Fun video! By the way, the reason keys weren't working was because you had the first menu opened, so it was waiting for you to click the "about" option or close the menu. Also, TOS has a built-in keyboard mouse (Alternate + cursor keys to move the pointer/cursor, Alternate + Insert to left click, Alternate + Clr/Home to right click), in case the mouse isn't working.
You have confirmed my suspicions, and so glad I came across this video. I am going to take my dormant 1040 STE out and stoke it up with my new Roland FP 90. THe world will again become my oyster. Here's hoping its well.!
Yes! Glad to see it eventually worked! Once, while preparing official product demo, my PC MIDI card died literally the same day i received a prototype synthesizer from the Waldorf company. What to do? I need to submit Streichfett demos and video by the next week! Quick ran to the basement, took out my Atari 1040 and continued as if nothing had happened. Literally. Atari connects directly to a computer LCD monitor via VGA adapter and runs in high resolution. Workflow / performance is essentially the same as when working on a PC with one important difference: the MIDI on Atari is super tight! We now have devices that can measure MIDI jitter. And in 2017 Atari is still No1, closely followed by a Mac. Then come the PCs, with USB audio interface being the worst performers when it comes to MIDI. This is why many of us still own an Atari.
Andy Merrett I've just discovered the need for usb inter face is to transmit sound back to the keyboard for editing. My mate was telling me tonight. The devices are on ebay. Usb 3 digital midi inter face.. o think that's them.
The Atari is so tight in Midi because the midi interface is connected directly to the CPU, and because you dont have a multitasking environment that triggers various interrupts in the background all the time wich steals cpu time.
Still, if you own a PCI-based audio card with midi built into it, the Midi is much better than on USB-interfaces. That's thanks to bypassing the "polling" that USB does and have a much higher priority than USB. There were an article about that in SOS where the jitter introduced with using USB for midi was discussed (micro latencies). It may not be as great as an Atari ST, but nowhere as bad as USB. Another bad thing is also that the USB-solutions really have a much worse latency for VST-i:s too. The sad thing is that almost all pro/semi-pro PCI (and now PCI express) cards have disappeared where you now only can buy extremely expensive ones. It used to be a lot of good value Pro-audio cards around before the 2010:s, like the Echo Juli@ I still own myself. Problem is that now that you want to upgrade and still use the old PCI-based card there are very few options on the modern motherboards that still has a PCI-slot in it (only PCI-express), if you wanna do an upgrade to, for example, the new Intel 8700K processor. Guess it's the loop based audience of young kids who use Ableton Live a lot that has made the demand for USB-only interface big and killed off Affordable PCI/PCI-express audiocards.
Together with my dad we had a Atari 1040STfm, Cubase 2.0, Dx7, Korg M1, Emu Proteus 1, Midiverb III, Yamaha FX500, a 16 channel mixer and a Fostex 4 track. I don't miss it though.....
I'm very thankfull for creating and sharing this video Woody. Back in the late 1980's i wasn't composing but still discovering electronic music. And so i was over the moon when our national radio-station had a program that allowed amateur musicians to send their music for airplay. These were the days before the internet as we now know it, so i wrote a letter to every musician that i heard of. :-) Made some great friends that way and some still are to date. The GM music modules you speak of were i believe the successors to the Roland U-20 and it's module brothers U-110 and U-220. After seeing your videos and because these Rolands are still very basic MIDI machines i'm keen to have a go at using some older software emulations. So thank you again, and have lots of fun playing and discovering synths.
good luck with your retro-sequencing quest mark and thx for the comment ! that's cool with the radio station. maybe we'll do a live stream one day and i'll play at being a dj and broadcast music produced by the viewers.
You're very welcome and yes indeed, sounds like fun to have a live-stream of music by viewers! :-) Staying tuned for that one and other videos as well! ;-) Cheers!
Hi Woody. Great video. Steinberg Pro-12 & Pro-24 weren't the first MIDI recording programs that Steinberg made. I actually started with MIDI recording on the Commodore 64 with Steinberg Pro-16. It worded great. After that i used the Atari 1040ST with Steinberg Pro-24 and after that i used the Atari Falcon with Steinberg Cubase Audio. That was a great machine at the time.
I started sequencing in 1992 with a similar set-up: an Atari ST, an MT-32 and a home digital piano. The ST ran Master Tracks Pro, a program I still use today. From time to time I had the same "Mouse Trouble" that you did here, and had to use the mouse without the cover on like this - you basically couldn't replace them, at least not here. Unless you were lucky.
Fun bit of Atari trivia: if your mouse is as faulty as this one, you could use ALT+cursor arrows instead. Two big keys above the arrows act as left and right button. And if you think that Atari ST's keyboard click (one that comes from a speaker) is annoying, well... I personally saw a musician that was a blind person that relied on these clicks. He memorized position of every bit of every program's interface in number of clicks he heard when using these arrows. So he could work without any problems on computers that didn't even had a monitor connected. Try that without his 'disability'...
I wanted to get into making music and the Atari St with Cubase and a Yamaha psr enabled me to do that. Use to read Atari magazine for their tutorials so learned how to create music from them. Good old days are fondly remembered and advances in technology are preferred and bigger hard drives and memory but cheaper prices. Another good video.
Many famous albums were sequenced with this setup, known for its reliability. Dedicated computer + software, no bullshit notifications or reboots, etc. I remember Steinberg users usually had the special monochrome screen for the ST which had a higher resolution, and sharper image than the RF/antenna. Looked so cool in green-scale too ;) Fatboy Slim went on French TV to play "live" and pressed the Spacebar, all his AKAI/Roland/etc MIDI units hooked to to the ST, full tracks playing while he went back to sit down somewhere else! At least he wasn't pretending. All memories from 20 years back, hope I got it right. I wouldn't mind such a setup to go back in time. I sequence with the MPC 2000 classic a lot, when I've had enough of mousing around a million options. Refreshing actually.
It wasn't Pro-24 in that kind of setup. It was Cubase that was only working on the "high-res" (at the time) monochrome monitor. The screen was a black and white affair only, no green-scale. I owned the exact setup myself and a couple of midi synths/modules. Cubase was revolutionary at the time of the release as being the first visual "tape-operation based" sequencer, something we still use today.
Anyway, good times for us actually being around using the stuff at the time. How low-tech it seems today, it really was the state of the art when you hooked up a 1 meg (think that als was the requirement for Cubase) 1040 ST to the sharp monitor and moved groups of selected parts around the screen. It was almost like magic! At the same time affordable multitimbral synths like the Roland D-10 had just appeared on the market. That was my the first synth I owned,(much like the D20 Woody uses here, except the D20 has the non-important Sequencer) which I used in combination with Cubase. Went on a similar journey as Woody with buying a lot of used synths in the early 90:s (except that I was in my early 20:s and the synths wasn't that old). Looking back at it and comparing it to today, you can't help marvell at the insane level of progression of technology. I mean everything I did back then was controlling external Synths that was, for most of the time, kind of crappy. Well, if you exclude some GEMs I owned like the Korg DSS-1 and the Roland Juno-106 and to a lesser extent the Korg M3r and the Yamaha TG33. The biggest difference lies in the fantastic studio type of things you can do today with an endless array of digital effects processors and limitless channels (I only owned a 6 channel really noisy Boss Bx6 Mixer and an extremely noisy Reverb and a Chorus Pedal). Things like compression was totally out of bounds, I think I didn't even know about it at the time. It was just stuff that home-recording bedroom musicians didn't bother about. The professional producer stuff kind of things.... I even had to use some dodgy tactics of chaining together two different synths/devcies into one cable which created problems when one sound got louder on one of the synths which lowered the volume of the other(it really didnt' work). Not to mention being able to save all the sounds with the song. That was a headache back in the times, where you had to program in program changes for every song and for the samplers you had to load in the right sound into to the sampler for every song. We are so, so spoiled today with the extreme possibilities, but at the same time I feel blessed to have lived through all the pains of the early stages so that I now can appreciate it much more than the young kids of today!
