Commodore Remix

This is the place to talk about your hardware and software setup. Ideally, we'll end up with more than just a 'kit list'. The how and the why will be useful for less-experienced remixers, hopefully!

Well, in most of the times the good old soundtracker and some decent st-00 samples will do the trick. Really, believe me. It's not the equipment that makes good music, it's you!

Start with the drums, i. e. a kick on every 4th step and some hi-hats in between. Maybe a snare or a clap every 8th. Then try some bass-sounds, there are some good ones on st-00.

On track 3 I normally put the chords. Depending on the song, I put some long pads on it, or, if it fits better to the style, some short chord-stabs.

Then the most important track: It's time for the melody. Search for a good lead-sound and think about a f***ing great hook-line. Lay it down on channel 4.

Now copy this pattern to the next one and try some variations. Repeat. For the advanced user: Try looking for some more st-xx disks, or - if you're a really good hacker - try ripping some instruments from games or demos.

And now the most important tip of all: Have Phun!!!

I use FL Studio.
If it's a remix, I'll usually render an mp3 of the original tune and put it into the project, so I won't have to switch between programs to hear it. Most times I'll basically make the meat of the tune that lasts 20-30 seconds, and then arrange it afterwards. In my experience this way isn't optimal though. It is best to start at the start, and work my way until the end. That way I'll end up with a more meaningful intro and buildup.

Do I smell an opportunity to give my links yet another airing? Let's roll: http://www.leftiness.org/Record.htm

Commie-wise I'm very happy with my setup. I have all I need in the MSSIAH, Sound Expander and Colortone keyboards, other MIDI carts, Commodulator and all else. I can serial network to the PC and feed data via MIDI as well. Commodore VSTi and samples also lend their weight. Similar with my Amigas.




http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=3 ... bf052aff1d




As a non-programmer, I approach SID work differently. Sometimes I compose in my DAW's piano roll mode, other times I improvise a melody and tune to a click track. Sometimes the SID (or any synth) is the foundation, other times not. Sometimes 'real' instruments are mixed in, other times not. I always try to have variety and so I dabble in any means possible. Sometimes my bits are riff-driven, sometimes not. Sometimes I transcribe dreams, sometimes music happens out of patterns drawn on the screen. Other times bits and pieces just come at random and can be threaded together later.

I'm no musician and I also have trouble trying to learn. In fact I can't even get too far through Me And My Piano. But I seem to be able to doodle quite nicely, as well as somehow 'feel' a few musical techniques and be inspired by them. Almost all my entire library has been made from comped ad-libs and people have said they were none the wiser. Perhaps this ignorance is a setback because I miss out on all those tricks and matters of technique. But other times I suppose I'm not bound by habit and convention and can just make something out of wild abstract ideas.



I simply doodled this into piano roll and imposed some SID sounds. But it still came out well, perhaps more than it deserved: http://www.dustybin.org.uk/VSTi_and_sample_demo.mp3

Just have a tinker. Who knows what you'll end up with. By sheer luck these two pieces for my own Youtube videos came off complete.




I do believe that multi-tracking a Commodore conventionally can open a wealth of extra possibilities. Programming the machine is still a huge advantage in getting the most from it, though what more can be achieved by also layering a harmonium, drums or bass? Or maybe a Juno 6 or JD 800 for contrast between synths. Who knows, perhaps Poke16384 could find just the combination he needs to get that magic sound from his head and onto disc.




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Give some fundamental instrument matchings a try. You love it: http://www.concept-single.net/cs9_music.MP3
The third section of that library music, recorded about 4 years ago, puts drums with the C64's rather tasty gothic organ-type sound.

When I started to make remixes I used Fasttracker2 and made wavs out of the sids and put it in ft2 and played along so I got the melodies perfectly.
Today I use Reason and sometimes I use sid2midi when the melodies and stuff isn't THAT eays to play along with
Else I will try to play along the melodies and learn them and then add my style to it

With my first Gods remix I saved all the samples from the mod and loaded them up in reason and recreated the mod so it sounded "exactly" as the original, then I remixed it, Unfortunalty I saved over that version so I haven't got the "original" sounding reason file :/

trace wrote:Today I use Reason and sometimes I use sid2midi when the melodies and stuff isn't THAT eays to play along with

I recently remixed a tune with very rapid arpeggiatied dissonant chords, and I just slowed it down using Audacity. Good idea to try and do it by ear first, though.

