Hey,
This forum seems really empty. How many audio guys out there? Want to give a brief introduction here?
Status : , , ,
Skill : , ,
Years exp:
I'll start.
Status : Fulltime, Freelance
Skill : Composer, Ssound designer
Years exp: 6
Might as well go third, I'm a bit hard to fit into the pigeon holes, so I'll provide some more detail, but stick to the sound stuff.
Age: 32
Status: part time student, part time employed.
Skill: composer, audio, midi and interactive music systems programmer, audio engineer, guitarist, teacher, researcher.
Years exp: hard to say. My first professional employment was as a guitar teacher starting in around 1992. I've done a lot of different things- one of the most fun was research and development work on a sonar based gestural musical instrument, literally a wand you wave around in the air to make music with. Funding dried up in the IT downturn and the project was canned.
Edit: given some of the people I'm finding out read sumea- that's a hint to you in particular Chris [:)] I should say a bit more still- I'm talking about the midiwand, I was part of trying to bring it to market.
Hey i'm new to Sumea and its forums - here's my info:
Status: Seeking Work (just finished my studies in audio technology last month)
Skill: Composer, Sound Designer, Musician (synths).
Years Exp: Havent been paid for my work yet, although i've been writing quality music for about 3-4 years now and have accumulated a nice, varied amount of tracks.
For those interested, check my stuff out at: www.insanelysane.org/music.html
Skills include: composing music, audio, electric guitar, programming.
I have not worked professionally as a musician, just doing this for fun and I've been playing guitar for almost 15 years.
I made protracker tunes for the Amiga demo scene during the early 90's ( mostly chip tunes ), currently working on some new material and playing around with a guitar midi synth.
quote:Originally posted by muse
Skills include: composing music, audio, electric guitar, programming.
I have not worked professionally as a musician, just doing this for fun and I've been playing guitar for almost 15 years.
I made protracker tunes for the Amiga demo scene during the early 90's ( mostly chip tunes ), currently working on some new material and playing around with a guitar midi synth.
You're not by any chance a former member of the group Cydonia?!?
pb
It sure has, I just checked the old Cydonia page on the way back machine:
web.archive.org/web/20010411051953/www.ar.com.au/~storm
Hmm, looks like the weird URL format confuses the forum code so you'll have to cut and paste it...
Anyway, it'll be exactly 10 years on 24/2/06 since we (that is the two of us as well as Souri!) did the Defy #5 intro!
pb
It still amazes me to this day that I could have had so much patience as to manually key in all the notes for the tunes I wrote.
I would improvise on an old nylon string and record parts of it to tape until I had enough for a tune, enter the score in one note a time on an Amiga 500 keyboard!
Unfortunately defy #7 never saw the light of day.
What have you been doing since ?
Muse, I've been in the games industry since, when I get a chance I'll send you a more detailed email.
Frontier eh? If I remember right, you guys released Industrial Fudge at the 1994 Pearl party, then got disqualified, and then later vindicated (mostly). That was a real awesome demo! I was in Digital Access back then and we took first prize with Guru Meditation, but it felt like a pretty hollow victory.
And Souri got ripped off in the graphics comp!
Hmm, looks like there might be more Amiga demo sceners here than audio guys [:)].
BTW, if you guys haven't visited: [url]http://www.hemiware.com/ozscene[/url]
pb
Cool, what software did you use? Most of the demo scene was all ProTracker mods, but I remember in the really early days there was Aegis Sonix and Deluxe Music Construction Set. But with its built in MIDI port and a slightly lower price the Atari ST seemed to get most of the audio action back then...
pb
quote:Originally posted by pb
Cool, what software did you use? Most of the demo scene was all ProTracker mods, but I remember in the really early days there was Aegis Sonix and Deluxe Music Construction Set. But with its built in MIDI port and a slightly lower price the Atari ST seemed to get most of the audio action back then...
pb
I was using DMCS (electronic arts used to be a decent company) and Mimetics Soundscape. Also had a bunch of software for making the amiga's audio chip do all sorts of crazy synthesis, but this is back in the dark ages, and I don't remember what they were. There was also a parallel port 8-bit audio digitiser I was using, don't remember it's name either.
Later I moved to an Atari (the real Atari) STe, then an Atari Falcon, then Windoze (shudder), then Linux.
Heh, I keep forgetting that the "Electronic Arts" of that era, the very same people who made the seminal DPaint, are actually the company we now know as "EA". Hard to believe... Sonix was pretty crap compared to DMCS for the most part, but it had some very cool synthetic sound generation, I used to spend hours tweaking different parameters to produce all sorts of weird sounds...
pb
quote:Originally posted by pb
Heh, I keep forgetting that the "Electronic Arts" of that era, the very same people who made the seminal DPaint, are actually the company we now know as "EA". Hard to believe...
Yep, they were instrumental in developing the midi file format, were champions of open standards and formats in general, and made some really cool software for the time. Now they seem to be a money farm... [:(]
Yeah, that's right, they supported IFF - a kind of binary XML, which was years ahead of its time.. You could even argue that there wouldn't be an XML if it weren't for the ideas behind IFF.
