Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

K EEP ON TRACK
you may have noticed I have talked a lot about
how you can get the best samples possible, but
not mentioned too much about what you can do,
apart from fiddling with them in the sample edi
tor. Well many moons ago when programmers
wanted to add music to games they concocted a
strange symbolic music system and wrote a pro
gram called Sound Tracker. This gave them a
simple way of adding music tracks to games and
demos, as tracker modules are written in a way
that was simple for the computer to understand.
Unfortunately for the poor old musician, they
had the task of learning this system and writing
music with it
I may have made trackers sound a little worse
At the top of the range for big box Amigas
the best choice around is SunRize's board
and a good second choice would be
MacroSystem's Toccata board. Both offer the
than they actually are. What they do is allow you
to play samples at set times and at specific
notes. By giving you a number of channels, to let
you play multiple notes at once, you can produce
fairly complex compositions. R is even possible
to add effects to samples played using extra
codes.
These codes are the crux of the whole prob
lem with trackers. Before you can realty get into
producing good songs you have to become
familiar with all these codes, and for a beginner
they can be a real turn off. Luckily all the mod
ern trackers do a good job of simplifying things
as much as possible and good documentation
should help newbies along.
best sound quality around and can sample
and replay better than CD quality I6 bit
sound. The SunRize board has the best soft
ware support with the Toccata really being
takes a look at some of the
software and hardware that could help
you break into the music biz
Possibly the most advanced tracker* on lh# fee*
of the world, OctaMED Sound Studio support*
loads at module types, can play up to 64 chan
nels at 14 bit quality and is dirt cheap too
developed to back up the V/Lsb motion cap
ture board, but it still offers exceptionally
good sound quality and if you go for the Pro
version, additional support is added for Midi
devices.
So you have the sampler and are ready to
try getting some sounds into your computer.
The first thing you need are good quality
leads to hook all your bits and pieces togeth
er. Your main enemy when trying to get sam
ples is background noise or interference so
we want to get off to a good start by having
decent leads and general connections. Next
you want to choose what the input is going to
be, either from a microphone, tape or CD. If
using a microphone, some sort of amplifica
tion is going to be necessary.
Setting levels
Once everything is hooked up you will need
to set the levels to try and get the best sam
ple possible. Most sampling software has a
monitor mode that gives you a real-time
display of what the sampler is cur
rently receiving. You need to
adjust the volume level as high
as possible without distort
ing or saturating the sam
pler's inputs. On the
monitor display you
will see the current
wave form as being
received by the
sampler, you need
to set the volume
as high as possible
without the wave
on the old side now, but TochnoSound Turbo 2
vides all the editing tools you will need