[VIDEO] The cheapest MIDI home-studio of 1988

[Kawai James]

This was awesome:

 

 

The same guy also has equally superb videos about Amiga samplers, MOD trackers, and other chiptune music/oldschool demo scene-related topics that are right up my alley. Honestly, there is loads of great content on his channel - highly recommended!

 

Cheers,

James

x

[ElmerJFudd]

 a stroll down memory lane. when computing was fun! 😉
 

i pulled my K1 out of storage recently. it had a little spider living in it I had to evict. but it boots and plays like a champ. 

 

my Amiga 500 has been gone a long time now. 

[miden]

Yep, the Atari pictured was exactly my setup!

 

Things were certainly much simpler then, and folks were not so demanding! Not that I recall at any rate.

[bjosko]

That was the good old days where a program could be on a single floppy disk.

I was never much into sequencing, but one program I used a lot was a program called Super Librarian. It was a gem for organizing and storing my presets. And I also learned quit a bit about MIDI programming back then.

Steinberg also made a Editor program for my D50 and M1 I spent quite some time with.

 I still have a box with old floppy disks, but my Atari and monitor went to recycling 10 years ago, it had som sticking keys, thrown it apart to fix, but gave up.

[Reezekeys]

I got many years from a few Atari STs, using Dr T software - which was way advanced for its time and probably did more to edit and mangle midi than any software before or since. I also remember adding memory to my Atari – you had to solder a daughter card directly to the 68000 microprocessor! Fun times. I also had their "megafile" hard drive; a 20 or 30 megabyte hard drive that sounded like a 747 taking off when you turned it on.

[David Emm]

19 minutes ago, Reezekeys said:

I also had their "megafile" hard drive; a 20 or 30 megabyte hard drive that sounded like a 747 taking off when you turned it on.

 

Yikes, I know that sound! It sometimes included a smell. I still feel mentally orgasmo that I never have to hear it again. I was always waiting for that one micro-sized piece of detritus to send the read head into a ditch. To be fair, I got decent service from spinning platters overall, but when they crashed, they crashed big. I probably killed a few off early by making too many safeties. Today, even our electric toothbrushes come with 200 megabytes. Hooray for SSDs.       

[Adam Burgess]

Watched this yesterday. Really enjoyed the nostalgia trip 🙂 Although I never used the Atari…

I did scores on a Mac Classic at both a seamen's mission/chapel/bar with Finale 2.5, and at an architect's place using MOTU Pro Composer.

Seamen's Mission also taught me about playing pool, and draught Guinness. Architect guy had a IIfx or cx for his CAD stuff, which was just amazing at the time.

 

In the 80s, playing in a busy mining town in the NE of England, where there were many bars and churches with people spending money; there were gigs galore. I saved a bit money doing more gigs than a 10 year old should've probably legally done. Did some local theatre pit stuff, too; hitting brass parts and LH bass on a keyboard stack next to the school's piano or whatever.

In 1992 (as a 12yr old), I could finally go and buy an Apple Performa 400 (LC II) with a 3x1 Midi interface, and a colour monitor. Loved every minute just layering stuff and generally making loud things. Had a Roland E15, a U20, and a Technics KN800. Can't remember the sequencer's name - but, it was a very colourful events list! And, I could see more than 3 bars at a time on the huge 14" display with Finale.

The day I got a 80MB HD hike, a 256 colour VRAM module (from 16 colours), and RAM upgrade from 4MB to 8 was special. 

Happy days.

[DeltaJockey]

Yes, interesting content on his channel. I used to run Hybrid Arts EzScore+ and Eztrack on the Atari. I had a 520st with no hard drive, so every time I'd start a session, I'd have to boot up with floppies and lots of disk jockeying before I could even start to lay down tracks. It was the most musically productive I'd ever been! I put it down to limited resources inspiring creativity.

 

Some of my late 80's early 90's "studio in a corner of the living room" gear..... 😀

[Baggypants]

12 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

I also remember adding memory to my Atari – you had to solder a daughter card directly to the 68000 microprocessor!

I had an 1040STE which had simm slots. 😎

[Stokely]

I wasn't too far off that, though in '88 I was learning in a pretty stocked studio.  Later at home in the early '90s my "home studio" was a Dos-based pc with my Roland JX-10 and Proteus.  I used Voyetra (shown below) as my sequencer until I got Windows 3.1, at which point I used Cakewalk.

