So it's been 3 years almost since I rocketed my ass down to Austin on 10/10/2010.
It's been rough going here and there, but I'm very pleased with my history here and decision making.
From working odd jobs and meeting new people on whims to daily grinds at a couple of different grocery stores.
The most notable things to me are my interest in electronics and acquisition of materials.
I'm still no producer, but I have gotten tools to make raw ear piercing music that
is very catchy and hard to ignore.
The most basic audio wave forms and methods of modulating them to tickle the inner ear.
Most musicians look at music as a talent of muscle memory. Tools are secondary to the process.
I am more interested in the sound creation aspect. I decided to go back to the basics
of the first truly mass produced synthesizers in the Commodore 64 computers.
These chips are very interesting in many ways. Most notably the flaws and short comings of the intended design. To hear the intended outcome of these one can look to the Ensoniq ESQ1, created by the same designer immediately after Commodore rushed his half finished product. One could imagine what the computer music world would have ended up like had he been given the time to finish his design.
I have run through various implementations of the SID chip including building a Midibox from scratch and 2 6581R4 SID chips. The filters and effects are interesting, but the functionality of using it as it was in a Commodore 64 was lacking. There was no practical way to utilizes an assortment of instrument settings to play in sequence. It was only one instrument per oscillator or less leaving much to be desired. Next I acquired a Commodore 64C early 90's model containing the 8580R5 SID chip and an MSSIAH cartridge. Now this was interesting, but very troublesome at the same time. The composition abilities work quite well, but firstly the C64's inputs from joysticks or mice are computed by the SID chip itself so lag would occur while working. Not only that, but mouse movement is entirely analog and shoddy at best. Also, the ability to save and load is not built into the cart and requires an external drive. I bought an SD card drive before I fully researched and found that the only working means for data storage was to either get a floppy disk drive and working floppies or to buy another cartridge that would have to be switched out on the fly and cost 5 times what I paid for the Commodore itself. Making usage unaffordable and unreasonable altogether. Thus I turned my attention to my other favourite sound chip, OPL3.
When looking at parts to build my Midibox SID I noticed another project the team had developed, Midibox FM. I was intrigued as it took chips from mid 90's soundblaster cards and allowed you to program them and play them with a keyboard. Not only that, but it was multitimbral to have 4 instruments and a drum set at the same time. I reminisced of my days dos gaming and playing with trackers in the mid 90's. The kits to build the simplest ones had sold out and I was already in the midst of building the Midibox SID so I looked on the for sale part and found an already built one and bought it. I still have yet to make a filter circuit for it, but was very interested after hearing the demos. This was very fun to program and play with, but then I soon found it too had the same short coming as the MIDIbox SID. No instrumentation switching on the fly. It's the element that makes trackers superior to all other sequencers aside from being built specifically for the chips automation parameters. It also only had the one mode of 4 instruments 1 drumset as opposed to the chips ability to have 18 2-op channels or other configurations allowing more sounds and instruments to play at once. This was a big shortcoming as well since midi allows 16 channels and there was no way to use it with actual midi music. I eventually began to crave that environment that gave total control and was ready to get an old computer set up. This time there would be no data/cartridge limitations with expensive workarounds. I found an amazing motherboard that contained ISA slots, a 1.4 Ghz processor and 512 MB RAM. A late 90's gem bridging 8-bit to 32-bit. I then also found a Sound Blaster 16 CT1740 after failed attempts at getting a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 like I had in the 90's. A short time later I had Windows 98SE and Adlib Tracker 2 running like a champ. Adlib Tracker 2 has some quirks I had to work out. They attempted midi implementation and failed, thus the only way to make music is the Tracker that cannot be synced with anything.
In conclusion, these instruments have been great learning tools. I love the sounds that can be generated and will continue to play with them. They are very far from perfect. The applications and methods for making music with computer sound chips is a hack job at best, but I find it much easier to be creative with these given the odd filter mixing of the SID and the harsh raspy noise of the OPL3. Not to mention the stereo mixing abilities of both in certain configurations. The midibox versions do require hardware soldering maintenance and have majorly slowed down on updates in the last 2 years. I do prefer using the actual computers for programming these and hope I can sync the computers together eventually.
