In my high school times I mostly listened to Amiga music and C64 music rather than ”real” music. I will now take a look back in time to some of the best Amiga modules I listened to.
Spell Amelioration from Uncle Tom was one of my favorites. Personal and technically good ProTracker music module.
Also Poseidon from Uncle Tom was one of my favorites.
Of course Klisje paa klisje was a real good tune to listen to:
Jogeir Liljedahl’s Face Another Day had big enlightening impact on me:
Many chip tunes on Amiga really touched me. Below is a compilation of some of the most famous chip tunes including many of my favorites:
Many people have been touched by good Amiga music and remixed their favorite tunes with synthesizers and real instruments.
Below is my own so called chip tune made with OctaMED on Amiga:
Some of the Amiga musicians have become professonal musicians.
If you’ve had C64 and/or Amiga childhood and/or youth this was probably good nostalgic trip to you too.
My music history is a bit strange; it’s very non-existent in my early years. As to listening to music, I haven’t had any ”official” equipment to listen to music until I was about 17-18 years old. What I then had, was only a portable C-cassette player with head phones.
My first C-cassette was Synthesizer Greatest vol. 5. This is was when I fell into Vangelis’ music. Especially Alpha on the cassette was amazing!
But I did listen to music before the Walkman, the portable cassette player. It all started when I got my first home computer in 1984, Commodore Vic 20. If my memory serves me right, I wrote sometime in 1984-1985 a program listing called Musikantti from a Finnish computer magazine, Mikrobitti for the Vic 20. With this program I could use the keyboard of Vic 20 to try to play something that might remind from music. 🙂 Though, I think hadn’t equipment to save the program (I’m not sure) in those days with my Vic 20; eventually, when I turned off the computer, the program was lost…
Later, when I was 12 years old I finally got a Commodore 64. C64’s demo and game musics probably gave me my most important influences as it comes to music. As to making music of my own, I didn’t have any program to make music. With C64’s basic I wrote a clumsy program that played short part of Ukko Nooa. This is children’s song, that is often used to start learning playing piano. According to Wikipedia, the Swedish name for the tune is Gubben Noak. I’m not familiar with any English name of it, though some kind of direct translation could be The Old Man Noah.
Finally, I think the year was 1988, I got SoundTracker 2.5 for my Amiga 500. This was the first version of SoundTracker that worked with Amigas with Kickstart 1.3 as ROM operating system. At the age of 14 I began learning making, composing music of my own with Amiga 500 without any education of composing music. Still, in nowadays I can’t play any ”real” instrument.
In my whole life I have took three (3) piano lessons sometime in 1994, but I thought it was too difficult and expensive…
Some people were sure that I’m insane, when I told that I have composed piano music with computer without ability to play the piano.
Well, they’re probably right; you can check my YouTube channel for some piano music I have composed. For example Sad, Forgotten Math, “Warm” (working title to an unfinished tune) include some piano music I have composed with PC. Heijastus (reflection in English) is a short Amiga tune, where I had put some piano patterns, that were playing in my head probably at least for a month, before I finally put together quickly some kind of piano tune at the age of 17.
Two of my favorite Vangelis albums (links to Amazon):
And Merry Christmas to you all from not so cold Finland! At the time the temperature is here, where I’m writing, about +4 Celsius degrees, that’s +39.2 in Fahrenheits!
