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.
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+!
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:
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...
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.
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 ...
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ;)
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/
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 ;) ]
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.
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.
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/
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...
"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.