As just some nerdy guy with a friend group mostly comprised of musically inclined individuals that I did websites for 20 years ago... the bass player was the butt of the joke until the keyboardist didn't get put back on the stage in time from his crowd surf. And there was no way to pause the iPod. Oh no.
Music Mouse was also available for the Amiga, and benefited from the Amiga's superior sound architecture. I keep an Amiga 500 around just to run Music Mouse. Also, you should probably learn about MIDI...
OK, this is incredible. I'm a MIDI nerd who got a Mac SE and all the MIDI trimmings for it, and I never knew about this program. Can't wait to try this out.
5:52 Normally Velocity tracks the "loudness" of a midi note by measuring the time from a key being up and then being hit down: the faster the travel was the more force the key press had. As the velocity is measured only once for note it cannot be used to modify the sound without lifting the key and pressing it again. After Touch is an additional (often high end) mechanism which allows key pressure measurement after pressing a key (hence the name). Usually After Touch is used as more intuitive way of handling modulation wheel features: for example adding more vibrato to pad sound with a delay by just pressing the keys more over time is very easy compared to using a traditional modulation wheel for the effect. After Touch comes in two variants: the regular, where a single source of After Touch value is shared between all keys. The key with the most pressure dictates the output value of the After Touch. Then there is the After Multi Touch variant where each key has an individual pressure value.
A bass player, a sax player and a drummer get into a taxi cab. Which one is the musician? The cab driver. What's the difference between a bassist and a pizza? Pizza can feed a family of 4. How can you tell if your drummer's kit is level on stage? He's drooling from both sides of his mouth. :)
While I truly appreciate that there’s an internal speaker option, I think it's so much more fun to use Music Mouse with MIDI. I sometimes hook my SE up to a Roland MT-100 (very similar to the classic MT-32), and just let it go wild. You can route each voice to a different MIDI channel and have them all trigger different instruments. It’s a hoot having drum sounds accompany the notes.
Laurie Spiegel's (amazing) album Unseen Worlds was composed using Music Mouse & a TX816 FM synthesizer. Thx for sharing this important & often overlooked piece of retro computing & music tech history! one of my fav action retro vids yet :)
I'm one too! I was leaving obnoxious comments suggesting he slightly re-chop the intro music to beat-match with the intro animation, when the channel had like 5k subs or something lol.
Absolutely incredible! And the sound through the peddle immediately made me think of the score to Hyper Light Drifter or Fez or any other kind of works from disasterpiece. Simply mindblowing!
What an impressive bit of software, and kudos for the casio cz-101 setting too. Bet that would sound amazing through one of them old synths.Needs a modern fl studio vst for this.
I still have my floppy and manual for Music Mouse which I used to run on my 512Ke back in the 80’s. It was innovative for sure but I never really found much use for it beyond being fun and perhaps as an educational experience. I wonder if playing around with it helped develop my understanding of musicality a bit. The internal sound of the Mac is fun, but as you mention, it really shines when you get it hooked up to an external midi device! (FYI, after touch is a midi function for modulating sounds usually generated by pressing keys) Controlling external gear was almost certainly the primary motivation for her creating Music Mouse and the ability to use the sound from the Mac was included as a reference, or to let a wider range of people enjoy the software. Other amazing Mac-centric music software included things like TurboSynth, Softsynth and Performer. Early Mac music software is fascinating and is often overlooked as a driving factor to the success of the Mac.
Woah wait, the settings you had with the pedal right at the start was bordering on EDM-tier. That was really cool. I suddenly really felt like getting this software and doing silly stuff. It just kept getting cooler and cooler. The fact that this came out in the 80s is insane. My aunt handed us down a Mac Plus in the early 90s before I got my first PC in 93, and I thought the best it could do was play solitaire. If I knew I could have done stuff like this....
Cool video, there is an ios app called arpeggionome that is similar. Glad to see music software on this channel. Old macs and midi are a great combination!
I got that enclosure a few weeks ago and I gotta tell you it is actually really fucking cool, and I use it to test the same OS across lots of hardware. It's super convenient when you don't have an m.2 slot but need m.2 speeds
I just learned about Laurie Spiegel earlier this year when I was researching the Voyager Golden Disk, the record we sent to outerspace in the 1970s, and discovered that Spiegel had composed the opening music for it based on the orbits of our solar system. Check out her Waveshaper interviews.
