Steinberg story: Long after it was forgotten, I started using Steinberg PRO-16 on a Commodore 64 (1992). After a year the floppy disk became corrupt, so I wrote to Steinberg (no internet). Two weeks later a motorcycle courier knocked on my door with a huge box. Inside was a new Floppy Disk along with a letter from Steinberg explaining how this is a gift as they couldn't believe I was still using this system! What wonderful people. I went on to write sketches for The Pet Shop Boys and Sting with this very system. I stayed loyal to Steinberg and then bought Cubase which was not so user-friendly in my opinion. However, the 21st century versions looks perfectly logical now I have been accustomed to the standard DAW interface. Stay creative people. 🌞🇬🇧🎹
The Atari ST, BBC Micro, the C64 and the Spectrum 128K all in one show with Lesley Judd dressed as a character from Blakes 7 and Fred Harris dressed as a Maths teacher. True nostalgia.
I had an Atari STE and a relatively cheap Casio keyboard that I used to write tracks on, then would borrow a better synth and Akai sampler to record tracks. Was such a great hobby, and enabled thousands of people with good ideas but little musical training to write great music. This is what led to so many songs entering the charts by people that basically wrote them in their bedroom. The whole electronic dance music scene probably wouldn't have existed without MIDI.
@Intuition I agree with you.. a bit. Ah, Octamed - was always envious of the Trackers the Amiga had. Most Drum 'n Bass? Think that's stretching it a bit, but the Amiga was an excellent jumping off point
Absolutely right. It led to a bunch of us coming together to form Funky Transport. An underground, globally recognised Deep House collective. Worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing. My music making started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and a gadget called RAM Flare Music Machine and a Casio home keyboard, A basic line mixer and a couple of tape machines!
@@davidf6326 Agreed, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. Those calling for the defunding/dismantling of the BBC don't know which side their bread's buttered.
There is great content out there on the BBC. The science hour on the world service is incredible, and Roland Pease is a polymath, getting to grips with any subject matter. It seems to be isolated, however.
As an American who pays to watch the BBC over here, I hear you and don’t disagree, but it still has very high quality stuff when compared with most of the world and even 90% of our programming here.
Working with limitations makes creative. I keep falling back to Atari Cubase every now and then, just because of only the core being there. Working without a internet connected computer makes it more easy to focus on what I planned to do: making music. No distractions by chats and mail and no temptations for getting lost on UA-cam. I really like working that way. And afterwards I always can use the MIDI information produced working on the Atari on the PC if I like to do. I notice that I'm not tweaking to death on the Atari and hardware synths/processors/mixers, where I very often seem to be doing this on the PC.
Quite rare for technology but the MIDI standard for interfacing with musical electronic instruments is very much still the standard and largely unchanged even down to the 5-pin DIN connectors today! Not many other standards have that claim to fame. Steinberg (the makers of the first bit of software) are very much still in business and some of the note editing software paradigms (changing note length graphically etc) are still de rigueur today.
@@thoang101 There is no consensus or consistency - some instruments don’t have USB, some have only TRS (and sometimes the “wrong” kind requiring a dongle and guess what? The dongle ends in a female DIN connector…).
Yet so much remains the same. MIDI is still the standard (virtually unchanged from those days) and some of the features and interface ideas (esp. from Steinberg) are still relevant today. Not only that there are producers who swear by the Atari ST and its rock solid timing for MiDi sequencing
@@Mamotreco agreed that midi is long overdue for it's 2.0 update to be implemented, but considering how much we've managed to knock out with ye olden MIDI, still a solid platform.
It's kind of amazing that today's music producers can do it all on a laptop, but home studios often feature 2 or even 3 4K widescreens, but in the 8-bit/16-bit era, people used those chunky CRT monitors that have really low resolution. The screen connected to the Atari ST in this clip is almost comically small. I used a sequencer back in the early '90s and it was so clunky compared to today's versions, but it got the job done.
Goodness me !!! This my childhood flashed before my eyes. Remember watching this and picking up an Commodore Amiga. It feels like yesterday. Quite depressing ..lol
Yes, I remember my first gaming computer the Amiga and having hours of fun playing games from psygnosis and the Bitmap brothers. Happy days, yes it does seem like yesterday, 30 odd years ago.
