What do you remember about audio tech pre internet?

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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?
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
I remember this:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Not_in_Love

Twothumbs
I remember when I first started to try to make d&b/breakbeat stuff, but not knowing what the hell a breakbeat actually was, internet time was so expensive and limited compared to now that if I got a rare 30 mins on the net that was only enough to download a picture of one boob oslt and no time left over to search for music stuff. So I thought all electronic music was made with drum machines no matter what. Non of my friends knew anything about jungle or hiphop either, well not making it but probably listening to some now and again, so that way of finding things out wasn't available. So I just carried on thinking everything was done with drum machines and that all these jungle tunes I was listening to must've been made by people with really amazing drum machines with those sounds already built in. It wasn't helped by the fact that people used to call Akai MPC's drum machines too for some reason even though its obviously a sampler/sequencer but in that stupid electronic music way of calling things the wrong way round because its all roads n shiiiet I always heard them described as drum machines.

Closest I could get for a while was speeding up and looping sections of breakbeat I had on some old hiphop battle LP's and recording them down on to an old 4-track. But stupidly I even thought that these were still made my someone with a really good drum machine Lol

Dunno how I eventually figured it out, maybe having say a James Brown break on one of my battle LP's then hearing the original song on the radio or something.
I remember going thru jungle hiphop cds trying to find clean breaks that i had no idea what they were called.

remember having a dat next to the tele (!) so i could record the break off the lucozade advert (Lol)

Remember spending hours cluelessly messing around with stuff to try to work it out, rather than spending hours on youtube/gearslutz....

Recording samples on High speed dub off cassette so you could get twice as much recording time.

Trying to mix tunes down with bass on L channel and everything else on right channel

Paying £999 (happily!) for an Akai S2000.... Icon_cry

etc.


:peas:
Statto Wrote:I remember this:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Not_in_Love


Twothumbs

Amazing production that,
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun05/ar...tracks.htm

Twothumbs