Magnus Lööv indeed! I have gone back and forth with the tech, and most of the time it's like taking a time machine, by choice, to break from starring at computers all day for work... MPC with Zip disks, DX7, D550 (etc.) old Mackie 24 desk, and computer software mainly for tracking audio. That, or turn off the screen completely, and do everything on Maschine STUDIO controller, sequencing hardware and software devices. Around 2000, I did everything in the box, on a CREAMWARE SCOPE cars with DSPs, which was insane and before its time IMHO. Oops... Could talk about this stuff for hours :)
Tell me about it! I still own a DX7 as one of my controllers. Don't use it for its own sounds though, but as a controller it has the best playable keybed of them all. Got it for nothing used ,700 kr (about $90 now) here in Sweden (yup, same country as Woody) in 2005 when I helped a neighbour moving (just for carrying a few of the heavy furnitures). I have a setup with my sequencer and my 3 keyboard controllers+ a Behringer BCR2000 (loads of knobs), where I have "multi"/splits and layers setups with arpeggiators, chords and stuff where I can instantly play/record on multiple channels at the same time and make a quick template of a song almost like in the style of the Vangelis setups (I only have two sustains pedals though and not the 8-10 pedal triggering bonanza he was doing with the different foot controllers). You know, getting as much as possible recorded in one take with just two hands (and sustain pedals). I DO turn off the screens (three of them) and just play along with all the external controllers, recording at the same time. It's very much about getting stuff recorded in a short period of time. Stying on the same song (or even 8 bars) for hours is what really kills the "music making Mojo". Yeah, the limitless possibilities can get in the way. And they did that already in a smaller way in the early 90:s even with external gear. Your still could loop things in Cubase to a bar, edit things in all kinds of way etc. But now that is insane. Everything is flexible to a point that you never have to commit! I mean, back then you still had to set for a certain sample you made in your sampler. And you had to get into the more cumbersome edit mode in the digital synths (getting away from the song). You were, in a positive way, more forced to commit to the choices already being made when you tweaked on the external gear. But nothing says that you still can't force yourself to make the same type of workflow decisions where you must commit to certain choices! And playing a lot of stuff in real time! So it is (or should be) better today in all kinds of ways, if you are aware of how the new possibilities are limiting your creativity in a bad way.
yes. I always remember the Atari back then as the other computers in school at the time were all BBC Masters :D If I remember correctly most of what we did was play compositions using the midi keyboard and it would then transpose it onto sheet music on screen which to a 16 yr old was much faster than writing it all out longhand :)
I bet this is the "secret" software that Boards of Canada uses...lol. This would also explain why it takes them about 5 years to release new albums. I'm on to you BOC. Fun video...thanks.
thanks for the nice feedback paul, yeah i downloaded the pro 24 manuals, yes there are two and they are out there as pdf scans. although the first 30 pages describe what midi is and what sequencing is etc, most people didn't know at the time.
As laborious as this looks by today's standards, there's something appealing to me about creating music in this way. Glad you got it working after all that frustration!
Back in the late 80's I had an Atari 1040ST with Cakewalk, connected to an Kawai K1, still have the Kawai, but I wish I hadn't given away the Atari. It was so easy to use, compared to what they have today. I don't currently use any DAW, but my Roland FA 06 sequencer reminds me of the old cakewalk, and that makes me happy.
I'm so glad someone has done a video showing what sequencing on these machines was like. I've consider for ages to get one because apart from the great midi clock there is tons of editors for 80s synths as well. Now I'm thinking maybe I should get a basic Windows pc and load an emulator on that. I did try the emulators for Mac but they don't support midi...
steem emulator (st em) supports midi rather well, and i think we need to do that on a video, and show cubase which was what really launched the atari as the center of many a recording studio
Steem does have it's problems with MIDI, like some editor/librarian programs that work on an actual Atari don't work so well in Steem, specifically there can be timing issues with regard to bulk dumps.
Well sir... I love the music you played, out of timing or not. Very nostalgic to say the least, and to say the most? Oh happy day ROLAND!!!!! My favorite classic ROLAND!!! Now, barring the failing hardware on the Atari, the objective for me would be to be able to record midi music with a ROM based computer system that would have much more ram, cpu power and DSP power than the built in or standalone hardware sequencers of the time.. Obviously with the added bonus of a huge color or gray scale GRAPHICAL display to see all the action! I felt your frustration and pain. Bad floppies, or bad drive, bad mouse, or bad keyboard(computer).. these are but some of the many things that have stifled my creativity on computers for years. Latency of midi note on, versus what you hear come out is the biggest downer of em all. Mechanical HDDs and OS that is flaky as hell(Win98), is the killer though. I imagine that software was meant to do midi AND audio tracks.. on a purely fanless, solidstate ROM based system I imagine that would be possible as latency would have been almost nil. We have come along way since IBM clones trying to be APPLES and ATARIS since then, but still, the pain is still felt when you record a beautiful midi song, and as soon as you record ONE audio track of yourself singing, and notice the audio and midi do not sync up.. game over. Now, Doing all this on a PC under an emulator kinda defeats the purpose of a ROM based stable midi recording system in realtime mode no? That WINDOWS update will kill your session fast and hard. Thankfully there is LINUX and SSDs though so there is light at the end of that there tunnel. I would love to see more videos like these of classic retro music gear and computers.. if for no other reason, so see some one else suffer other than me for once lol!
Hi Woody and thanks for all the great videos. I am kind of thinking about getting a Atari again, but is a 520 just as good as a 1040 for running a few samplers and a jv2080 ? Is there any big difference ? I know the 520 has about half the ram of the 1mb in the 1040. Im am pretty new to music making. Keep up the good work :-) Thomas (Denmark) :-)
hi thomas, stay away from 520, a lot of music software won't run on it, you'll also need a high-res B&w monitor to run the more powerful sequencers. sure,. you can upgrade a 520, but it's hassle and work out more expensive than buying a 1040 to start with. good luck!
Great vid. Well done for persevering! However I'm now pining for my old 1040st & Cubase combo I used all those years ago and all through the 90s! There was a simplicity which helped the creative process I feel. Less being more. Anyway, looking forward to your next vid.
if you ever have bad floppies try copying them to a blank disk as the copy process often corrects any read errors. It's guaranteed but it used to work quite often
saw an st500 today at a resale goodwill store for 75 dollars . i have a few old machines here to run cakewalk 3.1 dos . it is the best software for midi sequencing , period .
Pretty cool to see the old ST working like that! Would be cool to hook it up to something ultra-modern like the JD-Xi just to show how compatible these MIDI systems have remained. I'm kinda in the opposite situation - using a 30+ year old keyboard as a MIDI controller, hooked up via USB, to control modern software synths, and it all works like a charm! When I think of the state of computers in the mid 80s, vs what we have today, then think that this keyboard from the same era, was literally plug and play, and not only do the keys work, but I tweak the mod and pitch controls and it affects the soft synths just like it was a built in preset!
I had an ST when they first came out, I used Gajits Sequencer 1 program, it was simple but worked really well and above all easy to use. It was eventually given away free on a music mag. I tried a demo of Steinberg Pro 12 but thought it was hideous, I got running with Sequencer 1 straight away. It remains to be the tightest sequencer ever. Sequencer 1 did have a few oddies that screwed me up, the main one was hanging notes after deleting a bar where a note straddled it. Note on was ok, but lost reference to note off. Atari mouse buttons, yeh they do go soft after a while, I fitted some new microswitches at the time which were perfect.
There were two versions I had, Seq 1 and Seq 1 Plus. I suggest get the Plus version. It was written by guys in Manchester, UK who did a really good job, very impressive. When the company folded, one coder went on to do the VAZ softsynth which is also very good.
This is a really cool video. Can't wait to see your videos using modern editing software. I hope you use your dx7s in that series but I'll be happy with whatever decide!
had the atari mainly for games but knew it was used professionally in music AND design, Calamus was ages before the Mac software on desktop publishing... so fun to watch THANK you for posting thus video and going trough the stages! amazing!