As for now, well, that they're a money farm I have no problems with, but man, what about the quality... Just churn away another sport sim sequel in the sweatshop... I don't imagine they'll be releasing anything groundbreaking any time soon..
pb
Yeah, we did Frontier, and Vegemite and some other Music disk.
I was working at Midway Australia as a lead sound designer until well, last week. So back to Freelance full time until something else lands my way.
Funny thing was that another scener Alex Brandon - Aka Siren from way back was working as audio director at Midway SanDiego, so funny that 2 of us from the demo scene ended up in the same company, also to be made redundant at the same time.
I was at OZ96 and I think one of the Covens in Adelaide. It was in the University of South Australia - north terrace campus. All I remember was they watched Akira (which I fell asleep in) and Blues Brothers (also which I fell asleep in).
Siren, that name definately sounds familiar!! [;)] It's interesting to hear of other demo scene people from the Amiga days ending up in the games industry. There's certainly a fair few! I remember Frontier's demos and will have to open up UAE again to check out the music in them [:)]
quote:Originally posted by pb
And Souri got ripped off in the graphics comp!
It's been over a decade, but I'm still not giving in to the placings. I got rorted [;)] (pics below) I still remember busting a nut finishing the picture and uploading it to a bbs in South Australia the night before the party started with my trusty 9600bps modem. I wrote a passionate plea for anyone to bring it along too [:D]. Anyway, I got second place and Sumaleth got first. Some of you may know him now as a moderator at [url="http://www.sijun.com/dhabih/mainscreen.html"]Sijun forums[/url], which is a digital art forum..
[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/souri/200512208616_SouriCure.gif…]
(in interlace mode on the Amiga, so it wouldn't be so stretched vertically)
[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/souri/200512208657_SumealethNico…]
quote:Originally posted by muse
It still amazes me to this day that I could have had so much patience as to manually key in all the notes for the tunes I wrote.
You probably wouldnt have liked the pc trackers like FastTracker2 or Impulse tracker then, they had 32 & 64 channel tracking, which makes for a lot of typing!
I released a few music disks myself back in the early 90s, i think i even won one of those coven demo compos in the music category, then came second thanks to hunz entering [8)] (hunz is another aussie who was probably the best tracker i saw in oz).
quote:Originally posted by Souri
It's been over a decade, but I'm still not giving in to the placings. I got rorted [;)] (pics below) I still remember busting a nut finishing the picture and uploading it to a bbs in South Australia the night before the party started with my trusty 9600bps modem. I wrote a passionate plea for anyone to bring it along too [:D]. Anyway, I got second place and Sumaleth got first. Some of you may know him now as a moderator at [url="http://www.sijun.com/dhabih/mainscreen.html"]Sijun forums[/url], which is a digital art forum..
You learned a lesson there, though - the masses will always vote for a picture of a chick. [:)]
That's right Brett way back in the day when you composed :) Man... I feel OLD. I think every group had it's own hyperactive composers and released Music Disks. You still keep in touch with Hunz at all? He kinda dropped out of sight and sound.
Souri: I remember those pictures!! You didnt' upload it to BackRoom BBS by any chance :) I know the guy who ran that, I was music moderator on it.
quote:Originally posted by Brett
quote:Originally posted by muse
It still amazes me to this day that I could have had so much patience as to manually key in all the notes for the tunes I wrote.
You probably wouldnt have liked the pc trackers like FastTracker2 or Impulse tracker then, they had 32 & 64 channel tracking, which makes for a lot of typing!
Used FT, Impulse was great too but I was actually hooked on using MadTracker. No longer had to key stuff in manually thanks to having the ability to live record from MIDI controllers.
Anyone checked out Schism Tracker ?
quote:Originally posted by groovyone
Souri: I remember those pictures!! You didnt' upload it to BackRoom BBS by any chance :) I know the guy who ran that, I was music moderator on it.
I can't remember. It was such a long time ago! I remember it was a Pearl HQ bbs though, if that means anything to you [;)]
Mod files are being used on xbox360 right now. The reason is you can get really good sounding music in only a few hundred k.
Bejeweleed for xbox360 live arcade (ie so it is downloadable) used impulse tracker mods tracked by Skaven (of FutureCrew).
He used modplug tracker to make the sound and just about every channel used all stereo samples, resonant filters and echo filters in realtime. FMOD Ex was driving the game audio playback and it was quite processor intensive just for the music! (roughly 30% of one hardware thread on the xbox360 processor at times.) There are plenty of cycles to go around though with 6 of these hardware threads available.
What sort of music did you used to write Brett? I didn't know you were a muso, though it doesn't surprise me (many/most audio programmers are).
Trackers had little relevance to me is what I was saying (and they still have little, though for different reasons)- I was writing and desktop publishing music scores for classical musicians, and when using digital sound generation it was high end synths rather than trackers.
I understand the neatness of the format for games- seems rather limited to me though (compared to a real synth).
This place does seem a little quiet doesnt it! I have just bought my ticket to GDC next year and im really looking forward to the discussion on what changes we, as audio people, are going to face with NextGen. Anyway, ill go second:
Status : Fulltime, Freelance
Skill : Composer, Sound Designer, Audio Engineer
Years exp: 8