General thoughts and ideas vs. nasty 8-bitty samples

[Feekzoid]

I'm having a hard time thinking aboot what Amiga tune to cover.

There are many that I really like and fancy covering (especially some of my own! ) but I go through periods of thinking how crap a lot of Amiga music was.

The Amiga had a genre all to itself (a bit like C64 but more so) of music called "Demo-music" - and a lot of it was bloody terrible.

I'm also going through an anti-amiga phase unfairly due to the wonders of Deliplayer (player that plays every Amiga audio format) mainly due to the fact it plays Amiga stuff far to accurately. By that I mean that it seems to output at 28khz 8bit... and it sounds just like an Amiga.. horrible 8-bit scratchy ringing samples... everything that I hated the most when composing on the Amiga. Use Winamp (with appropriate plugin) or Modplugplayer and their anti-aliased PC wonderment does ... er.. wonders!

Aside from all that tho, and aside from covering my own mods I'm likely to begin work on one or more of the Desert Dream themes, Macrocosm by Firefox+tip and who knows what else.

[hoomish]

If you want my thoughts, I think you should tackle Exolon...

[exo]

Feekzoid, I'll remind you that Exotica has a huge archive of Amiga game info/grabs/music so you may want to check that out.

http://exotica.fix.no/gallery/games/index.html

I remember Dark Seed as an excellent surreal game, but I don't remember if there was any special music in it.

But perhaps you should check out:

Desert Strike
Alien Breed
Dune
Castle Master
Wings of Fury
First Contact
Budokan
Flashback
Beneath A Steel Sky
Goblins
Gobliins
Gobliiins
Heimdall
It came from the Desert
Antheads
Iron Lord
Ishar
Incredible Shrinking Sphere
Jurassic Park
Leander
Lemmings
Leasure Suit Larry
Lethan Weapon
Loom
Lotus 3
Mega'lo'mania
...and and and...

Some people say that amiga remixes are easier to make than c64 remixes but how can that be - the amiga sound is much better so to beat the original you need to have a different take on it (i.e. style).

[Vosla]

maybe it's easier to take an amiga-mod and your favorite mod-editor on pc and just insert better samples and call that a "remix" ? hookay, change the beat, maybe insert some fancy extras... at least you don't have to use sid2midi or something like that

[Dr.Future]

Macrocosm! Do it!

I *really* love it! Great collaboration between TIP & Firefox...

[exo]

I'm not sure its much easier to use a retro-sequencer to remix a song than a modern state-of-the-art sequencer. And there are programs to translate both mods and sids into midis. Further, in my experience with mod remixes, they don't all sound all that impressive, in fact many suck. First of all, if you use the old tracker tool, you're stuck with the oldschool sample-quality and in an emulator, well, perhaps some new trackers can handle oldschool mods. I wonder how many remixers start with a clean slate and reinterpret the material without the use of a conversion tool.

(btw. feekzoid, your last remixes good, nice work; I always liked the atmosphere of platoon... hmm, just thought of Jaws - incredibly atmospheric, but no music I think:)

[Feekzoid]

Fortunately guys, I now compose with Renoise... which is a tracker

I wrote about 150 Amiga mods in my time, and I found trackers to be my "weapon of choice" I tried Octamed on the PC but it had serious issues (my "Analogue Ninja" was written with Octamed and some of you may remember and early release of that track that stuttered - I later corrected this with much difficulty) then I decided that a "traditional" sequencer was the way forward... Everything up to and including my "Savage" remix was done with Cakewalk.

Now... I'm home again Renoise uses traditional samples, MIDI and VSTs. Bloody heaven!

...Exolon... I dont think I've heard that one... I shall go looksee for it

EDIT:

Exolon? Surely you dont mean the SoundFX mod? Its awful! Thats the kind of terrible sounds I'm talking aboot Horrible scratchy samples.
Yuk.

Now a really old tune thats got a fond place in my heart is the Amiga/ST mod title for Armalyte.... possibly because it was one of the first mods I ever heard... and that was on my ST... and to hear the ST doing 4 channel sample stuff was amazing enough

[exo]

I just hope, Feekzoid, that you and other remixers will try, when faced with the choice of whether to remix a tune that has been remixed more than twice or some alternatives, to consider if there are some cool retro songs that have yet to be remixed.

I think we need such lists of unremixed cool tunes for both C64 and Amiga. They can be partly autogenerated by excluding existing remixes and then by having manual submissions of requests for remixes.

There's a very limited amount of remixer-time available considering the scale of original material so selection is important.

(Hmm, I think amigaremix also misses an important thing, the original song for each remix.)

[Paul Vanukoff]

(Hmm, I think amigaremix also misses an important thing, the original song for each remix.)

Actually I have a location to each original song stored in the database, I just have yet to place that on the page. This will happen soon.

[hoomish]

RE. Exolon: yes, the samples are bad, but I liked the melody...
If you want a challenge, why not one of the M.O.N. soundtracks - something like Onslaught is very atmospheric

[tas]

hehe, everytime you post something like this, it seems you know my next step hoomish...

ok, it's not amiga, but the remix64 CD v2, is gonna feature and for the first time some MON tracks )

[hoomish]

Any hints?

[tas]

Rubicon, myth, and stormlord. (latter is a probably, not a deff)

[hoomish]

If you DO use Stormlord, are we talking about the cool intro-music, or the rather pedestrian (imo) Title music?

[tas]

we are talking about subtune number 3

it's actually be created at the moment, and will probably feature on the CD (no certainties tho)

the remix is in a LOTR style. so pedestrian won't be happening if you get my drift!