Transcription

Hello, today we're going to go on a bit of a musical adventure with this computer here. And this has a bit of a story about it. You see, in the 1980s, especially the end of the 80s, there was lots of amazing music on the radio, on the television, specifically the electronic music that was starting to become popular. And as a kid, you'd see this stuff and you'd go, I want to make this stuff at home. I want to be a music producer. But instead, you'd get something that sounds like this. The real studio equipment, the synths, the samplers, the drum machines, the tape machines, the mixers, all the bits that you were told you needed to make electronic music lived in studios and cost a lot of money in a time where even a single cassette would take more money than your paper round. And your home computer sounded like this. But in 1987, the Amiga 500 came out, and this took a lot of technology from its Amiga 1000 big brother, which was a lot more expensive. In particular, it took the audio outputs. And this was a 4-channel digital audio output, which although it was kind of crunchy, it was kind of 8-bit, it still gave you the opportunity to have a sampler at home. Something that was previously only a studio item. And there was a lot of basic music software that you could get for the Amiga, but the problem was the musical instruments they gave you were fairly generic. But if you wanted sounds like this, you wanted a way to get into the Amiga. And that is where these came in. Or this. Or this. Welcome to the world of the Amiga sampler. Recording audio to a computer in the 1980s wasn't that complex of an operation, because you could get these audio chips, which basically took in audio in one side and spat out a bit stream out of the other. And so, as you'd expect, these being quite cheap, a bunch of audio cartridges with names like TechnoSound, StereoMaster, we've got this one here, the FutureSound, each of them touting more features in software, trying to sell the dream of a recording studio that you could have at home. But these were built to a price. And if you look inside some of these cartridges, it gets a little terrifying, especially if you know anything about electronics. But of course, if you knew anything about electronics in the 1980s, you could build your own sampler. And in fact, this little unit here has a preamp, it has audio controls left and right, a little switch between your lighting or your microphone, and you could plug this into the back of your parallel port and be ready to record in no time. In fact, we should do that right now. Let's have a look. Today, we're going to use the StereoMaster. And inside the box is the cartridge with the input and the parallel port. And you can see here, we have the floppy disk with the software on it. We've got a cable that allows us to plug into RCA. We've got the original receipt. Thank you very much. £30. There we go. We've got the manual, which looks like it's kind of been put together in a pretty manual way. Yes, staples in the middle, and you can see it doesn't quite line up there. We'll forgive that. And then we've got some additional paraphernalia. And this is actually advertising the other products that they've got. And that's it on the back of the box. There we go. If you want to read it, have a pause. All right, so the Amiga's working, and it's asking us for a boot disk because it doesn't have a hard disk in it. So we've got a disk that came with the StereoMaster. We'll pop that in, and it's going to start loading, which will take a little bit of time and be making a bit of noise. Now the obvious answer to what we're going to sample is the family stereo system. Now unfortunately, this wouldn't always be in the same room as the Amiga, so you'd have to sneak it into your room if you were pretty ninja about it. But we've got that set up, ready to go. And look at that. Our software's loaded. So the second question becomes, what are we going to sample? So I'll take you back to 1990, and this was the era where the 7-inch record was really just starting to go out of fashion. And you could get them at the markets for $1 each, and a B-side on a 7-inch would often be an instrumental cut of a track. It would have a drum beat at the start, maybe some chords or bass notes that were sort of a bit more spaced out. And you could take these individual elements, and you could use them as instruments. And first on the platter is a bit of cold cut. Look at that. People hold on. Alright, what have we got? Oh, reverse cymbal. Pianos. Oh, listen to this. People hold on. Oh, reverse cymbal. Pianos. Oh, listen to this. This is like a goldmine. Yep. Alright, so, let's run cold cut into our Amiga. And we're going to do that by running out of our headphone socket of our Rotel amplifier here. And the reason we're going to do this is because the Stereo Master doesn't have any kind of level controls in it. So we need to control the level on the way in. But this means we can also use our bass and treble controls, and also hit the infinite loudness button. Really good for drum beats and things like that. And our software's loaded, so let's get sampling. Alright, so what we're looking at right now is our metering, our input metering. And we've got a record playing, it's just silence at the moment, but this tells us that our levels are looking good. So we'll hide that, re-drop our record, and we'll hit record just at the right time. And we're out of memory. So let's have a listen. Okay, well interesting, it sounds brighter on replay. But straight away we can hear at the start here we've got this crash cymbal, which is a reverse crash cymbal, but we can reverse the reverse