AMIGA alive: A techno music album created with OctaMED SoundStudio (and Camouflage)

Monday, August 19, 2024

A techno music album created with OctaMED SoundStudio (and Camouflage)

"Breathless" is an album of electro/techno music created on an Amiga computer over the latter half of the 1990s. All tracks were composed with OctaMED SoundStudio, using Amiga samples and MIDI sound devices.

I had learned that Amiga computers are great for sound and video. Demos like "Desert Dream" and "Lethal Exit", and esp. the intro music of the game "Epic" had left me very impressed. So I got an Amiga 600 and started playing with OctaMED. A MIDI interface and a Roland Juno 106 analog keyboard were added soon after, then a Yamaha FB-01 synth module, followed by a lot of other devices.

Over a couple of years, many pieces of synth music were created, all of which were more or less experimental. Until a handful stood out, and I thought it would be nice to put together an album. A few more tracks were created on-the-fly, to give the album more playing time - I just like music to have a little extra time to develop.

Around 1999, when finishing the album, I had expanded my setup to an Amiga 4000 with graphics, network, and Prelude 16-bit soundcard, and added a PC for recording and post-production. I had also upgraded the software in use to the latest version of OctaMED, called SoundStudio, and great audio/MIDI program Camouflage.

The music was initially composed with OctaMED SoundStudio (OMSS), using a mix of entering notes step-by-step, live jamming with MIDI-recording, and a few longer audio samples. Some of the tracks were then played back in OMSS, and recorded as audio tracks in Camouflage, to free up MIDI instruments and add more sounds.

A couple of notes on individual tracks:

Track 1, "Where the sun shines", features the Amiga playing back a catchy synth riff sampled from a Roland Juno 60 keyboard, and some speech samples.

Track 3, "Too hoppin' mad", is a spiced-up remake of an older track called "Hoppin' at the spot", and it has a funny story: The idea was to have some rhythmic chords, played on a Roland JX8P keyboard, enter on the first breakdown, and continue over the groove. But I forgot to switch on OMSS' "chord mode" - when MIDI-recording the chords, all (most) notes ended up on one track in OMSS in near-random order. When listening to the result for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised, and added distortion from a guitar effects processor to intensify the effect. The string/pad segment was mostly created in Camouflage, using OMSS as a "looper" for the MIDI instruments.

Track 4, "Into the ominous" features some random bleeps: These are created by just some random notes played on a Yamaha DX7 II keyboard: The battery was old, it had lost its memory. The sound is the result of an undefined state of one of the synth's memory slots. (Except for a handful that I had restored or overwritten, they all sounded pretty much the same at that point: random bleeps. lol.)

Track 7, "Breathless" is the most Amiga of the tracks on the album. The idea was to create an "epic" (?) acid track, it was initially called "Hildesheim", and it's a bit noisy. OMSS is playing back sampled synth sounds, and controlling a Kawai XD-5 drum synthesizer. Lots of samples were taken, in an attempt to recreate the filter sweeps of an analog synth. There's also a tiny bit of live filter mixing - you can probably recognize it by the better sound quality.

Track 9, "Farewell" is a groovy, simple track, that serves as a basis for some acoustic guitar solo jamming.

All tracks were recorded and "mastered" on a PC using Samplitude. I'd have loved to finalize the tracks using the Amiga version, but at the time PCs had become so fast, that they could handle a handful of audio effects in realtime, whereas an Amiga would require minutes to do the calculations. EQ-ing, compression, extra panning, and reverb was added, and the final tracks exported, stored, and burnt to CD.

In hindsight, everything could've been done better. The reverb is too much, it makes everything sound quite muddy. But it also enhances the hi-resonance synth sounds on nr. 7, "Breathless". The mixing and mastering has lots of flaws - there's some heavy banging, around 500Hz or so, on some tracks, sometimes created by individual sounds, sometimes by the mix. And so on - but overall, and as an entity of different compositions, I think it turned out somehow listenable, and, in parts, even a little catchy or moody.

The entire album has just been uploaded to YouTube. The videos were created with Blender in 2024, as a little "visualizer" for the music.