![]() ![]() Right: My AmigaOne X5000 tucked away at the bottom of the rack case. ![]() Left: The 2020 incarnation of the Rear Window Studio. Apparently, good old 8-bit sound can still cut the mustard. The individual instrument parts are more defined and the overall sound is less muffled. Compared to the sounds I used in my old songs, none of which were sampled above 16 kHz, I can hear that this project has really benefited from the increased sample rate and got the extra spark in the higher frequency range, allowing the drum track to stand out and making synth sounds more vivid. half the original sample rate), which seems to have worked well. I learned something of a bitter lesson there before I finally decided to play it safe and just converted everything to 8-bit mono at 22050 Hz (i.e. mod format you want to keep an eye on the Protracker specification right from the start, to avoid unwanted surprises at a later time. wav files sampled at 44100 Hz), when working on a tune to be eventually saved in the. But I had completely forgotten how limited Protracker was with audio samples! Although MilkyTracker was more than happy to import material from my sample collection (most of which are 16-bit stereo. The “Make Amiga great again” cap is courtesy of Steven Solie.Īs it turned out, neither the Amiga nor the tracker paradigm were the roadblocks. “Will the final result be worth the effort? And will my wife not kill me when she sees what I’m doing?” Left: AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition running MilkyTracker and AmiSoundEd. “Will I still enjoy it?”, I asked myself. So it naturally took me some time to put all my trust in the Amiga again and get back into the tracking mood. It’s not that I hadn’t composed any music in the previous two decades in fact I ran a small production studio for a few years, but it was all PC-based and very MIDI-oriented, with the Steinberg Cubase sequencer being my staple software. Good – I had the right tool and now it was time to bite the bullet and do my piece of work. After some experimenting I finally opted for MilkyTracker, which is actually a FastTracker 2 clone but can export songs in the Protracker format. So it was clear that my AmigaOne X5000, which I had mainly used for system programming and occasional gaming, would soon get a new task to prove itself.ĪmigaOS4 is not short of music trackers, although the choice is naturally not as wide as on classic Amigas. I also couldn’t help noticing that my old Protracker modules sounded really horrible, considering today’s standards. ![]() But as others picked up speed and kept showing new stuff, my cowardly decision became more and more embarrassing. So I first thought I’d just fish out some unused music I made in the 90s and be done with it. ![]() The drunken idea would have been all buried and forgotten were it not for our trusty coder Defor (the tallest guy in the photo above), who sent us an e-mail a few months later saying “All right boys, so I’m working on the demo, remember? How about you make some graphics and music for it?” I immediately knew I was in trouble because I hadn’t composed any demo tune since 2000. Demos ran rampant, monitors flickered, beer flowed like a river, so it was inevitable that someone would eventually stand up and say, “Yes, we can! Let’s make a new Vectors demo!” Vectors & friends at The Thirty Party, June 2019 To everyone’s surprise the event extended into the small hours, well past the time our function room was hired for. Most of us hadn’t met for good twenty years, so I expected a brief and rather subdued social occasion attended by life-worn, pot-bellied family guys. Last year some good soul remembered that Vectors would soon turn thirty, and we organized a get-together to celebrate the anniversary. This gave us a strong sense of belonging, and I dare say that our creative endeavours were driven by the fact that we were pals, above all. Unlike many other demo groups, the members of which were often scattered across different cities or even countries, we could easily meet up in person to discuss things, work on our projects, or just have some serious fun with our Amigas. I was lucky to live in a city which, albeit small, concentrated enough local talent to have formed a full-fledged demo group called Vectors, which I joined in early 1993. Much of my creative activity in the 1990s was related to the Amiga demoscene. ![]()
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