Coverdisks that Changed My Life pt1.

Thanks to NSKE for inspiring this article!

Around 29 years ago, March 1997 - I picked up my regular copy of CU Amiga Magazine and eyed the coverdisk intently. You see, each issue came bundled with 2 floppy disks (or a CD-ROM if you were flush!) filled with interesting software; some merely demos of new games or applications - but these disks featured a LOT of full commercial programs too - all given away for the price of a fry up.

So onto disk 152 and our focus for today, OctaMED Soundstudio. This wasn't the first musical freebie from Amiga mags - earlier versions of OctaMED had graced covers before; so my guess for Soundstudio was a small, incremental update. Having just acquired my first (170MB!) hard disk, I casually installed SoundStudio and was subsequently blown away.

Most Amiga trackers tended to run on their own custom low-resolution screens, with cute but often-wonky UI choices. Soundstudio adhered instead to the Amiga's Intuition framework - a clean, customizable, scalable user interface for accelerated learning. It also did MIDI (which was pretty handy for GCSE assignments, when connected to borrowed school keyboards) - although it's approach was slightly idiosyncratic.

Most old-school MIDI sequencers (including many on the Amiga) provided a timeline, 16 tracks and a piano roll. The notes you popped on track 1 would be fed, generally, to MIDI channel 1, then track 2 > channel 2 and so on. Advanced users might pop some automation or program changes in - but this was beyond most 14 year-olds!

OctaMED's approach made experimentation easier. There were 64 tracks, and they could be filled with whatever the **** you wanted! MIDI channel assignments were set at the instrument level! A single track could trigger MIDI channel 1 on the first note, trigger MIDI channel 16 on the next note and then maybe an internal Amiga sample on the next. With no dedicated hardware sampler at the time - hybrid tunes featuring both internal and external sounds afforded me pretty decent results.

This kind of flexibility is something I've really come to appreciate - OctaMED instruments can either trigger a sample/wavetable, MIDI note, or BOTH...The simultaneous nature of this scheme allowing me, these days, to trigger my Eurorack modular envelopes (Amiga>MIDI>CV/Gate) whilst running any triggered samples through those envelopes! Here's an example:

Still, she's a quirky one - programming pitch bend slides in hex might be off-putting for some, I imagine! This all due to the fact that MIDI didn't appear until MED v2.00. OctaMED, like any Amiga tracker, was built around the manipulation of samples - MIDI added after this fact. This magical sample manipulation focus, helps to form the real point I'd like to make. MED allowed me to learn the following skills:

• Chiptune techniques, e.g. arpeggiating a single note into a chord, manually creating echoes
• Retriggering a sample whilst modulating the start time - & automation in general, really!
• How to structure songs via pattern blocks
• Remixing other's work - .mod files are known to contain both samples & pattern data - one might discard the latter and use those samples to build something new!

So here's to OctaMED (which still gets updates today!) - a program that taught me so many facets of electronic music making. Here's a tune to finish on - 4 channels, no MIDI! See you next time for more inspiring free software.

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