I was at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 1982 when MIDI was presented. Most people didn't realize at that time what this interface could be used for. The technical development is simply immense. In my day, an AKG spring reverb for the stage (BX-20) cost around 20,000 Swiss francs, was highly sensitive, and to delay the reverb, we had to connect a Rexov spool tape recorder in front of it. And yes, MIDI has totally changed our musical life. Thank you for this great Video ! musical greetings from Lucerne in Switzerland
@@80ssynthfan48 exactly, 1982 was the start in Europe. It was very surprising for us and as I wrote, nowbody could imagine what this Interface would mean for our future. The first visible application was connecting a synthesizer to the rack sound modules. So a sound extension of the synthesizer via 16 MIDI channels.
Good to see my favorite gear all together on a BBC feature, the ESQ1, CZ101 and the C64, except I have the mighty MSSIAH instead. Let's rock like it's 1986!
Thank you guys so much for sharing this! Born and raised in canada so I never got to enjoy these programs. I had an Atari ST because of the MIDI ports and it was life changing. SMPTE tracks, Cubase with an 8 track reel to reel and an Alesis keyboard made me feel like I was king of the musical world.
So summing up - these concepts and the MIDI interface standard is ~40 years old. As a musician and moreover as an IT architect I must say "Respect! Well done!" I think the MIDI standard was *the event* in evolution of musical instruments ... unbelievable. Thanks for sharing, this is a so great piece of history / documentation! Liked and have a great day!
Music Programs has really come a far way! I remember when I use to dream having something like these to work on. Now for the first I finally got my powerful studio. 😃
Wonderful clip, thanks for this!! It took me back to my teenage years, without a budget trying to squeeze something musical from my Commodore Vic 20. This had a cheap (by today’s standards) sound chip which I recall could be controlled by a SOUND (x,y,z,a) command - pitch, duration, timbre and volume I think. A few of those, with a GOTO 10 at the end to loop it, and I was dreaming of replacing T’Human League in the charts.
@@10MinuteGuitarJams You must’ve upgraded your one. My standard VIC came with 3.5K of RAM (and 20k of ROM.) I got a 16K RAM-pack eventually so that I could play Jet Pac on it. Happy days.
@@BlueStratRedStrat You're right! 20k of ROM! I had the 8k "expansion cartridge".. Seems insane now that my watch is infinitely more powerful than my first computer.. Mind you, it has been 40 years!
I had a Commodore 64 and didn't realise it had that MIDI capability, but it looks like just about any 8-bit computer could. Great piece of archival footage that told me I should have used my first computer a lot better than I did!
My god my god !! I have worked on Cubase for years. Didn't know this is perhaps the precursor to modern DAWs. And honestly the work flow is still the same. I guess the ability to record audio came later on as this version seems to record just MIDI. Amazing video !!
I hope Tony had a good monitor. That Atari ST is displaying in Medium Resolution, which was very hard to read on standard colour CRTs. The ST's high resolution monochrome monitor was pin sharp, though, and that's what most users had for productivity software.
@@Wagoo Plus in this case it was easier to demonstrate it with the color monitor because its refresh rate matched the video camera's frame rate (50 Hz for PAL). If they had used the hi-res monochrome monitor it would've had a flickering image on camera due to its higher refresh rate (72 Hz). That's easier on the eyes in real life, but not on camera.
I still have my Atari 1040 STE although I don't use it anymore. (I will say that the MIDI timing of sequences in Cubase in the mid-90s was tighter than on the £10k Mac Pro I use today.) So funny to watch the hosts here enthusiastically waxing lyrical about the horrible-sounding telephone on-hold music generated by these machines. Great times.
How lovely to stumble across this ! I've got a Casio CZ101 now and I love it, very under rated cos of how it looks and feels. And Music 5000, 'Ample', BBC Micro....Fred Harris aaahhhh I can only handle so much nostalgia at once !
Our music class in High School used Atari STs, and so did the music class in the college I went to as well. Amazing, and never once spared a thought to latency etc. because it all just worked, we just made music. Which in modern times I've learned that was a particular feature of the Atari ST, thanks to direct MIDI support at the hardware level, and artists would continue using Atari STs to compose music long after it was supposedly obsolete for that reason.
I remember going to a demo of MIDI in 1983 which was presented by one of my former music teachers. It seemed amazing and confusing at the time. 8k sound… whohoo!
