.

⬐ dana321

Madtracker is a bit better imho. https://www.madtracker.org/about.php Has full .xm fasttracker 2 compatibility, plus a more powerful .mt2 format that supports vsti/vst and built-in effects, automation etc.

Renoise is the kitchen sink, its probably the most powerful tracker you can get, a bit overwhelming even to someone like me that spent over 10 years every day using them: https://www.renoise.com/

⬐ rob74

I used ModPlug Player (https://www.modplug.com/), the predecessor of OpenMPT, years ago. I was pretty pleased with it back then, although the alternatives mentioned by the others may be more modern/better nowadays (wow, the latest version of ModPlug Player is from 2002!). I still have an archive of MOD files somewhere in the depths of my hard disk, maybe I should try to find them and indulge in some nostalgia...

⬐ newnewpdro

SchismTracker is a somewhat maintained GPL ImpulseTracker clone that runs on Mac/Win/Linux (SDL).

https://github.com/schismtracker/schismtracker

⬐ severak_cz

I recommend you to look at SunVox - https://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

It's multi platform tracker with modular synthesizer functionality.

⬐ birracerveza

+1, sunvox is awesome. Also available for iOS/Android, it works perfectly on my Moto G8 Plus, even with the more complex examples provided.

It only needs that sf2 compatibility to reach absolute perfection.

⬐ tomduncalf

If you fancy the retro vibe, someone has ported Fast Tracker 2 to modern OS's: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. From what I've heard, Renoise is the most "modern" tracker. Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days.

⬐ dharma1

> Buzz is another interesting one, not sure what the status of that is these days.

Buzz is great software, the modular concept was fantastic. I don't think Oskari has worked on it since 2016 - http://jeskola.net/buzz/beta/files/changelog.txt

It still works though, and there is something of a community - http://forums.jeskola.net/

⬐ ilamont

I laughed out loud at this moment, which came a few seconds after starting the sample:

"Aaaand we're out of memory."

Explains why samples tended to be really short .. and also why some artists (or their labels) did make the investment in studio time & the professionals who knew how to take this tech to the next level.

I worked in a 24-track studio in London in the early 90s where dance music was recorded, mixed, and remixed by The KLF and Nomad, among others, as well as soundtracks by Hans Zimmer, who owned the studio. There was a small army of people who not only knew the studio hardware (the board, Moog, compressors, gates, etc.) but also Cubase, sequencers, and other software, which was quite expensive but utterly necessary to crank out the hits played on the radio and the remixes that were preferred in the clubs.

⬐ harel

I used to love the KLF (still do). The whole KLF story was a fascinating saga of art and PR. I found their sound quite solid and it holds today as well. Loved the Manual as well.

I had an electronic music studio from around 1997 to early 00s, which over the years has cost a lot of money. I sold it all off at a massive loss in the end (A Yamaha Promix 1 mixer was gone for 70 quid for example) and years later moved to a software only world. Back then the gear was necessary. When I sold it it seems an unnecessary luxury. Still miss it though.

⬐ C1sc0cat

I used to work with a Musician Turned developer who had worked as a London session guitarist

One classic comment about a major uk star "97 FUKI*&G tracks in pro tools for his vocal"

⬐ ilamont

"They'd fallen into a trap of using the studio more as an instrument and punching in parts to get the perfection they were looking for than they were getting through raw performance power."

Rick Rubin on Metallica circa 2008, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/rick-rubin-my...

⬐ takeda

I think the limitation was of the program. I remember being able to record much longer audio when I was playing with a sampler.

⬐ ArtWomb

Am curious how you would compare the production quality back in the day. To producers today who seem to eschew the massive studio. Doing everything in Logic. With perhaps a single MIDI controller. Preferring that Billie Eilish in her bedroom vibe ;)

My recollection is that even back then, the capital outlay required wasn't egregious. I recall a friend setting up a space with second-hand pro mixing board, amps, mics, etc all for around $10-15K in initial expense. And all sourced on various internet forums. Of course, today the mac book pro alone may set you back $5K+!