OK - when I started this thread, I was on Windows Phone so it would have been painful to do a full submission...

First things first - Commie, matey! Do please try to pay attention..

Analog-X64 wrote:
There is one particular tune that I want to take a stab at remixing and in my head I can hear this epic sounding thing that can become of it. Problem is, manipulating the hardware/software to make it sound like what I'm hearing in my head.

History:
My earliest SID's were done on Electrosound. I knew nothing about programming Assembly Language then. 'Paulie', (Paul Hughes) and me met in a computer shop and hit it off. So, we were mates and he
used to tweak the Electrosound 'save-files' to get them into our first joint-projects. I've pretty much played in duos, trios and bands constantly since the eighties and was really good with Roland drum
machines like the TR-707 & TR-808. So, Electrosound was really easy to get into.... Same linear pattern blocks. Just use notes instead of drum-beats.

The Ocean stuff, I'll leave for now, (It may well come up at some point, somewhere else on Remix64)

Current Day:
Reason.. Reason... Reason... and Reason! plus Live Guitar, Live Bass, (depending on the track).

Reason allows you absolute control over everything, (although it's maybe a bit daunting and a big ask for someone just getting into computer music). For me, it's the best DAW right now by a mile.

Guitar-wise, I have a line6 Variax, (thus the avatar). Love it to bits. PC Workbench software to change or totally redesign the whole guitar. Line6 Vetta2 Amp. Same flexibility, all changeable right on my desktop. (i.e. Fender Strat pickups on a Gibson Les Paul body.... you get the picture).

SID2MIDI is brilliant for pulling stuff apart. A wave editor to hold a .wav or .mp3 of the original, great for slowing stuff down ...and Cakewalk 9 for those rare occasions when i want to lay down looooong
passages that don't work well in Reason as samples.

Why?
Because Reason gives me the ability to sit at a keyboard and play with really good quality sounds when i'm composing.... and let's me get into the detail to program the stuff that's beyond my musical
capability. I love the way you can mix anything up with anything else. Making voices out of samples and synths with every parameter tweakable. Effects and mixing are equally easy to adjust and
are all programmable. Any short, live passages, can be sampled easily, straight into a preset. When it comes to the arrangement, you can make it as tight or leave it as loose as you want.

How?
Remix In a Nutshell, (could be a song title ) :
1). Any old sounds and get the arrangement down - especially drums and bassline - get the engine started - get some structure into the piece.
....a). just get the notes in there that you know are definitely going in there.
....b). Pitch bends, vibrato and note effects, (not reverb, echo, etc - that's later)

2). Focus on the new stuff I'm gonna add, the new parts, harmonies to the melody, pads, descants.
....a). For me, this phase is usually 50% at the musical keyboard, trying things out together to make sure they work and...
....b). 50% at the computer keyboard recording/programming the new parts in.

3). Find the sounds and tweak the arrangement to make the sounds really work, if necessary.
....a). pick, load, create sounds. get them sounding how they sounded in your head when you heard the piece of music playing. Add FX to taste, (reverb, echo, pan, etc).
....b). Keep playing back individual passages that you're working on as they develop. *IMPORTANT* From time to time, do playback from the bits leading up to your WIP too. Make sure it all fits.

4). Get the mix right!
....a). Listen to your finished piece through speakers, headphones, in the car, etc
....b). Listen to your finished piece through speakers, headphones, in the car, etc
....c). Listen to your finished piece through speakers, headphones, in the car, etc

No! it's not a mistake. You can't listen to your finished masterpiece enough. Once you've uploaded it, it's 'out there'. Make sure you're really happy with it. Oh! and give your ears a rest too!
Loads of times, I've walked away, made a coffee, had a break, come back and almost immediately heard something I missed 15 minutes before.

It's great listening to other people's methods and reasons. Believe it or not, I really feel like the 'Noob' here despite my history.

Commie, matey! Do please try to pay attention..

Alright alright! I did answer the headline question though.

Though n remix terms, music kept within the confines of the 64, I wonder how feasible it is to use samples of real instrument sounds you record yourself alongside the SID music? Rob Hubbard seemed to have no trouble. Imagine the fun in mixing sounds together to get a new blend.


Now, where's that harmonium sample....?

This is a fantastic thread, thanks for starting it. I'm going to type whats in my head at the moment and hopefully its not too messy to read .