Amazing stuff! I have a similar hardware accessory for my Mac Plus called "MacRecorder." It essentially adds a microphone to the Mac and comes bundled with "SoundEdit" which, as the name suggests, is a sound editing application. You can record up to 22KHz of 8- bit audio and it sounds fantastic. The best part about it is the fact that it has a Mic input port which I can connect a phone, CD player or just about anything to and I can record onto the Mac itself... or at least its RAM which I can then save to an external Hard Drive. I've put all kinds of tunes on there, the only limiting factor being the Mac Plus' 4MB of RAM which limits the length of the recording at certain qualities, only a minute and a half or so at the full 22KHz but around 5 minutes for 5KHz. It might just be my favourite addon for the Mac yet and it is quite rare to find in box with the manuals and software.
That made the hairs on my neck stand up. I have never heard this before, but It's almost like something I hear in my dreams from time to time. The resemblance is uncanny and unsettling to me. But I love this style of old school synth music. I remember when I was introduced to Suzanne Ciani. I believe she was a pioneer in the field of making synthesized music dating back to the late 60's or early 70's. What amazing music all of these artists make. And I understand the I'm not a musician comment. I'm not either. I play the drums.
Been watching for a long time but usually quiet. This is amazing and the sound's from that pedal are crazy good. Definitely a favorite video... keep it up and you should explore music on here more.
Recommend try to get a copy of HyperPrism running on a Quadra with an Audiomedia card for some mouse driven realtime modulated audio effects. The ‘blue window’ - then you have a retro mac that becomes the guitar pedal, or patched in series with them.
What monitors would you recommend instead? I currently have a 24" and a 20" and it sucks. My workloads include coding, web browsing, email and always viewable slack/WhatsApp/terminal for monitoring servers
Phew! Thankfully I only got round to bass last after getting back into keys and sax. So I think that makes me more amateur musician than not :P Anyway, this thing sounds lovely. I love synths through amps and recording the room sound.
1:51 I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive
Just found your channel and love it! We had a Mac Plus when I was a kid and I still do art in MacDraw II today using the Mini vMac emulator. I love how so much on these old computers can still hold up in modern times. I never used Music Mouse, but I do recall having a lot of fun with a program called Musictime, I think it was. P.S. Is your shirt from this video going to be available on your store, or did you get it somewhere else? I've had that "About Finder" mountain sunset burned into my brain since I was a kid and it hits me with nostalgia every time.
Bummer. No luck getting 2.0.2 running on a Mac Classic II. Bombs out in 7.0.1 to 7.5. The demo version for OS9 did work on my mini 4G, but you have a 5min time limit to play with the software. Any way to register?
Sounds like a Casio CZ keyboard going through slight phaser with heavy reverb. I feel like you can do this with an emulated Mac on Linux and patch it up with Jack audio to further manipulate the sound in Ardour or something.
Huh. I wonder if there is a historical connection between this and Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently books. Algorithmically generated music on a mac was one of the plot elements.
Okay now that we know you're into pedals, you HAVE to play the Magic Mouse through the Meowdulator pedal. Several guitar youtube channels have been raving about it. :)
"I'm not a musician,I only play bass". Incoming from Paul McCartney and ghost mail from John Entwhistle. LOL As always enjoy your videos,on subjects I never knew I was interested in.
Shargeek 140
Official website link: bit.ly/4ckFIcz
Amazon link: amzn.to/3AiiEhn
Sharge Disk
Official website link: bit.ly/4dhOppw
Amazon link: amzn.to/3SFViIU
These macs truly were amazing for music creation
There’s a little black dot on your wall. I caught myself three times trying to clean it off my screen.
I'm not a musician, I play bass...
As a fellow nerd and bass player, that was simultaneously hilarious and hurty.
Well, he did pronounce arpeggio as "are-preh-jee-yoo". So not a musician checks out. 😂
As just some nerdy guy with a friend group mostly comprised of musically inclined individuals that I did websites for 20 years ago... the bass player was the butt of the joke until the keyboardist didn't get put back on the stage in time from his crowd surf. And there was no way to pause the iPod. Oh no.
@@fuelvolts i have horrible news for you... that's the proper pronunciation.
@@spaceghostmiid It's Are-pej-ee-oh not are-preh-jee-you
I look forward to all the bass players leaving comments.
If you can hear them, the bass is too loud 👀
@@SullySadface one of my mentors used to say "bass is like salt... you won't notice it if its there... you'll notice it if its not there"
Davie504 and Charles Berthoud would like a word!
