A Timeless Wavelength

Commodore Amiga featuring Aegis Sonix – Jay’s Song

Sorry for the weeks-long blog hiatus.  I could quite legitimately claim to have been busy, it being the end of the semester and all.  But in reality, I just haven’t quite felt like blogging.  I had no idea when I started this thing just how tedious it could get, going through one’s music collection every day and finding something meaningful to say about a song.  I’ve even given thought to diversifying this blog, giving myself something to talk about besides just songs.  Good idea?  Or should I just stick with the present format?

That being said, it’s not like I could ever really run out of songs to talk about.  One of the non-blog activities that’s been occupying me the past couple of weeks has been playing around with an Amiga emulator.  As I’ve mentioned before, back in the late ’80s I had an Amiga 2000 and a copy of Aegis Sonix, which gave me my first exposure to creating computer music.  The software wasn’t all that feature-laden, but to this day I haven’t found a program that matches it for ease of use.  The built-in sound had the unavoidably tinny quality of 8-bit audio, but the Amiga managed to get as much performance as possible out of those 8 bits.  With the addition of a MIDI interface and a good tone generator (such as my trusty Yamaha TG-55), you could make professional-quality music with a pretty simple setup.

Sadly, my original Amiga was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina,  and I haven’t yet managed to get MIDI output working with the emulator.  But I can still get the original 8-bit-tastic sounds!  This is “Jay’s Song”, the demo song that came with Sonix, which was often used to showcase the Amiga’s then-extraordinary sound capabilities.

(As much as I liked my Amiga, I was always kind of jealous of Atari ST owners.  Said machine had built-in MIDI, and a better selection of music software.  The ST version of Cubase is prized by many even today over the bloated, feature-rich Cubase VST.  There’s a pretty good ST emulator out there, with MIDI capability… I’ll have to see if I can get it to cooperate with some external controllers and synthesizers.)