Gigging with 30-year-old Computers!

Kickstart, the UK Amiga Expo, entered into it's second year with a bang! No Literally, I'll explain later...

The show focused on the Commodore Amiga, a truly creative machine in terms of graphics and audio, when compared to other computers available in the late 80's & early 90's. The machine has 4 channels of 8-bit 28Khz PCM built right in, allowing many of us to get our first taste of sampling, but additionally, pretty robust MIDI solutions & interesting soft synths make the Amiga an exciting audio playground. For a primer on Amiga audio, check out this video:

The Amiga fan-base is a pretty passionate bunch, keen to show the word how amazing this lost machine (still) is. One of the most relevant areas I feel, is music. In the age of effortless fidelity, lofi character is desirable and that results in the 1000's of musicians who still use Amiga.

It was obvious that music was going to be a huge part of the event. During the expo I sat at my table selling the new Vogue Renege EP, (available on bandcamp or by emailing pauleebowen@gmail.com to buy a physical copy) listening to a kick-ass cracktro playlist that a friend had made - bubbly little musical intros that pirates used to add to copied games - and nodding my head.

But the afterparty was something else. A great variety of electronic acts performed; some using modern equipment & some using old. My set was based around the following hardware:

• Commodore Amiga 1200 with 68060 accelerator (she flies!)
• Flatscreen LCD TV
• A serial port MIDI interface
• Korg Nautilus Keyboard

We are lucky in the UK, because LCD TV's with RGB SCART are fairly common - a decent sized-display that allows me to see what I was doing! I ran OctaMED Soundstudio - the version I got for free off a magazine in 1997 - and it was interfaced to allow me to perform songs in two different ways:

• Option 1: The Amiga played back sequenced samples and loops, then I played leads, pads or other little sounds on my Nautilus
• Option 2: All samples came from the Nautilus and the same software merely provided the MIDI sequencing. This allowed me more control over say, a filtered bassline (the Nautilus MS20 engine is great for bass!) or grain-shifted drums.

The Amiga has always had very severe left right panning, so the engineer did a few tweaks to sweeten things, but man; that 30-year old A1200 sure put out a hell of a sound!

I brought a backup Amiga in case everything went wrong - but didn't need it, thankfully. In fact, the set went really smoothly until the last song, where the power to the stage blew! I took the chance to take a snap of the audience, and then rebooted everything and it was all fine! No idea what happened there, but it smelled awful. The slightly weak link became the 2022 Nautilus, which took much longer to boot than my 1992 A1200!

Other Musical Developments

Amiga Kit were also in attendance at the show. They were selling their new A600GS product, a console that runs Amiga software and is bundled with Octamed v8, an exciting new version of the classic software. I've offered my services as a beta tester for v8, so expect a video soon. For now, here's an interview with Amiga Kit:

Finally, there has to be a shout out to RobSmithDev, who created a wild floppy disk cleaning device; the machine plays a dance remix of "Car Wash" whilst it wipes the mold from your floppy - then dries it off! Check it out at 11:00 in this video from Ctrl Alt Rees:

See you next year I guess, long live Amiga!

Posted by MagicalSynthAdventure an expert in synthesis technology from last Century and Amiga enthusiast.

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