Between 81-82 we lived in a basement apartment (Greece) and our neighbour was a musician in a band who happened to be his entire family all 5 brothers, they were heavy into synths. One day he gave me a tape, and said you might like this. I listened to this tape till I wore it out. That was Oxygene.

Forward to 1983 and I was at a friends house and he said my dad bought me a computer (they were wealthy), this was at a time when this computer was $800. Loaded this game and when I heard "We have a visitor...." (you know the rest), I was like ok this is interesting... than he loaded Rambo and I was like... I have to get me one of these. I was still underage for working so I found a part time job paying cash what was I think $1.80 an hour or some crazy thing like that. I worked weekends for 1 Full year before I could afford one.

I was on my own, all my friends at the time, had no interest in this thing called a computer, there was no demo scene here, ordering magazines from the U.K. at a very expensive cost, I learned about the great computer scene in europe. I saved up money and at a cost of $75 I bought myself a Final Cartridge and started looking at code in monitor mode, I eventually figured out how to rip tunes and play routine out of a game and make them work standalone, my first one being Chimera. Friends would come over and I would load the ripped tune SYS 40967 or something like that, and voila, chimera music playing in an endless loop on my Commodore 64 without having to load the game.

Fastforward to the Amiga days and now once again through making contacts outside of north america I was able to get my hands on Demos' and such. Got introduce to Sound Tracker and eventually Pro Tracker, I would look at tunes that others had made and see how they used these codes to apply effects to samples. I attempted to make some tunes, nothing to be proud of, and by this time I had started purchasing some Midi Gear and using an Atari 1040STE with EDIT Track Gold, it had this Chain method of constructing a song. You would chain patterns together just like a tracker and it gave me precise control over the timing. So I could bash in my Drum sounds and later go in and edit the time such that each kick or snare hit at the exact time I wanted them to.

Fastforward some more, and got into using a PC to make music, tried a few different piece of software like Cubase, but I just couldnt get a grip with them. I was quite comfortable laying down a track with my Roland W-30 sampling keyboard which has a great 16 Track Sequencer but it was Linear and a very pain in the behind to try and do something complex without a lot of planning ahead of time, which took away from the creativity.

Finally I stumbled upon Fruity Loops and although it was not taken seriously and people laughed at me for using it, I didnt care of all the programs out there, this is something I felt comfortable with. I started buying tons of Keyboard magazines, again imported from Europe at great expense, these came with a lot of Free VST's even C64 vst's.

Real life came knocking on the door in 2001 and fastforward to 2011 and I'm ready to get back at making music. I've purchased a Quad core system to replace the computer I bought back in 2001. Right now the 3D rendering software is whats on it, and next will be to rebuild the audio software.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but kind of gives you and Idea how arrived to where I'm now in regards to making music.

Well... I've got kids on holiday right now, so I'll take my view on music making and C64 in some steps...

When I started out all the way back on the C64, I used a music sequencer by DEMON... I never released those 2-3tracks that I made back then, as most of my assembly demo's made then was usualy rips of Hubbards tunes... I don't even recall how DEMON's tracker worked or looked like, but I remember the intro tune to the editor very well... so well I did a remix of this intro tune, which is also on RKO.

I started making music for real when on the AMIGA, in the group KEFRENS... I also made lots of my own music routines during that period, but my main tool was Protracker, that I used much like anybody else at that time... I DID make my own samples though from lots of techno albums of that time.

My next step happened when I moved to the PC and AWE32/64 sound cards.. I managed to make lots of samples, and started collecting HUGE sample libraries at this time... I never made any C64 remixes on the AWE cards though... I did ONE remix on the AMIGA though. My AWE experience ended when I participated in the Creative Open MIDI Contest in 1996 (if I recall right)... won the whole damn thing, was very surprised and won an E-MU E4K sampling keyboard which totaly changed my music making experience... ever since that day I've been on "real" music equipment like hardware samplers, analog synthesizers, analog mixers etc. and still are to this day.

I've never turned to the softsynth era... I simply cannot find at terms with this method, as it opens way too many options for me... I'm working best under constraints. I'm working with loads of MIDI interfaces these days, and playing my synths realtime via MIDI... I then record the final 2-track signal to the PC for the final mastering process.

