![]() ![]() One particularly challenging problem was performance tuning the playback routines to be able to get consistent and accurate timing. This was a Roland D-50, which I kept for many years afterwards.Īnd I also wanted real-time audio feedback - so that you would be able to listen to the notes as you dragged them around with the mouse. Rockband podcast maker for windows software#I eventually convinced Jim to compensate the store for all of the time I spent there, by purchasing one of their Midi keyboards (I needed the instrument to test the software anyway). I thus spent many hours hanging out at the local music store pestering the store personnel with questions. I had some ideas as to what kinds of features a “real” musician might want, but they were only guesses. Rockband podcast maker for windows professional#The first is that I, myself, was not a professional musician. However, there were a couple of major obstacles I had to deal with. I discussed this with Jim Steinert, the head of MicroIllusions, and he was OK with the idea (Jim never tried to focus MicroIllusions on any one type of product.) ![]() ![]() I wanted a new program which would be aimed at the professional musician and would be much more powerful. I had already created Musica, my primitive score editor which I had used for Faery Tale and Discovery. The Amiga had a dedicated sound chip which could play up to four 8-bit samples at once - this was a giant leap from what the Apple and Atari could do.Īfter finishing Faery Tale, I decided it was time to do a “serious” music program. In 1985 I started writing games for the Commodore Amiga (as detailed in my article about the Faery Tale Adventure). These, along with Rush’s 2112, were the LPs most frequently played on my turntable. I wanted to hear music that treated synthesizers in a serious, musical way - I was a huge fan of Larry Fast’s Synergy albums, particularly Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra and Sequencer. And while a lot of rock bands were starting to make use of synthesizers, it was only for occasional riffs - it was too experimental and exotic to be used for the ‘meat’ of the music. Prior to that time, synthesizers had only appeared in ‘novelty’ music albums like Jean-Jaques Perry’s The In Sound From Way Out. I owned an ARP Omni (string synthesizer) which I kept in my room in the barracks, and which I occasionally played - although I am not a great keyboard player.Īlso around that time I was starting to notice increasing use of electronic sounds in popular music. I left the PAiA instruments behind during my Air Force career, however that does not mean that I stopped playing around with electronic music. I was never that great with hardware, and so was unable to repair it. I attempted to “upgrade” the computer to 1K of static RAM, and it worked for about 8 hours - after which something in the processor board overloaded, and never worked again after that. However, it only had 256 bytes of RAM, which was frustratingly limited for storing musical sequences. This was the first computer I ever owned. ![]() PAiA eventually came out with a micro-controller board (based on a 6503-based microprocessor), which I bought and learned to program by entering instructions in hexadecimal on a keypad. They also had limited ability to play back sequences of notes. That was fine if you had an expensive sound-on-sound tape deck that could be used to layer various instruments into a single performance, but I couldn’t afford something like that. These were also analog systems, which meant that they had limited programmability - changing sounds required a lot of tedious repatching and adjusting of knobs. It didn’t help that my soldering skills also left something to be desired. This meant that they tended to be noisy, introducing a lot of unwanted distortion and hum into the output signal. These kits were designed to be as low-cost as possible, which meant that they used relatively cheap components, as well as unshielded wiring and circuit designs. The PAiA kits were a wonderful learning experience for me, but in other ways they were unsatisfying. ![]()
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