Well done, you got there in the end... all though technically you need to save and reload the data for this to actually count as a complete success ! Now I wonder if the next video will be titled "Woody introduces petrol and a match to the Atari 520 AT" - us old-school guys may look back at this retro stuff and remember "how good it was in our day" but the truth is things moved on for a reason. .:. BTW its now been over a week since your Wavestation video and I've still got that bloody "Phil Collins / Another Day in Paradise" song in my head... arrrrgggghhhhh !!!!!! .:.
haha, sorry about another day, it's catchy, you gotta give it that... goód idea with the load and save data, but didn't want to push my luck with the disk drive and well, didn't have anything worth saving, but would have been fun to test for nostalgia sake.
Really took me back, this did. My first MIDI experience was a 520STFM and Pro 12. Screen res was sharper (somewhat) through the dedicated monitors - TVs were really only for gaming. The really crappy thing about Pro 12 was it didn't save as .mid so good luck to anyone wanting to use tracks in other sequencers later... Pro 24 would read the Pro 12 format files - at least the notes, if not the structure - but nothing else would. Still got the 520STFM and worked ok last I used it. Great for its time.
Cheers for the reply. I never could justify the cost of that monitor! I had a Philips med res one (still have - refresh rate is appalling!). Sadly the STFM I bought came with games - and my planned career trajectory as JM Jarre's natural successor got derailed by the likes of Buggy Boy and Ikari Warriors... :)
Great doing! I enjoy it very much, thank you very much! By the way, i used the atari ste with steinberg an cubase and my midi keyboard also. The atar and the amiga were great computers, working so good for 30 years. Go on with this stuff i like it so much. Best regards thomas
All connected up (STE 1040 STE) and working like a charm, however, i cant access the internal memory/ or usb memory or the already recorded music on My Roland FP 90. A mate said I need usb to midi cable and 2 female adapters to at least be able to get the music out of the piano from Cubase to be saved into my lap top. Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
steinberg pro 12 had it for a week...took it back..the manual had no index! bought hollis research trackman 32 (32 tracks - 32 midi channels...printer port gave another 16) pro 12 was not initially free was around £100 in music shops
cheers, yeah got the programs working, will record something after the summer. in the meantime, go download yourself, if i can figure it out anyone can :)
30 years ago, in 1987, it was probably out of reach for most "bedroom artists" to own an Akai or an Emulator. An Ensoniq Mirage and maybe a Roland Mt-32 or something was something much more reasonable in price at the time. And C-Lab Creator(which became Logic later) was probably the more useable/better sequencer on the ST until Cubase was released in 89! By the 90;s high quality samplers became somewhat affordable. Also, the second hand market was insane back then (here in Sweden at least). I bought and sold a lot second-hand gear in the early 90;s(started using Cubase on the ST from version 1.0 in 89)! That was times, but looking back at the incredibly limited options back then where I had a very noisy mixer and no good external digital effects (a crappy reverb and an analogue (Very noisy) Boss pedal-chorus on the sends)and no compressors what-so ever, you just have to feel very lucky everyday you turn on the hyperpowerfull DAW today which is essentially an emulation of what would be a superstudio at the time (with total recall of everything too. Plus editing. Plus a number of different insert effects working in parallell for every channel that just wasn't possible in any studio back then). We are just spoiled with limitless possibilities today!
I would get nothing done in life without persistence. Great video! Let me know if you get an MSQ-700. I've finally mastered how to use it! After a year of owning it. Take care and have a wonderful Wonder Woman weekend. Sam.
people say the midi timing is very tight, coz the atari is not doing much else in the background. very stable, no virus, very fast to boot. there's a few for you.
hello so to start I am not totally new to everything related to computer music, but despite everything I ask you for help because when I was young, my parents had bought me an Atari 520ST, and I always wanted find a piece which was integrated into the computer, which was a demonstration music, with the scores of the different midi instruments (I suppose). Only I do not remember the title or even the software (pro 24?) just a memory that there was an instrument called "wistle" that played a melody ... I know that doesn't advance the thing much but it's so far in my memory ... I would be extremely happy if you could help me find this piece. thank you in advance
Hey Woodie .. great memories from good ole Atari days. You promised us a Video with emulators :) I have tried various of the emulators around but never gotten them to work with a /silent ... c****** version of Cubase :( I do not have my Atari any longer but I still have the disks with Cubase Score .. but no atari dongle. It got swapped in when I ..god forbid it I ever did that .. switched to PC... Still have my Cubase 2 for PC dongle tho .. whatever I would use that for .. I gave up on Cubase at ver 2 as they still hadn't gotten it to run reliable on the PC back then. Would like to see some hints to get this to work on a PC emu or other hardware. If I knew I could get to work, I could get persuaded to buy one of those PGA emulators for the 6800. Would actually be fun if Steinberg just let people use these old Atari versions of Cubase without a dongle. Not that they are gonna compete with a Cubase 9 series today anyway.. but for midi and scoring, Cubase Score on a ST1040 with the hiRes Greyscale Monitor rocked. Of course this looks ugly as hell when you use the video out (320x200 16 colors) on a 40 inch TV .. Ewww ... lol
It's funny, out of time non-quantized drums are actually trendy now in certain genres, sometimes to painful extremes! Great video, it does make you appreciate todays DAWs but shows you can make music on less than cutting edge stuff
Soo how much was the set up? Paranoid performers 'd do that, in a world of spies and pirates, yes. Wish I could help improve it if I was an electrician, computer engineer.
you mean the cost of the computer and synth? well i don't remember exactly, say $100 for the atari and $150 for the synth. When they were new it was more like $1500 in total.
It's normally the port in which the mouse is plugged into needs to be re-soldered. It's a common thing with the ST machines. Also, if you're from the UK you could try using a Atari to SCART cable for a much better picture. But I guess it's back to the loft for this machine? ;-)
i did a bit of research and read about the potential port issue, no way I want to deal with that, so sold it on to another guy that perhaps wants to put more time and money into it! thx for the tip.
Try it on the Amiga with midi plugin if you have both of them in a Med or TFMX software see how retro kit differs from each other for the same job and compare the experience of ST Vs Amiga. That would be fun. If you don't have the kit don't bother unless you wanted to try a different experience out anyway. Lol
New subscriber here, Woody! I really enjoy your videos (especially the hardware/VST comparisons), but where's Part 2 of this video? I didn't see a link in the video, and I read almost all the comments, and didn't see a link there. Keep up the good work!
Hey woody,i also still have the atari 1040St,1 original and 1 with a memory upgrade to a Whopping 4 Mb :),but i have the Notator Software from C-Lab (nowawdays Emagic) on it with a added 4 midi connections Dongle (Log3). in my opinion that was the best Midi Software on it in the day
Yes it was,but i was friends with the musicshop owner back then (bought everything there),he said he could get it done for 100 guilders (in 1994 ish). but it seemed i had a atari version onwich the chip was soldered to it's mainboard resulting in it costing like 500 guilders (would be like 250-325 € these days). I was willing to pay that giving that the owner/seller made a mistake,but he said "i made a deal and i'll stand by it,even if it not in my favor". i still relish that memory and i am pretty sure that nowawdays,this it would be quite impossible to get that kinda Service.
Yep, that Original Atari-mouse could be a real pain. 😜 Luckily I bought a Logitech Pilot-mouse back then, which is lightyears ahead to the Atari-mouse! Still works like a charme (see my channel ^^). I was just wondering what exact ST-model you have. According to what I see (two additional joystickports on the left) and what you say (connected via antenna cable with the RF-out), it is a 520STEM, right? Didn't even knew that such a model exists! Thought the "M"-models are only the old 520 and 1040.😲
In my opinion there is high reason of replacement faulty FDD with some sort of SD-FDD emulators and use SD-cards with images of disks. And I think mouse should be replaced as well.
Some of the best songs I wrote were done on this, Could never find any in-depth videos on this. Somehow I feel like i still have not used the full potential of the mmt8. I purchased mine when it first came out. Still have the original box and manual and the battery still works to this day. It sat in my storage for many years since i started using Cubase VST 3.5. i am currently using Cubase pro 9
Seems you didn't get round to doing a composition using an emulator ?? Anyway you can run Pro 12 and Cubase Lite on your Android smartphone under Hataroid. I actually run a cracked full version of Cubase 2 and with a UTC to USB connector> to USB to MIDI you can connect your synths. Is a real blast seeing what I created back in 80s running on something that sits in my pocket! Oh and the mouse emulation is more stable than your actual mouse!
OMG! That now looks so prehistoric and impractical. Yet I bought an Atari st (although I loved the Amiga more) just for midi sequencing. As it had the best software for that. Looking at that now and I wonder how the hell I was able to use it :)
hello Woody ! , i was kind of hoping you were going to take a base ball batt to the Atari and send it back 30 years but now im glad you are putting back in the box hopefully for another 30 years , hats off to you for not giving up and getting it to work , i would have shown it no mercy and went with option 1 and killed it with the base ball batt and then option 2 and set fire to it ! , but fair play to you Woody ! you didnt let it beat you ! , great video and i enjoyed watching this piece of history work ! big thumbs up Woody ! 😎AK 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 p.s. i would have stood all over that mouse for sure ! 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
i will eventually want some money back on this atari when I sell it :) hopefully next lucky owner will restore and modernize. better than a baseball bat, even though it would have gotten me some views :) cheers ak
After 50 or 100 attempts, it warmed up! I used to turn my machine on then make a Latte Coffee before it would ever load Cubase 2.0 This is an absolute joy to reminisce!
I still use Pro24 V3 and Cubase on my ST. I was promoting Fairlight CMI to top recording studios in London in 1987 for Peter Gabriel and was blown away when Air Studios' Fairlight was down and they were using an Atari 520 and Pro24 instead for sequencing Dire Straits tracks! I immediately went and bought a MIDI setup. Here it is in action with an MT32 and Alpha Juno. Allow for Camera cutoff and focus issues, but on screen action shows Pro24 is punchy and not buggy! In fact I had Desktop ACCs running at same time for non front end functions within the MT32 ! th-cam.com/video/Wo9f5V0lA3k/w-d-xo.html
I run a 520 STE with Cubase 2.1 last week, (unfortunatly through the Monochrome Atari Monitor), and it was working well! I missed the metronome BEEP bip bip bip!!!! I d like now to find the atari/peritel cable to wire it to a LCD screen as on the video! Old school tank forever!! (The Mouse is definitley awfulllll !!)
You upgraded the mouse and it felt like heaven compared to the old one. The ball on the old one always got clogged up by dust and dirt and it showed the Atari up.
@Pete Testube I mean back in the day there were a few to choose from. The standard factory mouse sucked so I invested in a better one. Cannot remember the name as its was the late 80's.
@Pete Testube I don't have one anymore I was talking about when I use to have one when I made music. The Amiga always broke down but the Atari never did. I sold mine to a friend from school and his children play on it now and they are teenagers so it just shows.
yeah, you can buy a used mouse, or an adapter so you can use some modern mouse. but a worry is that the joystick connector that the mouse plugs in to is faulty, a common fault apparently and something I'm not prepared to tackle right now.
No, dutch. But, I live in the east of the netherlands, about 20 km from the german border. The same idiom also exists in dutch. Maybe it comes from the Lower Saxon dialects.
Nice one! I know a lot of this is about using the real thing - I miss my 1040 STE somedays - but you could get this running on a Raspberry Pi if you wanted to keep the old school feel. Heck you could even put one inside a dead Atari ST case and probably wire up the keyboard. Anyway, less dodgy old hardware and cruddy floppy drives, and more instant booting and stability!! :)
I don't doubt you could. It is like using the real thing. Aside - Atari and its MIDI ports have a lot to answer for in getting me into electronic music composition. Great machine.
Can anyone help me I have a very very old cuebase on my old Atari ste and I have several songs (projects) which I want to retrieve from the machine and put them onto my new Cubase 9 s/w I have been writing on Cubase 4 for ages but the studio pc died, I have plenty of Cubase project folders on the hard drive of the studio pc that died which I'm sure I can easily transfer to Cubase 9, but its my very old early stuff on my old Atari ste that I would love to translate into readable files for my new Cubase 9 (I should have done this years ago onto Cubase 4 before my PC died but never got round to it)... Is this at all possible, any help would be much appetited, cheers Kev
no worries, no adapter here, it's the rf modulator from the atari going into antenna input of tv. that's why i had to tune the tv. i think this was more common in the uk/europe than in us.
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Fun video! By the way, the reason keys weren't working was because you had the first menu opened, so it was waiting for you to click the "about" option or close the menu. Also, TOS has a built-in keyboard mouse (Alternate + cursor keys to move the pointer/cursor, Alternate + Insert to left click, Alternate + Clr/Home to right click), in case the mouse isn't working.
hi and thanks for the tips! well spotted that I had the menu open, that explains why clicking about solved the problem, that was bugging me.
Also using a atari joystick while not as elegant does the trick too.
You have confirmed my suspicions, and so glad I came across this video. I am going to take my dormant 1040 STE out and stoke it up with my new Roland FP 90. THe world will again become my oyster. Here's hoping its well.!
Yes! Glad to see it eventually worked! Once, while preparing official product demo, my PC MIDI card died literally the same day i received a prototype synthesizer from the Waldorf company. What to do? I need to submit Streichfett demos and video by the next week! Quick ran to the basement, took out my Atari 1040 and continued as if nothing had happened. Literally. Atari connects directly to a computer LCD monitor via VGA adapter and runs in high resolution. Workflow / performance is essentially the same as when working on a PC with one important difference: the MIDI on Atari is super tight! We now have devices that can measure MIDI jitter. And in 2017 Atari is still No1, closely followed by a Mac. Then come the PCs, with USB audio interface being the worst performers when it comes to MIDI. This is why many of us still own an Atari.
that's an awesome story, thanks for sharing.
@Don, "..on a Mac" as in a 68k Mac? I have Cubase on a Mac Performa would you think that setup is second to the Atari?
Andy Merrett I've just discovered the need for usb inter face is to transmit sound back to the keyboard for editing. My mate was telling me tonight. The devices are on ebay. Usb 3 digital midi inter face.. o think that's them.
The Atari is so tight in Midi because the midi interface is connected directly to the CPU, and because you dont have a multitasking environment that triggers various interrupts in the background all the time wich steals cpu time.
Still, if you own a PCI-based audio card with midi built into it, the Midi is much better than on USB-interfaces. That's thanks to bypassing the "polling" that USB does and have a much higher priority than USB. There were an article about that in SOS where the jitter introduced with using USB for midi was discussed (micro latencies). It may not be as great as an Atari ST, but nowhere as bad as USB.
Another bad thing is also that the USB-solutions really have a much worse latency for VST-i:s too.
The sad thing is that almost all pro/semi-pro PCI (and now PCI express) cards have disappeared where you now only can buy extremely expensive ones. It used to be a lot of good value Pro-audio cards around before the 2010:s, like the Echo Juli@ I still own myself.
Problem is that now that you want to upgrade and still use the old PCI-based card there are very few options on the modern motherboards that still has a PCI-slot in it (only PCI-express), if you wanna do an upgrade to, for example, the new Intel 8700K processor.
Guess it's the loop based audience of young kids who use Ableton Live a lot that has made the demand for USB-only interface big and killed off Affordable PCI/PCI-express audiocards.
On the plus, at least on the Atari you are not getting a ton of notifications popping up to distract you from the music! 😄
very true, and no wannacry :)
You should turn all that shit off when making music, and disconnect from the net
Very rarely a couple of bombs would appear on the other hand.
Together with my dad we had a Atari 1040STfm, Cubase 2.0, Dx7, Korg M1, Emu Proteus 1, Midiverb III, Yamaha FX500, a 16 channel mixer and a Fostex 4 track. I don't miss it though.....
I'm very thankfull for creating and sharing this video Woody.
Back in the late 1980's i wasn't composing but still discovering electronic music. And so i was over the moon when our national radio-station had a program that allowed amateur musicians to send their music for airplay.
These were the days before the internet as we now know it, so i wrote a letter to every musician that i heard of. :-) Made some great friends that way and some still are to date.
The GM music modules you speak of were i believe the successors to the Roland U-20 and it's module brothers U-110 and U-220.
After seeing your videos and because these Rolands are still very basic MIDI machines i'm keen to have a go at using some older software emulations.
So thank you again, and have lots of fun playing and discovering synths.
good luck with your retro-sequencing quest mark and thx for the comment ! that's cool with the radio station. maybe we'll do a live stream one day and i'll play at being a dj and broadcast music produced by the viewers.
You're very welcome and yes indeed, sounds like fun to have a live-stream of music by viewers! :-) Staying tuned for that one and other videos as well! ;-) Cheers!
Hi Woody. Great video. Steinberg Pro-12 & Pro-24 weren't the first MIDI recording programs that Steinberg made. I actually started with MIDI recording on the Commodore 64 with Steinberg Pro-16. It worded great. After that i used the Atari 1040ST with Steinberg Pro-24 and after that i used the Atari Falcon with Steinberg Cubase Audio. That was a great machine at the time.
ah ok, thx for the correction!
things got started on c64 but those versions were short lived and quickly dumped for the ST platform
thx grandpa!!
I started sequencing in 1992 with a similar set-up: an Atari ST, an MT-32 and a home digital piano. The ST ran Master Tracks Pro, a program I still use today. From time to time I had the same "Mouse Trouble" that you did here, and had to use the mouse without the cover on like this - you basically couldn't replace them, at least not here. Unless you were lucky.
Fun bit of Atari trivia: if your mouse is as faulty as this one, you could use ALT+cursor arrows instead. Two big keys above the arrows act as left and right button. And if you think that Atari ST's keyboard click (one that comes from a speaker) is annoying, well... I personally saw a musician that was a blind person that relied on these clicks. He memorized position of every bit of every program's interface in number of clicks he heard when using these arrows. So he could work without any problems on computers that didn't even had a monitor connected. Try that without his 'disability'...
Ah! memories ... Pro-24 was my first ever sequencer ... After 30 years I still use Cubase! ...
Great video, bravo! .......
I wanted to get into making music and the Atari St with Cubase and a Yamaha psr enabled me to do that.
Use to read Atari magazine for their tutorials so learned how to create music from them.
Good old days are fondly remembered and advances in technology are preferred and bigger hard drives and memory but cheaper prices.
Another good video.
I used to have a Roland D-20 back in the 90's. How nice it would've been to have a software sequencer like this.
Yes. For those extra four sequencer tracks... and all the Atari hassle *facepalm*
Many famous albums were sequenced with this setup, known for its reliability. Dedicated computer + software, no bullshit notifications or reboots, etc. I remember Steinberg users usually had the special monochrome screen for the ST which had a higher resolution, and sharper image than the RF/antenna. Looked so cool in green-scale too ;) Fatboy Slim went on French TV to play "live" and pressed the Spacebar, all his AKAI/Roland/etc MIDI units hooked to to the ST, full tracks playing while he went back to sit down somewhere else! At least he wasn't pretending. All memories from 20 years back, hope I got it right. I wouldn't mind such a setup to go back in time. I sequence with the MPC 2000 classic a lot, when I've had enough of mousing around a million options. Refreshing actually.
It wasn't Pro-24 in that kind of setup. It was Cubase that was only working on the "high-res" (at the time) monochrome monitor. The screen was a black and white affair only, no green-scale. I owned the exact setup myself and a couple of midi synths/modules.
Cubase was revolutionary at the time of the release as being the first visual "tape-operation based" sequencer, something we still use today.
Magnus Lööv ah yes! Thanks for bringing back more details to blurry memories :)
Anyway, good times for us actually being around using the stuff at the time.
How low-tech it seems today, it really was the state of the art when you hooked up a 1 meg (think that als was the requirement for Cubase) 1040 ST to the sharp monitor and moved groups of selected parts around the screen.
It was almost like magic!
At the same time affordable multitimbral synths like the Roland D-10 had just appeared on the market. That was my the first synth I owned,(much like the D20 Woody uses here, except the D20 has the non-important Sequencer) which I used in combination with Cubase. Went on a similar journey as Woody with buying a lot of used synths in the early 90:s (except that I was in my early 20:s and the synths wasn't that old).
Looking back at it and comparing it to today, you can't help marvell at the insane level of progression of technology.
I mean everything I did back then was controlling external Synths that was, for most of the time, kind of crappy. Well, if you exclude some GEMs I owned like the Korg DSS-1 and the Roland Juno-106 and to a lesser extent the Korg M3r and the Yamaha TG33. The biggest difference lies in the fantastic studio type of things you can do today with an endless array of digital effects processors and limitless channels (I only owned a 6 channel really noisy Boss Bx6 Mixer and an extremely noisy Reverb and a Chorus Pedal). Things like compression was totally out of bounds, I think I didn't even know about it at the time. It was just stuff that home-recording bedroom musicians didn't bother about. The professional producer stuff kind of things....
I even had to use some dodgy tactics of chaining together two different synths/devcies into one cable which created problems when one sound got louder on one of the synths which lowered the volume of the other(it really didnt' work).
Not to mention being able to save all the sounds with the song. That was a headache back in the times, where you had to program in program changes for every song and for the samplers you had to load in the right sound into to the sampler for every song.
We are so, so spoiled today with the extreme possibilities, but at the same time I feel blessed to have lived through all the pains of the early stages so that I now can appreciate it much more than the young kids of today!
Magnus Lööv indeed! I have gone back and forth with the tech, and most of the time it's like taking a time machine, by choice, to break from starring at computers all day for work... MPC with Zip disks, DX7, D550 (etc.) old Mackie 24 desk, and computer software mainly for tracking audio. That, or turn off the screen completely, and do everything on Maschine STUDIO controller, sequencing hardware and software devices. Around 2000, I did everything in the box, on a CREAMWARE SCOPE cars with DSPs, which was insane and before its time IMHO. Oops... Could talk about this stuff for hours :)
Tell me about it! I still own a DX7 as one of my controllers. Don't use it for its own sounds though, but as a controller it has the best playable keybed of them all. Got it for nothing used ,700 kr (about $90 now) here in Sweden (yup, same country as Woody) in 2005 when I helped a neighbour moving (just for carrying a few of the heavy furnitures).
I have a setup with my sequencer and my 3 keyboard controllers+ a Behringer BCR2000 (loads of knobs), where I have "multi"/splits and layers setups with arpeggiators, chords and stuff where I can instantly play/record on multiple channels at the same time and make a quick template of a song almost like in the style of the Vangelis setups (I only have two sustains pedals though and not the 8-10 pedal triggering bonanza he was doing with the different foot controllers).
You know, getting as much as possible recorded in one take with just two hands (and sustain pedals).
I DO turn off the screens (three of them) and just play along with all the external controllers, recording at the same time.
It's very much about getting stuff recorded in a short period of time. Stying on the same song (or even 8 bars) for hours is what really kills the "music making Mojo".
Yeah, the limitless possibilities can get in the way. And they did that already in a smaller way in the early 90:s even with external gear. Your still could loop things in Cubase to a bar, edit things in all kinds of way etc. But now that is insane. Everything is flexible to a point that you never have to commit! I mean, back then you still had to set for a certain sample you made in your sampler. And you had to get into the more cumbersome edit mode in the digital synths (getting away from the song). You were, in a positive way, more forced to commit to the choices already being made when you tweaked on the external gear.
But nothing says that you still can't force yourself to make the same type of workflow decisions where you must commit to certain choices! And playing a lot of stuff in real time!
So it is (or should be) better today in all kinds of ways, if you are aware of how the new possibilities are limiting your creativity in a bad way.
Ah, memories. This, my Boss DR-550, Kawai K1 and an Akai S1000 :)
WOW I haven't seen this piece of software since I used it in school in 1989 The thing that got me into music sequencing in a big way.
hi richard, another old timer then :)
yes. I always remember the Atari back then as the other computers in school at the time were all BBC Masters :D If I remember correctly most of what we did was play compositions using the midi keyboard and it would then transpose it onto sheet music on screen which to a 16 yr old was much faster than writing it all out longhand :)
I bet this is the "secret" software that Boards of Canada uses...lol. This would also explain why it takes them about 5 years to release new albums. I'm on to you BOC. Fun video...thanks.
Wow Woody, great video. I used to use Pro 24! The manual for it had about 200 pages, spiral bound.
It was awesome for it's time.
Love your stuff!
thanks for the nice feedback paul, yeah i downloaded the pro 24 manuals, yes there are two and they are out there as pdf scans. although the first 30 pages describe what midi is and what sequencing is etc, most people didn't know at the time.
A thumb up before even seeing the video! I know it will be good. I love oldskool software and MIDI shizzle.
maybe you shoulda held off with the thumbs, since i think we failed to accomplish anything in this video...
And after watching, I wished for another thumb to put up! :-) Oldskool hero, thank you for this video!
As laborious as this looks by today's standards, there's something appealing to me about creating music in this way. Glad you got it working after all that frustration!
can you post the link for the manual of this program??
thank you woody
this is why electronic music back then was so straight forward simple and unedited
You take me 30 years ago ,,, My Atari 1040 is still sleeping in my studio ,,,,,Thanks )))
Back in the late 80's I had an Atari 1040ST with Cakewalk, connected to an Kawai K1, still have the Kawai, but I wish I hadn't given away the Atari. It was so easy to use, compared to what they have today. I don't currently use any DAW, but my Roland FA 06 sequencer reminds me of the old cakewalk, and that makes me happy.
Certainly takes me back! In '89 I'd have been using Pro 24 with my ESQ'1, DX7s, DX100, K1m, TQ5, TR-505 and REX50.
I'm so glad someone has done a video showing what sequencing on these machines was like. I've consider for ages to get one because apart from the great midi clock there is tons of editors for 80s synths as well. Now I'm thinking maybe I should get a basic Windows pc and load an emulator on that. I did try the emulators for Mac but they don't support midi...
steem emulator (st em) supports midi rather well, and i think we need to do that on a video, and show cubase which was what really launched the atari as the center of many a recording studio
Steem does have it's problems with MIDI, like some editor/librarian programs that work on an actual Atari don't work so well in Steem, specifically there can be timing issues with regard to bulk dumps.
Well sir... I love the music you played, out of timing or not. Very nostalgic to say the least, and to say the most? Oh happy day ROLAND!!!!! My favorite classic ROLAND!!! Now, barring the failing hardware on the Atari, the objective for me would be to be able to record midi music with a ROM based computer system that would have much more ram, cpu power and DSP power than the built in or standalone hardware sequencers of the time.. Obviously with the added bonus of a huge color or gray scale GRAPHICAL display to see all the action! I felt your frustration and pain. Bad floppies, or bad drive, bad mouse, or bad keyboard(computer).. these are but some of the many things that have stifled my creativity on computers for years. Latency of midi note on, versus what you hear come out is the biggest downer of em all. Mechanical HDDs and OS that is flaky as hell(Win98), is the killer though. I imagine that software was meant to do midi AND audio tracks.. on a purely fanless, solidstate ROM based system I imagine that would be possible as latency would have been almost nil. We have come along way since IBM clones trying to be APPLES and ATARIS since then, but still, the pain is still felt when you record a beautiful midi song, and as soon as you record ONE audio track of yourself singing, and notice the audio and midi do not sync up.. game over. Now, Doing all this on a PC under an emulator kinda defeats the purpose of a ROM based stable midi recording system in realtime mode no? That WINDOWS update will kill your session fast and hard. Thankfully there is LINUX and SSDs though so there is light at the end of that there tunnel. I would love to see more videos like these of classic retro music gear and computers.. if for no other reason, so see some one else suffer other than me for once lol!
Thanks for the nostalgia time trip. Good job!
thanks george, yes, mission accomplished and now time to move on.... :)
Hi Woody and thanks for all the great videos. I am kind of thinking about getting a Atari again, but is a 520 just as good as a 1040 for running a few samplers and a jv2080 ? Is there any big difference ? I know the 520 has about half the ram of the 1mb in the 1040. Im am pretty new to music making. Keep up the good work :-) Thomas (Denmark) :-)
hi thomas, stay away from 520, a lot of music software won't run on it, you'll also need a high-res B&w monitor to run the more powerful sequencers. sure,. you can upgrade a 520, but it's hassle and work out more expensive than buying a 1040 to start with. good luck!
@@WoodyPianoShack Thanks for the help :-) Will try an get a 1040
@@thomasdietz579 did u get one?
Great vid. Well done for persevering! However I'm now pining for my old 1040st & Cubase combo I used all those years ago and all through the 90s! There was a simplicity which helped the creative process I feel. Less being more. Anyway, looking forward to your next vid.
if you ever have bad floppies try copying them to a blank disk as the copy process often corrects any read errors. It's guaranteed but it used to work quite often
saw an st500 today at a resale goodwill store for 75 dollars . i have a few old machines here to run cakewalk 3.1 dos . it is the best software for midi sequencing , period .
I've got that on an Atari ST hard disk somewhere, that I bought from a recording studio in Germany.
Pretty cool to see the old ST working like that! Would be cool to hook it up to something ultra-modern like the JD-Xi just to show how compatible these MIDI systems have remained. I'm kinda in the opposite situation - using a 30+ year old keyboard as a MIDI controller, hooked up via USB, to control modern software synths, and it all works like a charm! When I think of the state of computers in the mid 80s, vs what we have today, then think that this keyboard from the same era, was literally plug and play, and not only do the keys work, but I tweak the mod and pitch controls and it affects the soft synths just like it was a built in preset!
I had an ST when they first came out, I used Gajits Sequencer 1 program, it was simple but worked really well and above all easy to use. It was eventually given away free on a music mag. I tried a demo of Steinberg Pro 12 but thought it was hideous, I got running with Sequencer 1 straight away. It remains to be the tightest sequencer ever.
Sequencer 1 did have a few oddies that screwed me up, the main one was hanging notes after deleting a bar where a note straddled it. Note on was ok, but lost reference to note off.
Atari mouse buttons, yeh they do go soft after a while, I fitted some new microswitches at the time which were perfect.
will try out Sequencer 1 in emulation, thanks for the tip. interesting that you were able to replace the switches.
There were two versions I had, Seq 1 and Seq 1 Plus. I suggest get the Plus version. It was written by guys in Manchester, UK who did a really good job, very impressive. When the company folded, one coder went on to do the VAZ softsynth which is also very good.
and you explained very beatifully how it works like "mute" a track and so on.. basic principles
great..just did kind of the same on my channel and then found this. its a rocksteady fun machine and still very useful in 2019
Wish I could put more that one "like". Amazing!
really? thanks then, much appreciated!
This is a really cool video. Can't wait to see your videos using modern editing software. I hope you use your dx7s in that series but I'll be happy with whatever decide!
i'll probably attempt to virtualize the synth also :)
had the atari mainly for games but knew it was used professionally in music AND design, Calamus was ages before the Mac software on desktop publishing... so fun to watch THANK you for posting thus video and going trough the stages! amazing!
glad you enjoyed it Rolf, cheers
Well done, you got there in the end... all though technically you need to save and reload the data for this to actually count as a complete success ! Now I wonder if the next video will be titled "Woody introduces petrol and a match to the Atari 520 AT" - us old-school guys may look back at this retro stuff and remember "how good it was in our day" but the truth is things moved on for a reason. .:. BTW its now been over a week since your Wavestation video and I've still got that bloody "Phil Collins / Another Day in Paradise" song in my head... arrrrgggghhhhh !!!!!! .:.
haha, sorry about another day, it's catchy, you gotta give it that... goód idea with the load and save data, but didn't want to push my luck with the disk drive and well, didn't have anything worth saving, but would have been fun to test for nostalgia sake.
lol I know that feel of struggling with old tech. it can be maddening at times, but very satisfying when it works.
you're right, it's a nostalgic thing, and makes one appreciate what we have these days
The good old days with the ST's and the Amiga 500! Great video!
Both brilliant machines for gaming and music.
Love that retro stuff!
What type of connector are you using to connect the ST to a modern HD television?
my atari as rf modulator, so i use antenna cable and tune the tv to the atari. was a common way of doing it in europe.
That looks really clear for an RF connection.
Really took me back, this did. My first MIDI experience was a 520STFM and Pro 12. Screen res was sharper (somewhat) through the dedicated monitors - TVs were really only for gaming. The really crappy thing about Pro 12 was it didn't save as .mid so good luck to anyone wanting to use tracks in other sequencers later... Pro 24 would read the Pro 12 format files - at least the notes, if not the structure - but nothing else would. Still got the 520STFM and worked ok last I used it. Great for its time.
it was indeed great back then, i had a 1040 plus b&w atari monitor at one time,. steered the whole thing with a trackball.
Cheers for the reply. I never could justify the cost of that monitor! I had a Philips med res one (still have - refresh rate is appalling!). Sadly the STFM I bought came with games - and my planned career trajectory as JM Jarre's natural successor got derailed by the likes of Buggy Boy and Ikari Warriors... :)
Ha ha !! you have the patience of a saint...I would've had the mallet on it right from the beginning. Brilliant !
was tempted, but had the resale value in the back of my mind :) I'll be going back to reaper with some relief when I'm done with it.
MIDI envy! yes, it's a thing!
Why can't we have a computer system like this today? I wish we had dedicated DAW computers that all the Pro Audio Manufacturers provided software for.
Billy Batson I dream of a Synclavier 3 system.
Great doing! I enjoy it very much, thank you very much! By the way, i used the atari ste with steinberg an cubase and my midi keyboard also. The atar and the amiga were great computers, working so good for 30 years. Go on with this stuff i like it so much. Best regards thomas
All connected up (STE 1040 STE) and working like a charm, however, i cant access the internal memory/ or usb memory or the already recorded music on My Roland FP 90. A mate said I need usb to midi cable and 2 female adapters to at least be able to get the music out of the piano from Cubase to be saved into my lap top. Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
steinberg pro 12 had it for a week...took it back..the manual had no index!
bought hollis research trackman 32 (32 tracks - 32 midi channels...printer port gave another 16)
pro 12 was not initially free was around £100 in music shops
Great job!
Thanks for going through the trouble to make this.
Waiting for the video using atari emulation software.
cheers, yeah got the programs working, will record something after the summer. in the meantime, go download yourself, if i can figure it out anyone can :)
@@WoodyPianoShack is there a link at all?
These videos are amazing
I have some midi files I wrote on the atari ST 30 years' ago but I can't read them because I've forgotten what program I wrote them in.
Damn! That was some old schooö stuff :-) cool
howdy bo, yes, who needs the latest gear? we were doing this shit on ataris, akais and emulators 30 years ago... ;)
... and we only had a 14" B&W TV to use as monitor.... not the 42" flat screens like today !
30 years ago, in 1987, it was probably out of reach for most "bedroom artists" to own an Akai or an Emulator. An Ensoniq Mirage and maybe a Roland Mt-32 or something was something much more reasonable in price at the time.
And C-Lab Creator(which became Logic later) was probably the more useable/better sequencer on the ST until Cubase was released in 89!
By the 90;s high quality samplers became somewhat affordable. Also, the second hand market was insane back then (here in Sweden at least). I bought and sold a lot second-hand gear in the early 90;s(started using Cubase on the ST from version 1.0 in 89)!
That was times, but looking back at the incredibly limited options back then where I had a very noisy mixer and no good external digital effects (a crappy reverb and an analogue (Very noisy) Boss pedal-chorus on the sends)and no compressors what-so ever, you just have to feel very lucky everyday you turn on the hyperpowerfull DAW today which is essentially an emulation of what would be a superstudio at the time (with total recall of everything too. Plus editing. Plus a number of different insert effects working in parallell for every channel that just wasn't possible in any studio back then). We are just spoiled with limitless possibilities today!
Well done for persevering :)
I want to kiss your body.
You got a like from me it does look
Like the psp homemade sequencer.
I would get nothing done in life without persistence. Great video! Let me know if you get an MSQ-700. I've finally mastered how to use it! After a year of owning it. Take care and have a wonderful Wonder Woman weekend. Sam.
ah thanks for the comment sam, my wonder woman gone away this weekend unfortunately.
Appreciate the retro enthusiasm - curious to know if you think there is any actual advantage to using an ST over a modern DAW?
people say the midi timing is very tight, coz the atari is not doing much else in the background. very stable, no virus, very fast to boot. there's a few for you.
super tight midi timing,tons of midi software and ...the ST is fanless completely silent
hello so to start I am not totally new to everything related to computer music, but despite everything I ask you for help because when I was young, my parents had bought me an Atari 520ST, and I always wanted find a piece which was integrated into the computer, which was a demonstration music, with the scores of the different midi instruments (I suppose). Only I do not remember the title or even the software (pro 24?) just a memory that there was an instrument called "wistle" that played a melody ...
I know that doesn't advance the thing much but it's so far in my memory ...
I would be extremely happy if you could help me find this piece. thank you in advance
no idea, but somebody will know!
And here I thought I was old because I used Windows 3.1, lol
if you're using that to make music I'd love to see a video on that
Hey Woodie .. great memories from good ole Atari days. You promised us a Video with emulators :) I have tried various of the emulators around but never gotten them to work with a /silent ... c****** version of Cubase :( I do not have my Atari any longer but I still have the disks with Cubase Score .. but no atari dongle. It got swapped in when I ..god forbid it I ever did that .. switched to PC... Still have my Cubase 2 for PC dongle tho .. whatever I would use that for .. I gave up on Cubase at ver 2 as they still hadn't gotten it to run reliable on the PC back then. Would like to see some hints to get this to work on a PC emu or other hardware. If I knew I could get to work, I could get persuaded to buy one of those PGA emulators for the 6800.
Would actually be fun if Steinberg just let people use these old Atari versions of Cubase without a dongle. Not that they are gonna compete with a Cubase 9 series today anyway.. but for midi and scoring, Cubase Score on a ST1040 with the hiRes Greyscale Monitor rocked. Of course this looks ugly as hell when you use the video out (320x200 16 colors) on a 40 inch TV .. Ewww ... lol
same with my diskettes... getting old! but those Atari where and are steel the best.
Fantastic channel you have! Subscribed :)
i just got a d 20, and was wondering how to utelize it. do you have a d 20 review?
It's funny, out of time non-quantized drums are actually trendy now in certain genres, sometimes to painful extremes! Great video, it does make you appreciate todays DAWs but shows you can make music on less than cutting edge stuff
HxC Floppy Emulator is the key for a funcioning old computer... finns på tradera ;)
Soo how much was the set up? Paranoid performers 'd do that, in a world of spies and pirates, yes. Wish I could help improve it if I was an electrician, computer engineer.
you mean the cost of the computer and synth? well i don't remember exactly, say $100 for the atari and $150 for the synth. When they were new it was more like $1500 in total.
It's normally the port in which the mouse is plugged into needs to be re-soldered. It's a common thing with the ST machines.
Also, if you're from the UK you could try using a Atari to SCART cable for a much better picture.
But I guess it's back to the loft for this machine? ;-)
i did a bit of research and read about the potential port issue, no way I want to deal with that, so sold it on to another guy that perhaps wants to put more time and money into it! thx for the tip.
Try it on the Amiga with midi plugin if you have both of them in a Med or TFMX software see how retro kit differs from each other for the same job and compare the experience of ST Vs Amiga. That would be fun. If you don't have the kit don't bother unless you wanted to try a different experience out anyway. Lol
New subscriber here, Woody! I really enjoy your videos (especially the hardware/VST comparisons), but where's Part 2 of this video? I didn't see a link in the video, and I read almost all the comments, and didn't see a link there.
Keep up the good work!
it's there somewhere on the channel! surprised yt didn't suggest it to you. cheers
Thanks, Woody. I'll look for it again.
Hey woody,i also still have the atari 1040St,1 original and 1 with a memory upgrade to a Whopping 4 Mb :),but i have the Notator Software from C-Lab (nowawdays Emagic) on it with a added 4 midi connections Dongle (Log3).
in my opinion that was the best Midi Software on it in the day
that's cool to hear! 4 megs would have cost a fortune back then! i'm still running 520kb!
Yes it was,but i was friends with the musicshop owner back then (bought everything there),he said he could get it done for 100 guilders (in 1994 ish).
but it seemed i had a atari version onwich the chip was soldered to it's mainboard resulting in it costing like 500 guilders (would be like 250-325 € these days).