More on my workflow with C64 remixes in my next post in this thread

My main setup is based around a newly aquired analog mixer, a Mackie ONYX 24.4 mixing console:



Every channel on this mixer has 6 AUX sends, where I have connected two stereo FX processors:



These two FX processors I use for dedicated reverb and delay, as these two FX can easily be shared by every track.

The rest of the mixer is left "open" for a given project... I use some Guitar pedals on insert channels once in a while, but rarely use any subgroups for my work. EQ is done with the EQ on the mixer's tracks.

All my synths are rack mounted machines, as I prefer them that way... they take up less space that way, and I use a simple MIDI controller keyboard to play them through the PC. All synths are hooked up in patchbays, so that I can connect the ones I choose on a project for at mixer channel.

The reason I do not just plug everything into the mixer directly is that I have a fetish for synths... I simply have too many synths and too few mixer channels

My speakers are a pair of Behringer TRUTH's and woofer....

My current synth list are:

E-MU E5000 Ultra sampler
MIDI BOX Sammich SID
DSI Evolver
DSI Tetra
Yamaha TX7
HardSID 4U Studio edition
Yamaha FS1R
Waldorf Microwave 1
Novation Super Bass Station Rack
Ensoniq ESQ'm
Vermona M.AR.S.
Roland MKS-50
Roland MKS-30 Planet S
Waldorf Pulse
Yamaha TG77
Oberhei Matrix-1000
Crumar bit99
Vermona Kick-Lancet
JoMoX M.Brane 1_1

recently sold my KORG Polysix to get my new mixer... shame on me

My way of composing C64 music comming up next...

Hang on a minute, you haven't given us a rundown of your soft-synths yet. With all the good free ones available, the list must be quite exhaustive.

Any chance of some samples?

Commie_User wrote:Hang on a minute, you haven't given us a rundown of your soft-synths yet. With all the good free ones available, the list must be quite exhaustive.

Any chance of some samples?

Who? me? ... if it's me you're asking, then I do not use any soft synths at all... I'm strictly a hardware guy, exept for mastering, as I simply do not have the money to buy the kind af analog mastering equipment needed, so for that I'd use software if applicable... but honestly, I'm not even an amateur at mastering, I'm a complete noob withrespect to that, so I rarely do anything else than limiting and then normalizing.

The reason I do not use software is that it opens too many possibilities... I like working with constraints, a bit like you had to when you made SIDs or MODs on C64/AMIGA... another reson is that I like the sound of analog which software still cannot reproduce satisfying enough to my ear, but that's just a personal preference... as someone wrote earlier, it's not about what you use, but WHO use it, and how... software has it's forces and weaknesses, so does hardware analog and digital equipment...

You also mention samples... anything in particular you'd like to hear?

The better the mix, the less needs doing at the mastering stage anyway. And in this day and age, as long as the gear is at least half-decent then you'll still get great results. My mastering software can change all the time but on the hardware front I use the M-Audio Delta 66 interface and the Ultragain Pro or Tube Ultra-Q units by Behringer. The Behringers are criticised by some for 'merely' being transistor units with a valve stage but they still manage to outshine most valve emulating software I've ever tried.

Also considering I use the likes of the Soundcraft M8 mixer, SE Z3300A mike, Terratec Phase 88 Rack interface or the Focusrite Penta compressor when tracking and you get the idea of my price range and standards. You need not spend a fortune on choice mastering equipment, just enough for a like-for-like match with the rest of the rig. At least that's what I say.




Even budget kit delivers remarkable sound quality in this day and age. Many home users need spend years getting the best from them now.



My Yamaha Electone organ has a damn fine line-in, as depicted in my samples video. Software or old keyboards may sound sterile, or not the full shilling compared to proper analogue monsters, though tainting their sounds through a bit of choice hardware circuits can get them sounding juicy, fruity or wet. It's up the the gear and your ears to reckon whether that's good enough or not.





As for samples, I think I'll let you choose. You have plenty of good names on your list. Just a couple of middle C snatches as you twiddle the knobs would do for me and thanks very much.

Commie_User wrote:Hang on a minute, you haven't given us a rundown of your soft-synths yet. With all the good free ones available, the list must be quite exhaustive.

Any chance of some samples?

If you are asking me, I can certainly make a list, off the top of my head, here is my favourite one, although the website is in Japan the interface and everything else is in english.

Its simply called Synth 1
http://www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth/