Amiga Samplers : Budget dance music in 1990
hello today we’re gonna 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 you know 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 since 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 you’ll pay per 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 four channel digital audio output which although it was kind of crunchy 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 a 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 for this welcome to the world of the Amiga sampler recording audio to a computer in the 1980s it wasn’t that complex of an operation because you can 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 techno sound stereo master I’ve got this one here that future sound each of them you know touting more features in software trying to sell the dream of a recording studio that you can 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 sample up and in fact this little unit here has a preamp it has audio controls left and right a little switch between you know your learning 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 stereo master and inside box is the cartridge with the input and the parallel port and you can see here we have the floppy disk for the software on it we’ve got a cable it allows us to plug into RCA we’ve got the original receipt thank you very much 30 pounds there we go we’ve got the manual which looks like it’s kind of being put together it’s you know pretty manual way yet staples in the middle and you can see it doesn’t quite line up there now 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 amigas working and it’s asking us for a boot disk because it doesn’t have a hard disk in it so we’ve got our disks that came with the stereo master 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 gonna 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’re a pretty ninja about it but we’ve got that set up ready to go and look at that our software is 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 can get them at the markets for a dollar 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 all right what do we got like a goldmine yeah let’s run cold cut into our Amiga and we’re gonna do that by running out of our headphone socket of our Rotel amplify 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 and this means we can also use our bass and treble controls and also hit the infamous loudness button really good for drum beats and things like that and our software’s loaded so let’s get sampling all right so what we’re looking at right now is a 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 redraw our record and we’ll hit record just at the right time and we’re out of memory so let’s have a listen the 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 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 disk with our samples disk to be able to save our samples and that’s gonna get us about 30 seconds worth of storage space maybe 45 seconds if we drop the sample rate a bit so we’re gonna say this one is cold-cut crash we’re gonna go you’re hunting for more samples there’s a piano piano here little piano stab save that as piano – 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 and this is one of my favorite childhood tracks track called good life’ by inner city and that’s a fair light 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 kids 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 customizable synthesizer on top of that we’ve also got a little drum section where we can have a go at maybe trying to get the high hats out of this because trying to get nice sharp isolated high hats is something else that can be tricky so let’s hook this up and have a listen alright yeah that’s not bad for a kid’s keyboard so you can see we’ve got a big list of samples here on our samples disk so we’re going to take that sample storage floppy and we’re gonna put it to one side and we’re going to boot from another floppy disk 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 sound tracker 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 slides 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 track app this was one of the first or not with fair but very early clone that came out in 1989 and this is a version from 1990 so we’re gonna bring in our samples we’re gonna put in our samples discs 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 their crash and then maybe grab the piano too and bring those in here we go what I’m doing here [Applause] I’m just jamming on the keyboard and that’ll play the samples including the crash which is pitch bull 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 high hats in there to begin with percussion is tuned as well oh yeah mahaki board has quite a ring to it who’s gonna hammer in a bunch of notes and here that’s the sequence so it’s high hats but they’re tuned as well are getting groovy so we’ll add some bass to that here’s the Yamaha bass that we captured I’m gonna use both bass sounds here I’m gonna flip between the different bass sounds using column number two which is our instrument column and again that sounds okay but I need to shape the sound a little bit so I’m gonna 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 gonna drop off have a listen to this so the notes are never really staccato that don’t list it AB AB AB yeah I’m just gonna 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 fitted Dorf so let’s get those kick drums in got a little thing here let’s put those on the four to the floor and here’s our groove I’ll introduce the different sound so you can hear it hi hats and I’m just jamming live here sending the key con it off wait are you saying you would obviously sequence this time 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 when some of them loop as well so for instance this cold cut arson 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 [Applause] [Music] we’ve got the Yamaha since we’ve got cord stabs and the cold cut cords there as when we flipping between a lot of sounds in here that’s one channel [Music] so much going on in that channel anyway we better save this so we’ll go our 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 [Music] [Music] [Music] 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 this is section here where it’s so low so just have a listen [Music] 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 [Music] and you could 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 Omega mod format and although there was slight variation between the format’s 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 you know something of a novelty back then especially if it was digital and full of like high-quality samples and in fact it was very common to just buy floppy discs full of other people’s mods and because he didn’t have the internet you’d use a public campaign catalog and you’d simply quote the disc number you want for instance this is a disc with a bunch of instruments on it and 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 I 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 says drums from Steve’s drum machines and I would effectively just capture every single drum one after the other so the sample your own source material was really what set apart the early musicians you know many people would just use the sample tracker one two three samples that were pretty cheesy samples that have been around since the dawn of tracking and then there was a 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 are contributing to the sampled pool [Music] so what happened to these 8bit sample is anyway and I guess the story goes that technology just moved on you know 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 whole compact discs full of samples from music stores and this just meant it was a lot easier to get access to sounds and high-quality sounds now of course the sound blaster the big thing for the PC you know 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 you know knobs everywhere yeah you can 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 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 the stage running similar for channel software to what we’ve just looked at through our twenty thousand 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 and less 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 in 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 in 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 use just a sampler something like a kaya s 950 or other s series just with the Atari and they would have this combination the Atari in the sampler and so many early dance wall bangers a combination of just the s T and a sampler but sampler was many thousands of dollars and if you are a kid starting out with your home computer you needed something you could buy be a birthday with your pocket money or be a paper round money and this was the kind of sample technology that you ended up with [Music] 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 made another video that goes into detail which basically just don’t boxes 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 [Music] [Music] [Music] you