This is great BBC Archive, me in the late 80's,Atati ST & Cubase, a keyboard & a drum machine,..lol BTW, thanks to Mr Ikutaro Kakehashi / Mr Dave Smith for MIDI (awe...R.i.P guy's )BLESS! ✨ 🙏🏾
Pro 24 was my first sequencing software and I made many records with it. All these years later im still with Steinberg with Cubase Pro 12... it's been one hell of a ride!
This is ace! Fondly reminds me of my business card for my wee 8-Track demo studio I set up in late 1988. Proudly displaying “Steinberg Pro 24, SMPTE, Atari, Fostex” etc. I still have that same working Atari, SM monitor and Cubase V3 with countless projects from the last 30 odd years…
Stupidly, I literally threw out my perfectly working pair of 4meg STe and Mega Ataris with colour and mono screens about 15 years ago as I'd gone over to Cubase then Reaper on PC. Recently I went through my box of Cubase floppies with song ideas only to find 1) my PC won't read the Atari extended format and 2) all my songs were saved as ALL files and not MID - now I'm kicking myself. What an idiot!
@@leopoldbluesky ironically the ST could read PC formatted DD floppies just fine 😂 You can probably image the floppies using dd_rescue under Linux and then use an emulator like Hatari or STeem to read them and convert to MIDI. However USB floppy drives don't ever seem to work properly for low level access to the drives.. you probably need to use a real floppy drive plugged into the motherboard for this to work
@@Wagoo Yep, on my very long Todo list! I've got a bunch of old PCs with floppy drives knocking around and have STeem installed, so I will get around to it some time. Just never enough hours in the day when it comes to music technology!
I still have an Atari ST with Cubase in my loft. All these years on, I’m still using Cubase and wouldn’t use anything else. But on another note I still have a spectrum 81,Spectrum 48k with the rubber keys, Spectrum 48k with the hard keys, plus 2 and a plus 3. All sat there in my loft next to my Atari st and it’s monitor. 😬
I love that the Steinberg guy introduced quantizing to the public and within seconds said it can sound a bit "wooden" if you quantize everything - a complaint made today!
Wow this brings back memories. I had a zx spectrum, the cheetah midi interface and casio cz 101. The cheetah midi interface and software wasn't great and buggy. But I did also have their specdrum which was great to use.
Loving these music tech uploads from Micro Live. I'd even pay £200 a month for proper access to the archive via Bob iplayer - it's unbelievably frustrating that it's restricted to students :/
I started off on an Amiga, before buying an Atari ST with a midex interface and a cracked version of Cubase 3.1. I ran both, the Amiga effectively being used as a MIDI sampler, while the more sophisticated Cubase on Atari was the master, clocked to a bunch of analog gear (using a midi to cv converter) while also sequencing the more modern midi gear. It might've occasion went wonky, but it was a great set-up, virtually zero latency or jitter.
Little did Lesley know that a bass patch from the "budget" and "not very good sounding" CZ-101 would go on to feature in a seminal techno track, which would then be sampled in many DnB tunes.
This was nostalgic. I sold my Ensoniq's back in the 90's. But I still have a working Atari 1040st from 1989 with the Sonus Masterpiece Sequencer software. Watching this reminds me of the time I was just learning all of this goodness 😁
Steinberg’s most famous software is Cubase, which still is the industry standard. It had its origins on the Atari ST but now is used on Mac and Windows.
Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode when he realised that sequencers could be his extra hands and therefore didn't need to work with other musicians, he just needed a singer ( Andy Bell ) Erasure were born.
I wonder how much troubleshooting they did to get this to work before the show ? Lol! Takes me back to my teenage years. As a pianist, I was fascinated! In combination with MTV, I never let it go. Today in my studio I have JDXA TB3 MX-1 TI Virus Snow Launchpad Mk3 Berringer 303 Another MX-1 Modular rack And 3 controllers all hooked via MIDI. Still amazed by the vision of this technology! I love the video with Vince Clarke explaining all of this too!
Steinberg story:
Long after it was forgotten, I started using Steinberg PRO-16 on a Commodore 64 (1992).
After a year the floppy disk became corrupt, so I wrote to Steinberg (no internet).
