Commodore Remix

I am mainly making music for fun and through finding this site and the connected others I got into the mood of trying my hands on some more traditional and less contemporary styled "oldschool" mod sounds, the kind that was featured in many Demo productions and games like the Pinball Series of Digital Illusions.

Now as I am a cheapskate I wonder if there are any good free VST's that are able to get this warm kind of synthesizer sound (Yes I always found synthesizers can sound very warm ) featured in such old musicpieces like the above. There are tons of free ones that can output harsh techno orientated sounds... Can anyone give a few pointers to nice sounding VST instruments or what Synthesizers were typically used by the artists then? Thanks!

Demo scene mods were done by mainly using Noisetracker type software. These used samples and sometimes chip music (Octamed) which was then crunched to fit on the demo disk if it was a large file. You could emulate an Amiga or C64 and use them to make the music running a tracker program or use the real thing for more authentic results. As for harsh techno VST's. Synths are only tools and its up to you how they sound.

Yup I know they used Noise/Pro/Whatever-tracker, I had a few of these myself then... but you gotta fetch the samples from some source like a CD or an actual device. (Okay there were some soft synths later on that could prerender samples but that came later on)

And yeah it depends what you fetch out of the thing but most VST's I checked out are (at least in the presets) more suitable for harder music. I guess I need to play around more.

Having had quite a bit of synthesizers from the 80's I can tell you, that many of the sounds from the .mod era on amiga was taken from late 80's synths that were popular at the time... simply sampled from these machines. If you want these type of samples either go and look for samples from specifik 80's synthesizers, or find VST's that emulate them.

Synths to try out:

KORG Wavestation
KORG M1
Roland D-50
Roland Alfa Juno, 106 etc.
Oberheim Matrix-6
Yamaha DX7

etcetera... maybe this will give you what you're looking for. I've heard sounds on some of these machines that was 100% like samples on some of the first sampledisks for the AMIGA.

Yay thank you, see I was thinking of Korg machines as I faintly remember to have read that more often in the mod sample names which were used as song info often but there are so many different models... Thank you for the list I will take a look at those!

I am new here and have not much knowledge about it. But I am agree with Doddsy that Demo scene mods were done by mainly using Noisetracker type software, you must used CD for this purpose. Good Luck

If you want to start doing music and don't have much of a collection, or money to spend on a collection why not get yourself a copy of Computer music special issue no.44,
It comes with 99 free VST's - Effect's programs etc etc, the lot and some great stuff which will also give you the 80's sound etc

Go here and check it out http://www.musicradar.com/computermusic ... 010-286552

Hope this helps

Paul