hue Wrote:I was born in the 80's. As probably everyone else who still comes here, I grew up in the 90's, and I was the last part of the internet boom generation that remembers the sound of whirring microfiche and the dewey decimal system fading into a google.
I found a bunch of shit in my basement (amongst a shit load of D&D character sheets) mailed to my brother about programming BASIC. Several of these mailing lists were essentially goofy homebrew programs. Growing up my friends parents were into ham radio. I remember seedy 2600 meetings in food courts, and meeting other people from other people through heresay about....I don't know....90's internet topics not available on the internet. .mod and .xm and demos just seemed like a really open scene for pirating sounds people found. I had no idea these people were using their PC's as samplers.
oh yeah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Was anybody else around in those days? And how far did you take it?
And how much MIDI do you still use?
Born 1979 here, and I know a few guys who are members here:
http://www.gameboymusicclub.org/
been out of touch though due to shitloads of other stuff I am forced to prioritize (like work and such...) But yeah, I was familiar with the demo scene back in the day.
As to the question of what I remember bout audio Tech b4 the Internet? I got it all from magazines really (combination of computer magazines and music mags).
Music critic for the Tally Ho
learnt to write music with a computer at school back in the very early 90s. We were taught the basics of composition quite early on (7-8 years old), and used Acorns with Notate software (very basic scoring software) which used internal sounds from the computer (very poor 4/8 bit samples?), and later on Music Studio 32 and Sibelius. The latter two had really basic midi interaction, GM standard with some early Yamaha PSR keyboards.
I was about 10-11 when I branched out on my own, using MS32 for early forays into what would have been the latter stages of jungle and breakbeat hardcore / early happy hardcore. I had worked out that I needed decent synths to get most of what I was hearing although the cheaper Casio and Yamahas were quite ok, but I couldn't quite place the drums which the Yamahas were seriously lacking in. I was bouncing things into the schools 4-track Tascam, which was from the 80s and already dead. We had an SY35 in the IT cupboard, and I fell in love with it, used it all the time. Seriously wanted an M1, but they were still big money. I worked out that it was samples and samplers around 12-13, but again, they were very expensive.
We had trackers as well, I played with them for a while. Acorns could run a lot of Amiga stuff, or at least had it ported (certainly the older ones). I've heard a lot of the classic mods really early on, it was a badge of honour to have some of the classic tracks on your disks. I worked out how to remix a couple of them, and the keyboard would allow for editing and recording, but hexadecimal stuff was hard, and generally any mods I produced/remixed were shit.
We got the internet at home and school about a couple of years later.
Around 15 I got a copy of Fruityloops V.1.0 from a mate, and I realised pretty quickly that although it was a drum machine, you could write basic tracks with it, and then I started up again. By this point it was happy hardcore and garage (well proto-grime really, I was bouncing chopped breaks and bleep n bass style bits into the 4 track which I had then borrowed from school), no midi, and sampling in the pc by downloading small samples from the net onto a floppy disk, or basic recording with a microphone. Rough, but the most creative period ever for me, I would try anything and work it till I couldn't succeed any more - don't have that sort of willpower or curiosity anymore. Gave up trying after a few years, finished my exams, got a degree, got a job, and just wrote stuff on the side for a laugh.
done