⬐ tjr225

> Of course, today the mac book pro alone may set you back $5K+!

I run Ableton Live 9 and Logic Pro along with all of my normal software instruments and effects on a 2009 Macbook Pro that was given to me for free. Upgraded to an SSD and 8GB of RAM and it runs nearly just as well as on my 2013 Macbook Pro - which I would use but the keyboard has started to go out.

My point is you could just buy a used MacBook or a lower end MacBook for far, far less than 5k.

On the flip side of that I have a synthesizer that has increased in value five fold since I bought it in 2007.

⬐ C1sc0cat

And if you have a working Yamaha CS 80 even more so ( one of the synths used on blade runner)

⬐ ilamont

That's a pretty good price if that includes a 24-track board, which cost many multiples of that new back in the day.

Other big costs at the professional level included hardware gates, compressors, tape machines (2 inch analog IIRC), the software (Cubase) and the Macs with the memory and storage required to run it, and staff -- a few engineers and manager employed by the studio and the hired guns brought in for specific tasks.

I was just listening to "Justified & Ancient," one of The KLF's hits from 1991/1992. I don't think it would have been possible to do a song like that (and the remixes) with the Amiga and other low-cost home gear of that era. It's really complex and layered, and Jimmy Cauty and the people he worked with were really pushing the capabilities of the software and studio hardware they had at their disposal. Check out these two mixes of that song:

https://youtu.be/RPjggN-KByI

https://youtu.be/LWuPPMTiuRw

They shifted key with some very complex backing harmonies to make the two versions. It's possible they did that in the studio with singers, but I suspect that was probably done at the console, with hardware and software handling the shift. It would save a lot of time (and money) applying tech for that use case.

Of course, nowadays it is like you said -- the bedroom/home studio model followed by Billie Eilish and her brother and practically every other up-and-coming artist.

The technology shift is very liberating, and opens up music to a much wider range of artists, but there's something lost, as well. A really powerful documentary about this trend was made by Dave Grohl some years back about Sound City in L.A. and the Neve console that powered recordings by Neil Young, RATM, Tom Petty, and more. Details: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/08/173823162/dave-grohl-finds-mu...

⬐ stewartm

I love that Sound City doc - watched it a bunch of times.

I was a studio engineer the same time as you, predominantly in a studio in Sheffield. I was blessed for the fact that the studio had an epic live room, fabulous collection of mics and outboard, including some mental compressors from Tubetech and E.A.R. - all recorded to 2 inch via a Neve that we had dismantled from its previous home in CTV and rebuilt and installed over the course of a month or two.

Around the time I moved on, Logic Audio was really coming into its own, particularly the plugins available. I remember seeing an AC30 plugin (we used to have a lovely AC30 in the flesh) so I figured "this will be *", but it wasn't - times they were a'changing :)

I was a little sad because I loved the all the moving parts and collective effort/experience that it took to build a record, and watching it all disappear inside a box seemed to steal some of the magic. That of course is just the opinion of a tech guy - for the guys on the other side of the glass, it has been a game changer democratising access to making records. (Not that it stopped some people at the time - I remember the massive A&R bun fight over Gomez when they appeared - they very shrewdly managed to get an excellent deal, together with advance and then promptly went back into the tiny studio they recorded the demos in and put that out - it did sound great to be fair)

Sort of back on topic - never got near Amigas. Before Macs becoming ubiquitous it was all Atari STs ...

⬐ danbmil99

I was a studio engineer in the late 80s and I work on music now using modern tools.

It's a different vibe, that's for sure. I could go on for days about the technical differences, analog 2-inch tape versus a to d converters and so on. Analog synths, effect boxes now replaced by VST plug-ins.

But I thinkt the biggest difference is really more on the human level. It used to be an enterprise that by its very nature required multiple people to be working together. Now, music is a largely solitary endeavor. Back when, you started playing with your friends in the garage, and if you move to the next level you recorded in the studio together. Now you put together a demo on your Mac, throw it out into the world, and if it goes viral you get to do it again.

Different times.