Two weeks later a motorcycle courier knocked on my door with a huge box. Inside was a new Floppy Disk along with a letter from Steinberg explaining how this is a gift as they couldn't believe I was still using this system! What wonderful people.
I went on to write sketches for The Pet Shop Boys and Sting with this very system.
I stayed loyal to Steinberg and then bought Cubase which was not so user-friendly in my opinion.
However, the 21st century versions looks perfectly logical now I have been accustomed to the standard DAW interface.
Stay creative people. 🌞🇬🇧🎹
salute to you. amazing story. thank you
That’s awesome. Sting was using computers on dream of the blue turtles too.
Oh come on!! If you'd just used Logic pro x, you'd have had a much easier time!!
That's great they sent it to you.
The Atari ST, BBC Micro, the C64 and the Spectrum 128K all in one show with Lesley Judd dressed as a character from Blakes 7 and Fred Harris dressed as a Maths teacher. True nostalgia.
And Tony doing a road test of Andre Agassi's mid 80s mullet. Quality all round.
Fred used to be a school teacher.
Was just thinking Blake's 7 !! was expecting her to whip out a blaster and take out 80s tucked in shirt and mullet combo man
Would Lesley Judd have made a good Servilan? Not bad, but Judith Hann seemed more ruthless.
@@MrMusicbyMartin haha Judith Hann is my friend's mum. She's lovely.
RIP Dave Smith, Father of MIDI
I had no idea Dave Smith passed , may his soul rest in peace 🙏
@@Gabbanadj couple months ago :(
Tony's super-mullet is everything. 😁🤣
That mullet probably has midi inputs built in as well. 😆
@@jamesmacleod671 It probably works like Jean-Michel Jarre's laser harp. 😂
...and that green jumpsuit
@@jamesmacleod671 Lmfao 👊🤣👍
Leslie returned from Jupiter and went straight from the spaceship hangar to the studio. Such dedication and focus.
And the irony, the first thing she says is "Let's come back down to Earth for a moment..." XD
Commodore 84, proof she's came back from the future
Lesley Judd. Hair by Vidal Sassoon, make up by Yves Saint Laurent, jump suit by Quality Street.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I had an Atari STE and a relatively cheap Casio keyboard that I used to write tracks on, then would borrow a better synth and Akai sampler to record tracks. Was such a great hobby, and enabled thousands of people with good ideas but little musical training to write great music. This is what led to so many songs entering the charts by people that basically wrote them in their bedroom. The whole electronic dance music scene probably wouldn't have existed without MIDI.
@Intuition I agree with you.. a bit. Ah, Octamed - was always envious of the Trackers the Amiga had. Most Drum 'n Bass? Think that's stretching it a bit, but the Amiga was an excellent jumping off point
no electronic dance music would’ve still existed without midi
@Intuition I never said they did
Absolutely right. It led to a bunch of us coming together to form Funky Transport. An underground, globally recognised Deep House collective. Worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing. My music making started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and a gadget called RAM Flare Music Machine and a Casio home keyboard, A basic line mixer and a couple of tape machines!
And Hip Hop/Pop, and lazy but innovative production you wouldn’t be able to do without MIDI
Imagine the BBC producing something this educational and insightful nowadays.
So sad isn't it.
@@AmazinglyGayPhil Even more sad is the fact that despite all that deterioration, the BBC is still among the best options available 😢
@@davidf6326 Agreed, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. Those calling for the defunding/dismantling of the BBC don't know which side their bread's buttered.
There is great content out there on the BBC. The science hour on the world service is incredible, and Roland Pease is a polymath, getting to grips with any subject matter. It seems to be isolated, however.
As an American who pays to watch the BBC over here, I hear you and don’t disagree, but it still has very high quality stuff when compared with most of the world and even 90% of our programming here.
Imagine rocking up with Garageband on an Iphone in that studio. They would have been convinced you were an Alien.
Not only is this a brilliant glimpse back to where we've come from, it's also unintentionally hilarious. Love it.
amogus
I'm loving Lesley Judd's jumpsuit!
I love how she said let’s come back down to earth while dressed like a space alien😂
I appreciate the fact Fred calls them sythths instead of synthesisers.
Those humble beginnings ❤️
How far we’ve come.
Great time to a musician in 2022
I'd imagine so... but where is the great, truly novel music, nowadays? Where are the ARTISTS? Nowhere.
