New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

T his weekend I've tried a different approach to writing and recording a song and it's worked out so well I thought I'd make some notes here about the process. First of all, here's the finished music. I only spent an hour or two actually writing it. That was in itself an exercise in composing but I wanted to try this new method of recording and just got something down to work with. I like it a lot and will definitely expand it. All sounds here are produced by the C64, albeit one fitted with an ARMSID (set to 6581). Only because my working C64 with a real SID chip is playing up. Rather than try to write for 3 or 6 voices and then import that information to end up with a .prg that will run and play the music (aka a "sid") I've written any number of parts, with up to 3 voices in each, and used the C64 as a MIDI instrument, sending each part as MIDI to the computer and recording the audio that comes out of the computer. I think that Logic and other...

I'm typing this blog post on the Plus/4 itself. I'll have to transfer to something more up-to-date before posting because Commodore didn't include a web browser alongside the word-processing, spreadsheet, graphics and database packages that they built into this machine. The first word-processor and spreadsheet I used were on the Amiga. When I saw that the Plus/4 had even earlier examples of such packages on-board, I was curious. There was a non-working one in my collection, bought sometime in the 90s at a car boot sale. The 1984 Plus/4 has a lot in common with the Commodore 16. In fact they share the same key chips. The Plus/4 just has additional RAM and the office software on ROM. On opening up a 'spare' working C16 and the Plus/4, I found the important chips socketed and identical, down to revision numbers. Chip-puller came into play and chips were exchanged one at a time, starting with the most likely suspects until the Plus/4 worked. In this case the ...