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Markus Captain Kaarlonen
source link: https://markuskaarlonen.com/space-debris
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Markus Captain Kaarlonen
Space Debris is an Amiga mod I composed back in 1991. This is a short story about how I made the song, and what it was like to make music on the Amiga. If you don't know what "Amiga" or "mods" are, no worries, just read on!
Amiga, Trackers and Mods
Starting from the mid/late 1980's, many aspiring musicians (like me…) used the legendary Commodore Amiga computer to learn and compose music. Amiga’s sound and graphics capabilities were pretty incredible compared to other home computers available at the time, and it quickly became popular among gamers, coders, graphic artists and musicians all over the world, and especially in Europe.
Many Amiga musicians used a tracker, a type of music software that produces modules, or mods for short. A mod is a single file that contains everything necessary to play back a full song: notation, arrangement, song structure and instruments.
As you might have guessed, trackers and mods were quite primitive by today’s standards. The Amiga could play up to four monophonic audio channels at the same time (it was possible to play more than four with some trickery, but that had drawbacks, like greatly reduced sound quality). Each channel played back digital samples, which are essentially short recordings of any piece of audio. The samples had a 8 bit resolution, and typical sample rates were much lower than what we are used to today, which basically means they sounded pretty rough and lo-fi. You also couldn't use any realtime effects, like reverb, so everything was 100% "dry". But back in the day, it was just unbelievable you could do all this on an affordable home computer.
One of the most laborious but also interesting and rewarding aspects of making mods was finding ways around the technical limitations. As time went by, people really learned how to push the limits, and make those four lo-fi channels sound bigger and better than they appear on paper.
Mods circulated among Amiga users around the world, and were often used in audiovisual presentations called demos. Demos and mods took part in competitions, which were often arranged at events called demoparties. And all this was part of the demoscene community, which still lives on today. But that’s a story for another time...
Getting Started
I was 17 at the time, with no musical education of any kind (still don’t have any...). I didn't even have the basic music classes in school because we had to choose between music and visual arts, and I chose the latter. I totally sucked at drawing and painting (still do...), but all my classmates chose the art classes, and I didn't want to be the odd one.
But I remember being fascinated by music and sound from an early age. Growing up, I didn't have any traditional instruments at home, but I had been using my earlier home computers (VIC-20 and Commodore 64) to produce simple sound effects and drafts of music, maybe learning something along the way. I think it was just before Space Debris when I got my first actual instrument, the good old Roland D-5 synthesizer, and could finally try playing on an actual keyboard.
For some years, I had been sort of exploring the basics of music theory on my own, mostly by trial and error. I was essentially just listening to all kinds of music, trying to figure out what notes make up a specific chord, why does a chord or interval sound the way it does, etc. I noticed I could usually trust my ears to tell me when something is "right" or “wrong”, and that helped me learn some fundamentals without any formal music education.
On the Amiga, I started learning how to make music with trackers. I don't remember exactly how I got started with Space Debris, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have any single grand idea or a specific music genre in mind. It was more like "hey, here's a tracker, let's try something with it and see what happens".
The Sounds
I had a primitive sampler connected to my Amiga, so I could record any audio and use it as an instrument in the tracker (you can do this and much more with any smartphone today, but being able to do it on a home computer 30 years ago was truly unbelievable). I sampled many of the instruments used in Space Debris from my Roland D-5, including the choir sounds and some synths.
I had a summer job at the time, and while the company where I worked had nothing to do with music production, they had a small hobby studio at their office with a few synthesizers and a Roland R-8 drum machine. One day I recorded some drum hits from the R-8 on a C-cassette, took the cassette back home, sampled the sounds into Amiga, and that's where the drums came from.
There was also a large collection of preset sounds that came with the tracker, and a few instruments (like the bass) I took straight from that collection. There was this straightforward "use whatever you have at hand, don't overthink it" mentality with everything.
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