@@bassc ya, I guess the challenge is gone and thus an important part of the creative process
Working with limitations makes creative. I keep falling back to Atari Cubase every now and then, just because of only the core being there. Working without a internet connected computer makes it more easy to focus on what I planned to do: making music. No distractions by chats and mail and no temptations for getting lost on UA-cam. I really like working that way. And afterwards I always can use the MIDI information produced working on the Atari on the PC if I like to do. I notice that I'm not tweaking to death on the Atari and hardware synths/processors/mixers, where I very often seem to be doing this on the PC.
I think technology has ruined people's creativity, being only limited to synths and the Atari st was how all the best music was created.
What an odd twinkly green her bodysuit is, I've only ever seen that colour used to wrap mint chocolates.
Good call! I believe it was made from many, MANY of the said wrappers.
Ah the 80s..
Quite rare for technology but the MIDI standard for interfacing with musical electronic instruments is very much still the standard and largely unchanged even down to the 5-pin DIN connectors today! Not many other standards have that claim to fame. Steinberg (the makers of the first bit of software) are very much still in business and some of the note editing software paradigms (changing note length graphically etc) are still de rigueur today.
And they only just ratified MIDI 2.0 in the past couple years… 😉
We stop using 5-pin DIN quite some time ago. I've been using USB for at least 7 years now.
@@thoang101 And yet, new instruments come out every day that still use DIN connectors… 😞
@@symbiat0 They're there for backward compatibility only. Thanks to that, I can still connect with my old synth for the vintage sounds.
@@thoang101 There is no consensus or consistency - some instruments don’t have USB, some have only TRS (and sometimes the “wrong” kind requiring a dongle and guess what? The dongle ends in a female DIN connector…).
So proud to be there at the beginning. Still got most of my equipment from the day.
Sitting in front of my macpro rig, this video makes me appreciate the progress in music tech that accelerated during my early childhood.
Yet so much remains the same. MIDI is still the standard (virtually unchanged from those days) and some of the features and interface ideas (esp. from Steinberg) are still relevant today. Not only that there are producers who swear by the Atari ST and its rock solid timing for MiDi sequencing
@@Mamotreco agreed that midi is long overdue for it's 2.0 update to be implemented, but considering how much we've managed to knock out with ye olden MIDI, still a solid platform.
It's kind of amazing that today's music producers can do it all on a laptop, but home studios often feature 2 or even 3 4K widescreens, but in the 8-bit/16-bit era, people used those chunky CRT monitors that have really low resolution. The screen connected to the Atari ST in this clip is almost comically small. I used a sequencer back in the early '90s and it was so clunky compared to today's versions, but it got the job done.
Goodness me !!! This my childhood flashed before my eyes. Remember watching this and picking up an Commodore Amiga. It feels like yesterday. Quite depressing ..lol
Yes, I remember my first gaming computer the Amiga and having hours of fun playing games from psygnosis and the Bitmap brothers. Happy days, yes it does seem like yesterday, 30 odd years ago.
I was at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 1982 when MIDI was presented. Most people didn't realize at that time what this interface could be used for. The technical development is simply immense. In my day, an AKG spring reverb for the stage (BX-20) cost around 20,000 Swiss francs, was highly sensitive, and to delay the reverb, we had to connect a Rexov spool tape recorder in front of it.
And yes, MIDI has totally changed our musical life.
Thank you for this great Video !
musical greetings from Lucerne in Switzerland
That might have been the first large-scale presentation in Europe, perhaps?
@@80ssynthfan48 exactly, 1982 was the start in Europe. It was very surprising for us and as I wrote, nowbody could imagine what this Interface would mean for our future. The first visible application was connecting a synthesizer to the rack sound modules. So a sound extension of the synthesizer via 16 MIDI channels.
Lesley Judd in a Blake's 7 outfit is making me feel unusual, and I like it.
Disappointed to not see an appearance by Synthesiser Patel
lol
These days synthesisers so bloody expensive
I stole all his synthesizers
They didn't feature new music either like rapping.
Glad I'm not the only one.
Fred: "that must be difficult"
Also Fred: rewrites a piece with a "word processor".
Stunning thumbnail beauty Lesley Judd appears at 4:19.
Fred is very accurate at the end there. I have countless plugins and options but no ideas. 😥
Fred really knew his stuff - a proper nerd.
What an extraordinary getup Lesley Judd is wearing!😁
Good to see my favorite gear all together on a BBC feature, the ESQ1, CZ101 and the C64, except I have the mighty MSSIAH instead. Let's rock like it's 1986!
People still use the Atari ST.
Definitely yes.
Yes, I use Atari tt 032 since 1991 with Cubase because it’s more faster than PCfor some manipulation.
Thank you guys so much for sharing this! Born and raised in canada so I never got to enjoy these programs. I had an Atari ST because of the MIDI ports and it was life changing. SMPTE tracks, Cubase with an 8 track reel to reel and an Alesis keyboard made me feel like I was king of the musical world.
Wow, for 1988, this was something very ahead for it’s time😁
So summing up - these concepts and the MIDI interface standard is ~40 years old. As a musician and moreover as an IT architect I must say "Respect! Well done!" I think the MIDI standard was *the event* in evolution of musical instruments ... unbelievable. Thanks for sharing, this is a so great piece of history / documentation! Liked and have a great day!
How far we have come along! This gives us perspective and much appreciation. Glad y'all shared this! :) 🎹❤
Banging synth music.
Music Programs has really come a far way! I remember when I use to dream having something like these to work on. Now for the first I finally got my powerful studio. 😃
Wow! 8 different voices!
Er, that’s impressive, 8-part multitimbrality. Most synths of the time could only produce one sound. Still today, most synths produce only one sound.
These shows were so well made.
Wonderful clip, thanks for this!! It took me back to my teenage years, without a budget trying to squeeze something musical from my Commodore Vic 20. This had a cheap (by today’s standards) sound chip which I recall could be controlled by a SOUND (x,y,z,a) command - pitch, duration, timbre and volume I think. A few of those, with a GOTO 10 at the end to loop it, and I was dreaming of replacing T’Human League in the charts.
Same here, my friend.
My first computer was a VIc 20.. Hard to believe it had 19k of memory after it booted up! 19 KILOBYTES!!!!!
@@10MinuteGuitarJams You must’ve upgraded your one. My standard VIC came with 3.5K of RAM (and 20k of ROM.) I got a 16K RAM-pack eventually so that I could play Jet Pac on it. Happy days.
@@BlueStratRedStrat You're right! 20k of ROM! I had the 8k "expansion cartridge".. Seems insane now that my watch is infinitely more powerful than my first computer.. Mind you, it has been 40 years!
I had a Commodore 64 and didn't realise it had that MIDI capability, but it looks like just about any 8-bit computer could. Great piece of archival footage that told me I should have used my first computer a lot better than I did!
I haven't seen one comment yet on just what the hell Lesley Judd was wearing! LOL I remember watching this and that was normal attire in the 80s!
Woooo !! Agassi and the Atari ST!
Wow, this takes me back!
I remember at school having the music 500 system on the BBC , it also had a controller keyboard called music 400 .
My god my god !! I have worked on Cubase for years. Didn't know this is perhaps the precursor to modern DAWs. And honestly the work flow is still the same. I guess the ability to record audio came later on as this version seems to record just MIDI. Amazing video !!
I still have Atari STs and a BBC Micro. I remember Steinberg Pro-24 was the thing at the time. Fun times.
I hope Tony had a good monitor. That Atari ST is displaying in Medium Resolution, which was very hard to read on standard colour CRTs. The ST's high resolution monochrome monitor was pin sharp, though, and that's what most users had for productivity software.
It was fine on a good TV via a SCART cable. It looks like an Atari SC1224 colour monitor being used here for Pro 24
@@Wagoo Plus in this case it was easier to demonstrate it with the color monitor because its refresh rate matched the video camera's frame rate (50 Hz for PAL). If they had used the hi-res monochrome monitor it would've had a flickering image on camera due to its higher refresh rate (72 Hz). That's easier on the eyes in real life, but not on camera.
@@vwestlife yep, good point :)
That guy's synthesizer didn't come fitted with a burglar alarm?
I still have my Atari 1040 STE although I don't use it anymore. (I will say that the MIDI timing of sequences in Cubase in the mid-90s was tighter than on the £10k Mac Pro I use today.)
So funny to watch the hosts here enthusiastically waxing lyrical about the horrible-sounding telephone on-hold music generated by these machines. Great times.
How lovely to stumble across this ! I've got a Casio CZ101 now and I love it, very under rated cos of how it looks and feels. And Music 5000, 'Ample', BBC Micro....Fred Harris aaahhhh I can only handle so much nostalgia at once !
Our music class in High School used Atari STs, and so did the music class in the college I went to as well. Amazing, and never once spared a thought to latency etc. because it all just worked, we just made music. Which in modern times I've learned that was a particular feature of the Atari ST, thanks to direct MIDI support at the hardware level, and artists would continue using Atari STs to compose music long after it was supposedly obsolete for that reason.
Still have my Atari ST, still works too. ST, Midex & Cubase SMPTEd up to an 8 track cassette machine.. good times!
I remember going to a demo of MIDI in 1983 which was presented by one of my former music teachers. It seemed amazing and confusing at the time. 8k sound… whohoo!
This is great BBC Archive, me in the late 80's,Atati ST & Cubase, a keyboard & a drum machine,..lol
BTW, thanks to Mr Ikutaro Kakehashi / Mr Dave Smith for MIDI (awe...R.i.P guy's )BLESS! ✨ 🙏🏾
Pro 24 was my first sequencing software and I made many records with it. All these years later im still with Steinberg with Cubase Pro 12... it's been one hell of a ride!
This is ace! Fondly reminds me of my business card for my wee 8-Track demo studio I set up in late 1988. Proudly displaying “Steinberg Pro 24, SMPTE, Atari, Fostex” etc. I still have that same working Atari, SM monitor and Cubase V3 with countless projects from the last 30 odd years…
Stupidly, I literally threw out my perfectly working pair of 4meg STe and Mega Ataris with colour and mono screens about 15 years ago as I'd gone over to Cubase then Reaper on PC. Recently I went through my box of Cubase floppies with song ideas only to find 1) my PC won't read the Atari extended format and 2) all my songs were saved as ALL files and not MID - now I'm kicking myself. What an idiot!
@@leopoldbluesky I still have all of my stuff 😌
@@jessihawkins9116 Don't sell it, but if you do then sell it to me!
@@leopoldbluesky ironically the ST could read PC formatted DD floppies just fine 😂 You can probably image the floppies using dd_rescue under Linux and then use an emulator like Hatari or STeem to read them and convert to MIDI. However USB floppy drives don't ever seem to work properly for low level access to the drives.. you probably need to use a real floppy drive plugged into the motherboard for this to work
@@Wagoo Yep, on my very long Todo list! I've got a bunch of old PCs with floppy drives knocking around and have STeem installed, so I will get around to it some time. Just never enough hours in the day when it comes to music technology!
I like that shiny silky green nylon jumpsuit. XD Man. Fashion was crazy in the 80's
I still have an Atari ST with Cubase in my loft. All these years on, I’m still using Cubase and wouldn’t use anything else.
But on another note I still have a spectrum 81,Spectrum 48k with the rubber keys, Spectrum 48k with the hard keys, plus 2 and a plus 3. All sat there in my loft next to my Atari st and it’s monitor. 😬
Ewww...just get a ps5 or x box s/x.
@@charliehudson9827 Got one of them too, but crap for making music.😂
@@charliehudson9827 Why?
I also still have my Atari ST (actually have 6 of them) and am still using Cubase (but not on Atari lol, on pc). Great days.
Dreamed of having this as a kid! My studio now puts that early midi to shame!
Now in 2022 we have MIDI 2.0 protocol. Long path from 1983's first version of MIDI.
I had the same setup, happy days! Pro24 was great software
I love that the Steinberg guy introduced quantizing to the public and within seconds said it can sound a bit "wooden" if you quantize everything - a complaint made today!
It's crazy how much of what he said was echoed directly by my teacher when I was learning my first DAW, just eight years ago
Forty years on, MIDI still does the business.
コレが今でも使われ、通用することは驚くべきことだ
Fred Harris was a great presenter
How dare the BBC Micro be in the same room as the Atari St
I'd pay major cash for Leslie's jumpsuit and that Micro Live sign..
The mullet at 0:19 was a compulsory hairstyle if you wanted to make it in pop music business back in the day.
And in case anyone wasn't sure when this was recorded one look at what Lesley Judd was wearing should clear things up.
