ah, the very chap!
attempting to make music since 1994.
I've been making electronic music since 1994. I started on an Amiga 1200 with ProTracker, SoundTracker, and OctaMED, using samples from public domain disks that came in the post, before I got a Technosound Turbo sampler and sampled in from tapes. I recorded straight to a tape deck on the most expensive TDKs i could afford, not that it helped my terrible mixing ability. In 1995/6 (can't quite remember) I bought an Atari ST and ran Cubase 3.1 on it, and started buying actual hardware so I could start sequencing over MIDI, eventually got a 24:4:2 mixing desk and started buying a lot more gear! I still have the Amiga and the ST, and both still work.
I held out against using a PC for music for years, because I liked having my hands on the gear. Around 2004 I gave in and used Cubase Audio, Cakewalk, and a few others. Around 2007, I moved to a Mac (mainly because I was programming for a living and thought I'd treat myself - I could still do my Linux stuff on it!) and soon started exploring Logic, Ableton, I still use the Mac these days (obvs a newer one) and for the last six or seven years I've been using FL Studio, which feels more like a real studio to me, though still very fond of Ableton.
For many many years I was basically collecting gear, racks and racks of outboard, drum machines a museum would be proud of... but alas, as we moved house (well, entire country) I sold an awful lot of it. I do miss some of it. So these days I make music in FL Studio on headphones, with a small controller keyboard and still use samples from my old collection. Quite pleased with a lot of my tunes over the years and now at least sound cleaner and better made (i think!) - but I am still fond of my older (absolutely terribly produced) stuff! The artwork for all the tunes was made with AI btw.
6 different UI's to explore music
- Sonic AtlasTracks mapped by tempo, energy and brightness. Wander the atlas and play anything from 1994 to now.
- GalleryA clean, Apple-style gallery for browsing the collections and their artwork, and discovering the tunes.
- TimelineTracks laid out year by year, from 1994 to now: the Amiga years, the late-90s rush, the quiet stretch up until recently.
- TunerA radio. Turn the dial and land on tunes from thirty years of music.
- Mood MixerFaders for tempo, brightness, energy and era, and the mixer lines up tracks to match.
- Crate DigA virtual record box. Flip through the records, pull one out and play it.
Have a go on the Amiga
My day job is as a developer, so I built this tracker just for a bit of fun on this page. It works like just the real thing... well no, it doesn't, but close enough for now... as the song plays, each channel triggers samples and synth voices from the notes in the pattern. Click the Kickstart screen to boot it, then play and stop, switch channels off and on, load a different song from FILES, or click a cell to change its note. The three "songs" on its disk were made just for the sake of it. I will likely build a full on browser based tracker out of it.
ah, the very chap!
insert disk, or click anywhere to boot