 

 

[DeltaJockey]

On 7/5/2023 at 5:09 AM, bjosko said:

It was a gem for organizing and storing my presets.

I assume it was not pun intended, considering the Atari used the GEM desktop manager OS. 😆

[DeltaJockey]

I forgot to add in my comments that I still have copies of my original sequencing and scoring software on virtual floppies and can still run them on one of the many Atari emulators for PC or Mac. The one I still have is the STEEM emulator which runs on PC. I only have Macs now, so would run it in a virtual windows machine running on an Intel Mac....running on a...running on a ...😆 No seriously, it would run fine as a virtual machine on a virtual PC windows machine. Sadly it doesn't run on Apple Silicon, but apparently Hatari has a universal binary, (beta) that does. It sure brings back memories, (and memory)!

 

For anyone who is interested. 🫣

[Reezekeys]

I can't tell you the number of times I've tried running Dr T's KCS "Omega" sequencing suite on my old Macs, first booted into Windows and running STEEM, then Hatari on the Mac side. I could load & run KCS and its many MPE ("multi program environment") apps but only for a few minutes before it froze. I could never get midi to & from the Mac side either - despite the pref that lets you assign Atari midi ports to Mac virtual ports (IAC? I forgot). I think Dr T did some "creative" programming with his app that may have talked directly to the hardware. I'm pretty sure this was the most advanced midi editor of its day, possibly ever. At one point I considered looking for an old Atari setup to run this on (all my Ataris were lost in a house fire).

[CHarrell]

When y'all had these tech set ups, did you ever think 20, 30 years from then that you'd look back at them with nostalgia and fondness?

[bill5]

All long before I got into music making, but I do fondly remember my first PC, a 386. At a mere $1500 it was only a mid-level machine at best. Now what does $1500 get you...it was all so new and novel then, and the leaps in tech were huge.

 

I will say nostalgia aside, I don't miss DOS or installing a program by inserting and removing a jillion floppy disks! 

[vonnor]

Ah yes. Back when a 80MB (yep, MB) external drive cost $1K. I know 'cuz I had one for the EPS-16+

 

~ vonnor

[AROIOS]

7 hours ago, CHarrell said:

When y'all had these tech set ups, did you ever think 20, 30 years from then that you'd look back at them with nostalgia and fondness?

Yup. I got into computer-driven music at a sweet spot in time. GUI based OSes had gone mainstream; MIDI sequencers was 90% as good as their modern counterparts; Roland and Yamaha were both releasing cheap but good sounding modules; and Creative made E-MU's excellent sampling technology affordable for most kids...
 

Compared to the low-rez user interface, crappy 3-operator FM sound, and expensive outboard synths that folks in the 80s had to deal with, the 90's was heaven. In fact, Yamaha's XG modules were so well balanced, I still use them today all the time.
 

In the attachment is a transcription I did in the 90's with Yamaha's most basic XG synth with no external processing. Still brings me joy every time I play it.

[CHarrell]

8 minutes ago, AROIOS said:

Yup. I got into computer-driven music at a sweet spot in time. GUI based OSes had gone mainstream; MIDI sequencers was 90% as good as their modern counterparts; Roland and Yamaha were both releasing cheap but good sounding modules; and Creative made E-MU's excellent sampling technology affordable for most kids...
 

Compared to the low-rez user interface, crappy 3-operator FM sound, and expensive outboard synths that folks in the 80s had to deal with, the 90's was heaven. In fact, Yamaha's XG modules were so well balanced, I still use them today all the time.
 

In the attachment is a transcription I did in the 90's with Yamaha's most basic XG synth with no external processing. Still brings me joy every time I play it.

 

Even though I was way too young for any of this, I have to admit I romanticize this era of music production very much. Not just 'cause I love video games from that period (including ones for the NEC PC-98, with its Yamaha FM), but it seemed like a much more even playing field back then. I'm sure there were still pay barriers etc., but on the other hand, the same general tools seemed to be used by about everyone, regardless of professional stature or not. How much difference was there really in the quality of Roland Sound Canvas Strings patch vs an EMU, Korg, or Yamaha module? As well, it seems there was a lot of trickle down in sounds from different tiers of models, as demonstrated in Kawai James' posted video (with a suspiciously generous segment relegated to a Kawai board....🤔  😜).

 

All of this is to say that to my rosy-hued vision of that era, you could very well get similar-quality results regardless of the (much smaller pallette across the board) tools you had. Now, of course, if you wanted to say, do an orchestral mockup/VST piece, the gulf between a $500 strings library vs a $2,000 one can be very, very wide, and there's like 300 new libraries getting released very week. 