I was willing to pay that giving that the owner/seller made a mistake,but he said "i made a deal and i'll stand by it,even if it not in my favor".
i still relish that memory and i am pretty sure that nowawdays,this it would be quite impossible to get that kinda Service.
You should check out Sekaiju, it's a really good MIDI sequencer for Windows that supports MIDI In/Out like this.
thx! looks cool and old-school, i'll stick with reaper for now on my modern pc though :)
Yep, that Original Atari-mouse could be a real pain. 😜 Luckily I bought a Logitech Pilot-mouse back then, which is lightyears ahead to the Atari-mouse! Still works like a charme (see my channel ^^).
I was just wondering what exact ST-model you have. According to what I see (two additional joystickports on the left) and what you say (connected via antenna cable with the RF-out), it is a 520STEM, right? Didn't even knew that such a model exists! Thought the "M"-models are only the old 520 and 1040.😲
yeah, it was the ste "enhanced version of the ST with improvements to the multimedia hardware and operating system" with modulator!
In my opinion there is high reason of replacement faulty FDD with some sort of SD-FDD emulators and use SD-cards with images of disks. And I think mouse should be replaced as well.
yep, with a small investment (roughly equivalent to cost of atari itself) you can replace mouse, floppy, vga adapter and be good to go.
Maybe you should consider one of those fancy floppy disk emulators?
I want you to saturate me with your love.
Good video man you had fun with the atari great.
There used to be load of DAWs softwares for XP on Ebay? Why need to go that far back? Unless you already have it??
My Alesis MM-T8 stills slams tight and works like new. Would love to see you do a demo on it.
used to have one of those and yes i'd like to revisit it!
Some of the best songs I wrote were done on this, Could never find any in-depth videos on this. Somehow I feel like i still have not used the full potential of the mmt8. I purchased mine when it first came out. Still have the original box and manual and the battery still works to this day. It sat in my storage for many years since i started using Cubase VST 3.5. i am currently using Cubase pro 9
Seems you didn't get round to doing a composition using an emulator ?? Anyway you can run Pro 12 and Cubase Lite on your Android smartphone under Hataroid. I actually run a cracked full version of Cubase 2 and with a UTC to USB connector> to USB to MIDI you can connect your synths. Is a real blast seeing what I created back in 80s running on something that sits in my pocket! Oh and the mouse emulation is more stable than your actual mouse!
i did spend a while messing around with atari and mt32 emulators, it was fun, but a video never materialized.
;-)))))) FUN ... 80's Old School Sequencer with 1024 ATARI STE inside Wood Box = Desk Rack 19" ....
I've got that on an ST harddisk somewhere. I better give it a go.
MPC3000 for me, but this is cool to watch. never had an Atari as kid,
i ran all my music on atari computers in the early 90's! ugh...logic creator and something else...did lots of shows with it though!
OMG! That now looks so prehistoric and impractical. Yet I bought an Atari st (although I loved the Amiga more) just for midi sequencing.
As it had the best software for that. Looking at that now and I wonder how the hell I was able to use it :)
Where is the elastic audio section in this software?
hello Woody ! , i was kind of hoping you were going to take a base ball batt to the Atari and send it back 30 years but now im glad you are putting back in the box hopefully for another 30 years , hats off to you for not giving up and getting it to work , i would have shown it no mercy and went with option 1 and killed it with the base ball batt and then option 2 and set fire to it ! , but fair play to you Woody ! you didnt let it beat you ! , great video and i enjoyed watching this piece of history work ! big thumbs up Woody !
😎AK
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
p.s.
i would have stood all over that mouse for sure !
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
i will eventually want some money back on this atari when I sell it :) hopefully next lucky owner will restore and modernize. better than a baseball bat, even though it would have gotten me some views :) cheers ak
😎👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏great stuff Woody
Were they high density diskettes with sticky tape over the HD detect hole? That'll be why they got corrupted.
yes they were hacked HD, the guy that wrote them for me was sure that it would work.
It's a gamble, they can work for anything from 5 months to five minutes in my experience.
a quiet read allowed access kind of like running an old (over used) credit card 20 times to make it finally work.
yep, that's kinda similar!
After 50 or 100 attempts, it warmed up!
I used to turn my machine on then make a Latte Coffee before it would ever load Cubase 2.0
This is an absolute joy to reminisce!
You could have moved the pointer with the keyboard, combination with ALT or CTRL and arrow keys if my memory is right.
thanks, yes there are some key shortcuts, albeit rather clumsy!
Open mouse added some degree to the overall craziness goin' on )
I still use Pro24 V3 and Cubase on my ST. I was promoting Fairlight CMI to top recording studios in London in 1987 for Peter Gabriel and was blown away when Air Studios' Fairlight was down and they were using an Atari 520 and Pro24 instead for sequencing Dire Straits tracks! I immediately went and bought a MIDI setup. Here it is in action with an MT32 and Alpha Juno. Allow for Camera cutoff and focus issues, but on screen action shows Pro24 is punchy and not buggy! In fact I had Desktop ACCs running at same time for non front end functions within the MT32 ! th-cam.com/video/Wo9f5V0lA3k/w-d-xo.html
Your the last person I expect to say "what the fuck" would make. A great sample
i would never say that, you're imagining it...
;)
I run a 520 STE with Cubase 2.1 last week, (unfortunatly through the Monochrome Atari Monitor), and it was working well! I missed the metronome BEEP bip bip bip!!!! I d like now to find the atari/peritel cable to wire it to a LCD screen as on the video! Old school tank forever!! (The Mouse is definitley awfulllll !!)
You upgraded the mouse and it felt like heaven compared to the old one.
The ball on the old one always got clogged up by dust and dirt and it showed the Atari up.
@Pete Testube I mean back in the day there were a few to choose from.
The standard factory mouse sucked so I invested in a better one.
Cannot remember the name as its was the late 80's.
@Pete Testube I don't have one anymore I was talking about when I use to have one when I made music.
The Amiga always broke down but the Atari never did.
I sold mine to a friend from school and his children play on it now and they are teenagers so it just shows.
That mouse is giving up the ghost, aren't there any replacement mice for the atari?
yeah, you can buy a used mouse, or an adapter so you can use some modern mouse. but a worry is that the joystick connector that the mouse plugs in to is faulty, a common fault apparently and something I'm not prepared to tackle right now.
dykodesigns2yt giving up the ghost is a German idiom if I'm not mistaken. Are you from a German speaking country by any chance?
No, dutch. But, I live in the east of the netherlands, about 20 km from the german border. The same idiom also exists in dutch. Maybe it comes from the Lower Saxon dialects.
dykodesigns2yt interesting
Nice one! I know a lot of this is about using the real thing - I miss my 1040 STE somedays - but you could get this running on a Raspberry Pi if you wanted to keep the old school feel. Heck you could even put one inside a dead Atari ST case and probably wire up the keyboard. Anyway, less dodgy old hardware and cruddy floppy drives, and more instant booting and stability!! :)
that sounds like an interesting project, especially if you could boot to atari in full screen, so you wouldn't see that it was running in an emulator.
I don't doubt you could. It is like using the real thing. Aside - Atari and its MIDI ports have a lot to answer for in getting me into electronic music composition. Great machine.
Can anyone help me I have a very very old cuebase on my old Atari ste and I have several songs (projects) which I want to retrieve from the machine and put them onto my new Cubase 9 s/w
I have been writing on Cubase 4 for ages but the studio pc died, I have plenty of Cubase project folders on the hard drive of the studio pc that died which I'm sure I can easily transfer to Cubase 9,
but its my very old early stuff on my old Atari ste that I would love to translate into readable files for my new Cubase 9
(I should have done this years ago onto Cubase 4 before my PC died but never got round to it)... Is this at all possible, any help would be much appetited, cheers Kev
sorry if this question has already been answered, but what kind of video adapter are you using from the atari to your lcd monitor?
no worries, no adapter here, it's the rf modulator from the atari going into antenna input of tv. that's why i had to tune the tv. i think this was more common in the uk/europe than in us.
oh man...... one came with my 1040 ste but it's long gone. The image looks great! Thanks for the upload.
Hi
Did make change tone casio keyboard