@@_mnejing if you like them check out Nathan Navarro
Wow, after my dad Laurie Spiegel has been a huge inspiration to me. I didn't think anyone else know who she is
Oh we know!! Love experimental electronic music. And drugs!
Bro!!!!
I had to look her up. She seems amazing.
me too! this is incredible
Yes! More music experimentation with old hardware, please. This was great.
at 7:56 my eyes absolutely lit up. That sounds INCREDIBLE
we're one step closer to macintosh shoegaze
someone already made wii shoegaze
What a great little piece of oddware.
It's wild how good that sounds going through the guitar petal.
And through a practice amp ha
@@willm5032 tbh room-sound from a cheap amp often helps make these kinds of sounds way more textured and interesting
that bass player comment at the start killed me. how could i endure such slander from one of my own people
Such anti-bass sentiment from a guy with a strong Stuart Hamm vibe is jarring!
idk if I believe him, the video lacked an exaggerated "OMG" and the most monotone "lmao" possible.
Such treachery cannot be taken lightly… you must assemble the Council.
Emily’s channel is fantastic!
I’m sure she’ll dig the shout out.
Keep up the good work! 🖥️
Music Mouse was also available for the Amiga, and benefited from the Amiga's superior sound architecture. I keep an Amiga 500 around just to run Music Mouse.
Also, you should probably learn about MIDI...
When you started playing with the petal, it gave me hard 'The Outer Wilds' vibes.
OK, this is incredible. I'm a MIDI nerd who got a Mac SE and all the MIDI trimmings for it, and I never knew about this program. Can't wait to try this out.
Ah! Laurie Spiegel! I have her first album!
5:52 Normally Velocity tracks the "loudness" of a midi note by measuring the time from a key being up and then being hit down: the faster the travel was the more force the key press had. As the velocity is measured only once for note it cannot be used to modify the sound without lifting the key and pressing it again. After Touch is an additional (often high end) mechanism which allows key pressure measurement after pressing a key (hence the name).
Usually After Touch is used as more intuitive way of handling modulation wheel features: for example adding more vibrato to pad sound with a delay by just pressing the keys more over time is very easy compared to using a traditional modulation wheel for the effect.
After Touch comes in two variants: the regular, where a single source of After Touch value is shared between all keys. The key with the most pressure dictates the output value of the After Touch. Then there is the After Multi Touch variant where each key has an individual pressure value.
What a cool program! In this setup you've made here, it reminds me of an Omnichord
Hi! It's Amy! VCFMW!!!!
@@fractalMD woo hoo!!!
lets go. Omnichord nerd here. i wish i will find one someday
I WAS NOT EXPECTING IT TO SOUND THIS GOOD WTF
A bass player, a sax player and a drummer get into a taxi cab. Which one is the musician?
The cab driver.
What's the difference between a bassist and a pizza?
Pizza can feed a family of 4.
How can you tell if your drummer's kit is level on stage?
He's drooling from both sides of his mouth. :)
While I truly appreciate that there’s an internal speaker option, I think it's so much more fun to use Music Mouse with MIDI. I sometimes hook my SE up to a Roland MT-100 (very similar to the classic MT-32), and just let it go wild. You can route each voice to a different MIDI channel and have them all trigger different instruments. It’s a hoot having drum sounds accompany the notes.
When some of my favourite channels collide.
That... Its the ringing/chorus/music i hear when I'm on a sick one. The sound of angels! 😮
Man this is inspiring, I've got a Mac Plus, and I like ambient music...
This is really quite awesome, all 'round, Sean. Thanks for going to such great lengths with the links in the description, too.
This+TheCursedSE/30+Somegoodexternalspeakers would go *HARD*
My thoughts exactly!
Yay! It's a guitar pedal channel now!
Emily is super awesome. You should drop in one of her live chats when they pop up. Thanks for sharing!
I'm usually in there listening haha
Laurie Spiegel's (amazing) album Unseen Worlds was composed using Music Mouse & a TX816 FM synthesizer.
Thx for sharing this important & often overlooked piece of retro computing & music tech history! one of my fav action retro vids yet :)
Wow so cool, some really good sounding chillstep and melodic dubstep tones and patterns
... and sitting right behind me is my (one of my) 1986 Mac Plus also with four megs of RAM ;)
I’ve got to wonder what the Action Retro/Emily Hopkins crossover audience size is. It might just be us.
There are... dozens of us!
I'm one too!