[DeltaJockey]

10 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

I can't tell you the number of times I've tried running Dr T's KCS "Omega" sequencing suite on my old Macs, first booted into Windows and running STEEM, then Hatari on the Mac side. I could load & run KCS and its many MPE ("multi program environment") apps but only for a few minutes before it froze. I could never get midi to & from the Mac side either - despite the pref that lets you assign Atari midi ports to Mac virtual ports (IAC? I forgot). I think Dr T did some "creative" programming with his app that may have talked directly to the hardware. I'm pretty sure this was the most advanced midi editor of its day, possibly ever. At one point I considered looking for an old Atari setup to run this on (all my Ataris were lost in a house fire).

Perhaps I should confess that I wasn't running it for productivity of course, yes physical MIDI port access was a problem, though I did manage to get that to work when directly running STEEM on a real windows XP machine some time ago. Since then, not so much. I only keep it for nostalgia, to have a bit of play with it from time to time. My "personal museum" pieces. I'm not vested in wasting my life getting it all running perfectly as it would detract from me doing real stuff from my current hardware.

It's like I have most windows OS versions from 1.0 upwards on virtual machines, as a conversation piece with those who are interested.😁 I still have a music virtual XP machine, with old functioning versions of things like Rebirth, Synapes Orion, Reason 1.0? etc. The beauty of those apps are that, because they contain virtual synths, you don't need any physical port access to play songs composed with the original sounds. I'm sure there are many folks who have similar nostalgia saved away in the corner of their hard drives.👍

[Bobbo Fett]

My early studio was an Atari ST with a Tascam TSR 8 synced with SMPTE and a Mackie 1604. I did several albums with that rig tor friends that I'm still proud of today....

[AROIOS]

4 hours ago, CHarrell said:

Even though I was way too young for any of this, I have to admit I romanticize this era of music production very much. Not just 'cause I love video games from that period (including ones for the NEC PC-98, with its Yamaha FM), but it seemed like a much more even playing field back then. I'm sure there were still pay barriers etc., but on the other hand, the same general tools seemed to be used by about everyone, regardless of professional stature or not. How much difference was there really in the quality of Roland Sound Canvas Strings patch vs an EMU, Korg, or Yamaha module? As well, it seems there was a lot of trickle down in sounds from different tiers of models, as demonstrated in Kawai James' posted video (with a suspiciously generous segment relegated to a Kawai board....🤔  😜).

 

All of this is to say that to my rosy-hued vision of that era, you could very well get similar-quality results regardless of the (much smaller pallette across the board) tools you had. Now, of course, if you wanted to say, do an orchestral mockup/VST piece, the gulf between a $500 strings library vs a $2,000 one can be very, very wide, and there's like 300 new libraries getting released very week. 

I, too, looked at a lot of of 80s/90s productions through rosey glasses. It wasn't until sites like Gearsluts and leaked mix stems started popping up online, that I started realizing how much of the "dream" sounds I lusted over were results of great arrangement and mixing.
 

With that said, there were a few "money patches" that are unique to certain synths of that era and would be hard to program authentically using other gear. Don't get me wrong, it had little to do with price or the power of the hardware. Often times it's just a matter of serendipity/luck and taste/skills. Take Robbie Buchanan's signature EP sound(s) for example, it'll be very hard to program on romplers like the SC and MU series. (trust me, I've tried 😄)
 

Eric Persing and the presets he programmed for Roland epitomized the "money patch" phenomena. Top arrangers like Keith Thomas and Walter Afanasieff used to keep synths just for one unique sound they had. (e.g. "Crystal Rhodes" on the JD-800). Sometimes those "money patches" can even go as far as defining a genre, and still gets asked/discussed about decades after their debut.
 

Speaking of tools available today, I can't thank the tech industry and programmers enough for lowering the barriers of entry on music production. Last time I fired up any of my hardware synths was 2018, we're truly lucky to be alive in this chapter of our civilization.

[Reezekeys]

10 hours ago, Bobbo Fett said:

My early studio was an Atari ST with a Tascam TSR 8 synced with SMPTE

 

Similar here, I had the Dr T "Phantom" SMPTE sync dongle for my Atari, connected to a Tascam 388 - 8 tracks on 1/4" with dbx NR and a built-in 8x8x2 board.