I remember the rush I felt as I upgraded the ram to 4meg. Much bigger rush, though, when I managed to get an old case, pull the keyboard section from my working rig, transfer it to the new case and extend the cable, so I’d have my Seperate keyboard. Heck … the space age was here … and I’d made it happen And Gawd, it looked a mess.
Installing a ramdisk, loading my programs on it, and keeping the computer on 14/7. Instant loading.
Using Score Edit to design and print my wedding invitations.
Years of simple workflow and cubase and Roland D110 just got on with the job. The very early stuff in my sig is all Atari.
Opening up my SM125, and finding how to amplify the deflectors [or something], so’s to maximize the size of the picture on the screen
Accidentally throwing it away three years ago, because it was stacked with a couple of 15-inch PC monitors I was chucking.
Remembering now, how, back there then, it all looked like The LateST and The GreateST, and how geeking and tweaking were entrance requirements.
Oh … And ST Club … a magazine based community where the relationship with developers was not ‘Gimme’, but ‘HowCanWe’
What was that? The black thingie that generated and received SMPTE? Or was that something else.
We had that to sync to two ADAT blackface. It was easier to make the SMPTE/Atari sync with the ADATS than to make the two freaking ADATs sync with each other haha! Alesis hardware crap!
haha! yeah and you just though WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW! when you got it out of the box when you got it! he he
I have a friend a few miles down the road who STILL has his hooked up to an old ADAT machine and is still making money doing jingles, local band demos etc… seems there’s still a market for that kind of thing bizarrely. http://www.abbeysound.co.uk/lol a real blast from the past
Funny, I remember going to buy it from a local music shop that had a discount on it. The keyboard salesman that I was dealing with wouldn’t sell me it because he said I needed a midi thru box!!! He actually tried to argue with me and kept telling me I was wrong. Even after I told him I was needing to connect 3 fully expanded EPS16+ workstations, a Roland S760 sampler, A saber Console with midi mute automation, a Tr909, Tr505 etc, various Roland boxes some kenton midi to CV stuff for 2 SH101’s, and a 24 track for smpte and have spare midi for other things. Felt like punching him in the face at the end of it.
Still I eventually got it and was a very happy puppy
CZ1… now that was a BEAST of a synth! incredible piece of kit for it’s day… if you mention it to younger people these days they just laugh… i used to have its ‘sister’ the FZ1… pretty much the most advanced sampler on the market for its day, not sure if the fairlight was out at the same time… the FZ1 was an AWESOME piece of kit! even still by today’s standards if it wasn’t for the IIRC 32KHz sampling rate, would still be a pretty impressive piece of kit… also the first machine to use a large LCD which was later developed into their miniature TV sets. The thing had EIGHT ouputs, was 8 or 16 part MT… the editing capabilities although fiddly were mindblowingly good! fantastic machine for sound creation… actually i wish i hadn’t sold the thing now
yer i know the feeling ,never will there be a synth like it again ,a few months later i bought the one and only korg rack sampler they ever made , the dsm1 and my possibilities were endless , the korg was the same as the fz1 ( i only dreamed of the fz1) but 12 bit tho with 8 outputs and the sample rate up too 48 khz which was amazing , ionly sold it last year as i love that 12 bit dirty sound on some drums . loovvellyyy , with this little set up and the atari’s my whole world changed for ever
god bless ya steiny , even tho your part of yamaha i still love ya !
yes, how true I still have mine … although the display has become almost opaque … I still sometimes use it. The Floppy still works and I know the key sequence to load the samples so its still fun to work with… although its difficult to adjust any parameters. Was the first buyable 16bit sampler and it sounded really “digital”
I too was an Atari user. Prior to getting the computer I was sequencing on a Yamaha QX5, using a Casio CZ101 and an Akai S900.
I used to think “what the hell do I need a computer for?”, but then when I got one, I used it for everything!
It was the MIDI sockets that sold it to me. Started with Pro12, then Pro24 followed by Cubase.
Then when Cubase Audio came out for the Falcon, I got that (Falcons were £899 apparently*) and splashed out £700 for a 1GB SCSI drive to store all the files.
Who remembers Club Cubase, with the Basique magazine? Vic Lennard, Ofir Gal and Brian Heywood.
*I’ve just found my pile of Basique mags! Issue 3 has the headline “Cubase Audio on the Falcon” from the end of 1993.
Come to think of it… So have I, only I lent it to a studio along with my old atari to sort a problem out they were having trying to convert either midi timecode or smpte to midi clock (cant remember) and the old machine with cubase V2 worked a treat, saved the day, as they had committed a drum machine track to a stand alone harddisk recorder and put each channel through way too much enhancement and had no time reference to re record. Playing with the offsets we managed to sync the drum machine back up and all was well
I must remeber to go and get it back before they think it’s theirs…
And Gawd, it looked a mess.
he he
The StarTrek version!