I was leaving obnoxious comments suggesting he slightly re-chop the intro music to beat-match with the intro animation, when the channel had like 5k subs or something lol.
Another fan of totally normal computing and Harp Lady here!
Absolutely incredible! And the sound through the peddle immediately made me think of the score to Hyper Light Drifter or Fez or any other kind of works from disasterpiece. Simply mindblowing!
Just in case anyone is thinking of taking up music, the pedal or effects aleays make the sound amazing. Love the video. So joyous!
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time! Can't wait to check out the software myself
i cannot even describe what i felt in the moment when it made the first sounds using the pedal, that sounded so fucking good
What an impressive bit of software, and kudos for the casio cz-101 setting too. Bet that would sound amazing through one of them old synths.Needs a modern fl studio vst for this.
This rules! Bass player here. Would love to see you do more retro music hardware/software vids!!
This was super cool! You do a lot of entertaining stuff, but i think this is one of your best videos. Awesome sounds!
I still have my floppy and manual for Music Mouse which I used to run on my 512Ke back in the 80’s. It was innovative for sure but I never really found much use for it beyond being fun and perhaps as an educational experience. I wonder if playing around with it helped develop my understanding of musicality a bit. The internal sound of the Mac is fun, but as you mention, it really shines when you get it hooked up to an external midi device! (FYI, after touch is a midi function for modulating sounds usually generated by pressing keys) Controlling external gear was almost certainly the primary motivation for her creating Music Mouse and the ability to use the sound from the Mac was included as a reference, or to let a wider range of people enjoy the software. Other amazing Mac-centric music software included things like TurboSynth, Softsynth and Performer. Early Mac music software is fascinating and is often overlooked as a driving factor to the success of the Mac.
The music you made would fit perfect as a background track for any of retail archeology’s videos.
This video has inspired me to get back into tinkering with music stuff. Really awesome demonstration!
David Holowitz needs to try this.
Omg yes! I thought about David as soon as I heard the guitar pedal sounds.
Very chill, could let this play in a loop for a few hours :3
I'm a drummer, I'm not an artist, I'm a technician ^
this is super cool! I’d love to see more music themed videos from you
I had that setup, a Mac Plus and Music Mouse, in 1986.
Connected it to Alesis HR16 drums and a Yamaha FB01 FM voice.
Wonderfully fun.
You cant aftertouch on a mouse. That's a midi keyboard feature, and a lot of cheaper keyboards dont even have support for it.
thanks for sharing this! love the match between your music side's piece of equipment and my all-time favorite mac plus
I watch the "Chesty harp lady" also. Didn't know you were a fan!
Woah wait, the settings you had with the pedal right at the start was bordering on EDM-tier. That was really cool. I suddenly really felt like getting this software and doing silly stuff. It just kept getting cooler and cooler. The fact that this came out in the 80s is insane. My aunt handed us down a Mac Plus in the early 90s before I got my first PC in 93, and I thought the best it could do was play solitaire. If I knew I could have done stuff like this....
I think we need an Action Retro theme song! Nice post.
Cool video, there is an ios app called arpeggionome that is similar. Glad to see music software on this channel. Old macs and midi are a great combination!
I got that enclosure a few weeks ago and I gotta tell you it is actually really fucking cool, and I use it to test the same OS across lots of hardware. It's super convenient when you don't have an m.2 slot but need m.2 speeds
"I'm not a musician: I play bass" 🤣
I just learned about Laurie Spiegel earlier this year when I was researching the Voyager Golden Disk, the record we sent to outerspace in the 1970s, and discovered that Spiegel had composed the opening music for it based on the orbits of our solar system. Check out her Waveshaper interviews.
Amazing stuff! I have a similar hardware accessory for my Mac Plus called "MacRecorder." It essentially adds a microphone to the Mac and comes bundled with "SoundEdit" which, as the name suggests, is a sound editing application. You can record up to 22KHz of 8- bit audio and it sounds fantastic. The best part about it is the fact that it has a Mic input port which I can connect a phone, CD player or just about anything to and I can record onto the Mac itself... or at least its RAM which I can then save to an external Hard Drive. I've put all kinds of tunes on there, the only limiting factor being the Mac Plus' 4MB of RAM which limits the length of the recording at certain qualities, only a minute and a half or so at the full 22KHz but around 5 minutes for 5KHz. It might just be my favourite addon for the Mac yet and it is quite rare to find in box with the manuals and software.
Good News. Someone just cloned the MacRecorder!
This is awesome! I might mess around with this program a bit myself
Awesome idea!
That made the hairs on my neck stand up. I have never heard this before, but It's almost like something I hear in my dreams from time to time. The resemblance is uncanny and unsettling to me. But I love this style of old school synth music. I remember when I was introduced to Suzanne Ciani. I believe she was a pioneer in the field of making synthesized music dating back to the late 60's or early 70's. What amazing music all of these artists make. And I understand the I'm not a musician comment. I'm not either. I play the drums.
Been watching for a long time but usually quiet. This is amazing and the sound's from that pedal are crazy good. Definitely a favorite video... keep it up and you should explore music on here more.
Please tell me where you got this shirt! Seeing that image unlocked a core memory.
Thoroughly enjoyed this! Has this software been ported?
That looks and sounds like a super groovy music program that I wish I had on the C64 as a kid!
Recommend try to get a copy of HyperPrism running on a Quadra with an Audiomedia card for some mouse driven realtime modulated audio effects. The ‘blue window’ - then you have a retro mac that becomes the guitar pedal, or patched in series with them.
Ok, now you need to do a collab with LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER for the UK!
PLEASE make an album with this!!!
That’ is really something Sean would not expect that from the Macplus
Need to get this Mac Plus on midi so it can play with you through mixing on the bass .
What monitors would you recommend instead? I currently have a 24" and a 20" and it sucks. My workloads include coding, web browsing, email and always viewable slack/WhatsApp/terminal for monitoring servers
I just KNOW aphex twin probably used this back in the day, sound awesome!
Phew! Thankfully I only got round to bass last after getting back into keys and sax. So I think that makes me more amateur musician than not :P
Anyway, this thing sounds lovely. I love synths through amps and recording the room sound.
1:51 I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive I do NOT need the fancy USB drive
cool to see music mouse’s laurie spiegel get her due!
Genius app. I'll have to try this out.
That was neat and kind of mesmerizing.
Just found your channel and love it! We had a Mac Plus when I was a kid and I still do art in MacDraw II today using the Mini vMac emulator. I love how so much on these old computers can still hold up in modern times. I never used Music Mouse, but I do recall having a lot of fun with a program called Musictime, I think it was. P.S. Is your shirt from this video going to be available on your store, or did you get it somewhere else? I've had that "About Finder" mountain sunset burned into my brain since I was a kid and it hits me with nostalgia every time.
Awesome!
Fellow bass player, I agree :-D Thanks for the vid, it's punk rock as always ^_^
If you use a midi interface and connect it to an external sound module you will understand why the midi option was important.
THAT WAS SO COOL!
Bummer. No luck getting 2.0.2 running on a Mac Classic II. Bombs out in 7.0.1 to 7.5. The demo version for OS9 did work on my mini 4G, but you have a 5min time limit to play with the software. Any way to register?
This is fascinating. Do musicians still use software like this today?
That's super cool!
Sounds like a Casio CZ keyboard going through slight phaser with heavy reverb.
I feel like you can do this with an emulated Mac on Linux and patch it up with Jack audio to further manipulate the sound in Ardour or something.
There is an online emulator of this software. Great stuff!
Really wasn't expecting an Old Blood Noise Endeavours pedal here of all places hahaha
Oh my god dude... Kind of want to hook a gameboy or a NES up to a distortion pedal after that
This sounds like something I'd expect to see in a Wintergatan concert. :)
I think for that sharge disk I'd prefer a metal passive cooler.
But yeah I like this old computer music/synthesis stuff.
This is so rad!
Will it chug? I want to hear some distortion stomp boxes! And using a Marshall tube amp that goes to 11! 🤘
This is sick
Huh. I wonder if there is a historical connection between this and Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently books. Algorithmically generated music on a mac was one of the plot elements.
Sam, did I give you a demo of MusicMouse on my setup at VCF West back in February?
You could make a song for a old NES, Master System/Game Gear and Game Boy music with this combo, i don't know, i feel that vibes
Man, I Love Fish!
Apple Macintosh Time!!
Okay now that we know you're into pedals, you HAVE to play the Magic Mouse through the Meowdulator pedal. Several guitar youtube channels have been raving about it. :)
that video made me happy :3
"I'm not a musician,I only play bass". Incoming from Paul McCartney and ghost mail from John Entwhistle. LOL As always enjoy your videos,on subjects I never knew I was interested in.