cymbal and get a forward cymbal. Let's have a listen. And that's going to be our first sample. So at this point we're just going to swap out our system disc with our samples disc to be able to save our samples. And that's going to get us about 30 seconds worth of storage space. Maybe 45 seconds if we drop the sample rate a bit. So we're just going to save this one as cold cut crash. And we're going to go hunting for more samples. There's a piano, piano here, a little piano stab. Save that as piano two. And there might be a couple more samples, but I think we'll move on for now. So we're ready for our next record. Bit of demob. This is one of my favourite childhood tracks. Track called Good Life by Inner City, and that's Fairlight as far as I know on the start of that. So we're getting a bunch of good sounds here, but we still haven't found a good bass sound. And this is where your kid's keyboard can come into play. This particular one's got a bunch of sounds, but it also has quite an interesting little very limiting but customisable synthesiser. On top of that we've also got a little drum section where we can have a go at maybe trying to get the hi-hats out of this, because trying to get nice, sharp, isolated hi-hats is something else that can be tricky. So let's hook this up and have a listen. Alright. Yeah, it's not bad for a kid's keyboard. So you can see we've got a big list of samples here on our samples disc. So we're going to take that sample storage floppy and we're going to put it to one side and we're going to boot from another floppy disc, and this is our tracker software. So with a three-finger salute, the Amiga will reboot. And while it's rebooting, I'll tell you a little bit about trackers. In 1987, a German developer named Carsten released a tool called the Ultimate Soundtracker. This was a commercial Amiga program specifically for making game music, but soon after a bunch of free clones appeared, each adding more features and further sample slots. Each column represents one of the four hardware channels, and the notes are played from top to bottom with each note triggering a chosen sample. So welcome to the infamous Noise Tracker. This was one of the first, or not one of the first, but a very early clone that came out in 1989, and this is a version from 1990. So we're going to bring in our samples, we're going to put in our samples disc and let that load, and up comes a list of all the samples that we captured before off the various records. And we're going to grab, I'll grab them in order, so I'll start by grabbing the Crash and then maybe grab the Piano 2 and bring those in. Here we go. So what I'm doing here, I'm just jamming on the keyboard, and that'll play the samples including the crash which is pitchable as well. So what we're going to do is grab that piano, start putting it into our tracker, and build a little sequence up. Yeah, there we go, keep putting those notes in. And one thing I'm going to do here is add a C command, and you can see this C that's in the right hand column here is a volume control, so I'm repeating it to make an echo effect. Let's get some hi-hats in there to begin with, the percussion is tuned as well, the Yamaha keyboard has quite a ring to it. I'm just going to hammer in a bunch of notes, you can hear that's the sequence, so it's hi-hats but they're tuned as well. Ah, getting groovy, so we'll add some bass to that. Here's the Yamaha bass that we captured. I'm going to use both bass sounds here, I'm going to flip between the different bass sounds using column number 2, which is our instrument column. And again, that sounds ok, but I need to shape the sound a little bit, so I'm going to hammer a bunch of A's in here, and the A command is the drop-off, it's like an envelope that attenuates the sound over time, so it's going to drop off. Have a listen to this. So the notes are now really staccato there, instead of... Yeah, I'm just going to set the volume of that second synth to make it a bit quieter. Alright. Needs one more thing, and that's a little bit of doof, so let's get those kick drums in. Got a little thing here, I'll just put those on the floor. And here's our groove. I'll introduce the different sounds so you can hear it. That's just our hi-hats. And I'm just jamming live here. Turning the kick on and off. You would obviously sequence this, I'm just playing around. Oh yeah, and we've got a pretty cheesy sounding house track there. So, let's have a look at all the other sounds we've got here. And some of them loop as well, so for instance this Colcutt synth I've got looping. And the loop is a bit rough, but... I think part of the Amiga charm is that you don't get too fussy about your loops. We've got the Yamaha synth, we've got chord stabs. And the Colcutt chords there as well. And we're flipping between a lot of sounds. You can hear that's one channel. And we've got the Yamaha synth, we've got chord stabs. And we've got the Yamaha synth, we've got chord stabs. And we've got the Yamaha synth, we've got chord stabs. There's so much going on in that channel. Anyway, we'd better save this, so we'll go to disc operations and save module. And that's going to compile everything onto a floppy disk. All of the samples, all of the note data, everything, all into one neat mod file. So while we're saving, let's have a look at some other mod files. And I'll show you the source material and the resulting mod file. So let's have a look. So one thing that's worth looking at in this track is our samples list. Because if you look at this sample here, you'll notice this white line is jumping around. And what that is doing is it's actually jumping to different spots in the sample. This is known as sample slicing. There's a section here where it's solo, so just have a listen. And you can do that with one simple command. And you can copy and paste it to different samples as well. It's really handy. And you can fit all of those songs on a single floppy disk. One of the cool things about trackers was they almost always used a format called the Amiga Mod Format. And although there was slight variation between the formats, usually you could put your files on a disk, give it to a friend along with a play routine, and they would be able to listen to these files, your music, on their computer. Which was a big thing back in the day. And in fact, a lot of people simply collected mod files. Because listening to music on your computer was considered something of a novelty back then. Especially if it was digital and full of high quality samples. And in fact, it was very common to just buy floppy disks full of other people's mods. And because you didn't have the internet, you'd use a public domain catalogue. And you'd simply quote the disk number you want. For instance, this is a disk with a bunch of instruments on it. You'd call a number, and then you'd have to give them your credit card details. And as a kid, you probably didn't have a credit card. So you'd have to be a little more creative with getting sounds. For instance, when I was a kid, my guitar teacher used to bring a little drum machine in, so we could jam along when I was learning guitar. And I used to be like, can I just have five minutes with the drum machine after the lesson? I just need to do something. And I would sit with a cassette, and in fact I've got it here. This is one of my old cassettes. It says drums from Steve's drum machines. And I would effectively just capture every single drum, one after the other. So to sample your own source material was really what set apart the early musicians. Many people would just use the sample tracker, one, two, three samples that were pretty cheesy samples that had been around since the dawn of tracking. And then there were the bunch of people who found guitarists and would record them and vocalists and take synthesizers and record those. And they were really the people who were contributing to the sample pool. So what happened to these 8-bit samplers anyway? And I guess the story goes that technology just moved on. CDs became a thing throughout the early 90s. Even magazines like Future Music Magazine would give away free samples on their CDs as well. You could just buy a whole compact disc full of samples from music stores. And this just meant it was a lot easier to get access to sounds and high-quality sounds. Of course, the Sound Blaster, big thing for the PC. Every PC shipped with one of these once CD-ROM drives became a thing because to be multimedia compliant, you needed to have a sound card in your computer. And that suddenly meant that every computer had a line in and a line out. It came with your computer. So it was only a short period of time, I'm guessing 1988 to 1992, where the big commercial electronic music was being produced in these studios. And it was being sold to you as a dream of Wonderland and knobs everywhere. Yet you could cheat your way into that same scene using something like a Commodore Amiga and a sample cartridge. And yes, it was a bit low-flying, it was a bit scratchy, but it actually turns out once you crank one of these computers at a party, no one really notices. And yes, that is me on stage running similar 4-channel software to what we've just looked at through a 20,000-watt line array a couple of years ago in front of 3,000 people. So there we go. No one even knows these days when you're using one of these on stage, unless they're a bit of a nerd. Of course, I have to mention the other computers that were around at the end of the 80s and the early 90s. The Atari ST, the Mac Classic, the MSX, the humble PC, just to name a few. And in fact, the Atari ST was a bit of a special machine because it came with MIDI ports built in, and it was kind of pushed as the music computer. And it was, if you had a studio with synthesizers and drum machines and a mixing desk, you could use the Atari ST to control all of these devices straight from the box. And in fact, a lot of artists used just a sampler, something like a Akai S950 or other S-series, just with the Atari. And they would have this combination, the Atari and the sampler, and so many early dance floor bangers, a combination of just the ST and a sampler. But a sampler was many thousands of dollars, and if you were a kid starting out with your home computer, you needed something you could buy for your birthday, with your pocket money or for your paper round money, and this was the kind of sample technology that you ended up with. So if you want to check out a video with a bunch of these samplers and have a bit of a listen and a look to what's the difference between them, how do they work, all of that, I've made another video that goes into detail, which basically just unboxes each of these and has a bit of a hack around and a bit of a play. So feel free to have a look at that. The usual like thing and all of that stuff, there's a bunch of videos I've got planned for the future, so yeah, hopefully I'll see you soon. And if you're a musician, keep enjoying the sample life, and if you're a retro person, then I hope you found this a bit of a step down memory lane. And if you're someone who's never heard of this stuff in their life and is like, well, I didn't know that existed, well, maybe you can get yourself a sampler and start having a twiddle. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