This is basically SONIC STATE - 36 years ago.
Based
Fred's coda/coder joke though 🤣
The Cheetah MK5, next on Ulis clone list...
I had a cheetah SpecDrum. Excellent, it was. Well, it would have been had I the remotest musical capability!
I remember Cubase on the AtariST, quantisation etc good ' acid house ' music machine 1990s
Wow this brings back memories. I had a zx spectrum, the cheetah midi interface and casio cz 101. The cheetah midi interface and software wasn't great and buggy. But I did also have their specdrum which was great to use.
Specdrum was the mutts.
I love Lesley Judd's outfit... I wish they would bring the 80's back!
Let'us SHOP Vintage then ! SHALL WE ??
She in shiny green? If yes, then I absolutely agree!
the sequencer that is built in to the Ensoniq is way easier than the computer version.
And the sequencer back then is way easier than what came before it.
I started producing music in an Atari ST with Cubase
what a fantastic mullet
And now here I am sending SoundCloud new synthwave tracks I've made on an iPhone.
How far we've come.
Loving these music tech uploads from Micro Live. I'd even pay £200 a month for proper access to the archive via Bob iplayer - it's unbelievably frustrating that it's restricted to students :/
I never knew it was restricted to Students only, that to me would indicate there is a pirate version of it somewhere;)
Well you'd be wrong. They monitor account activity quite closely for now
m.ua-cam.com/play/PLsmlQk866373UyWIGQkZZ_4FAJzPtCLjk.html
That's season 1 I found.
@@AmazinglyGayPhil right, but I was talking about access to the BBC archive in general.. not just Micro Live 👍
Lesley Judd...she can fall off my xmas tree anytime. 😉
I started off on an Amiga, before buying an Atari ST with a midex interface and a cracked version of Cubase 3.1. I ran both, the Amiga effectively being used as a MIDI sampler, while the more sophisticated Cubase on Atari was the master, clocked to a bunch of analog gear (using a midi to cv converter) while also sequencing the more modern midi gear. It might've occasion went wonky, but it was a great set-up, virtually zero latency or jitter.
Starting making Music wtih an AMIGA 500 incl. Sampler,Synthie ect. Great machine,work today too.
I wish I had a "professional music synthesiser"... I would write popular music for the pop parade.
Little did Lesley know that a bass patch from the "budget" and "not very good sounding" CZ-101 would go on to feature in a seminal techno track, which would then be sampled in many DnB tunes.
which sound, the organ preset ?
The Reese bass patch programmed by Kevin Saunderson using the CZ-101, and used on the track: Reese - Just want another chance.
Didn't know Lesley Judd presented !
I might just get into computer music one day!
Great stuff. More please! ☺
This was nostalgic. I sold my Ensoniq's back in the 90's. But I still have a working Atari 1040st from 1989 with the Sonus Masterpiece Sequencer software. Watching this reminds me of the time I was just learning all of this goodness 😁
ahh the Atari st the birth of dance music
Nice mullet
“A professional music synthesizer”, the kind of description you’d hear for a prize on 3-2-1.
i had a banjo n sat on it and da spring reverb went right up my bum!
What was wrong with the “Sight & Sound Commodore 64 Keyboard Overlay”
Lesley’s get up. Groovy!!
”Musical coda..”
Clever chap!
"I am now telling the machine EXACTLY what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate."
Steinberg’s most famous software is Cubase, which still is the industry standard. It had its origins on the Atari ST but now is used on Mac and Windows.
The irony here is the ESQ1 synth there did this on its own without a computer.
Didn't the ESQ1 use Commodore architecture?
Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode when he realised that sequencers could be his extra hands and therefore didn't need to work with other musicians, he just needed a singer ( Andy Bell ) Erasure were born.
I wonder how much troubleshooting they did to get this to work before the show ? Lol! Takes me back to my teenage years. As a pianist, I was fascinated! In combination with MTV, I never let it go.
Today in my studio I have
JDXA
TB3
MX-1
TI Virus Snow
Launchpad Mk3
Berringer 303
Another MX-1
Modular rack
And 3 controllers all hooked via MIDI.
Still amazed by the vision of this technology!
I love the video with Vince Clarke explaining all of this too!
CZ-101 is a dope sounding synth, actually. Lesley must be an analog purist.