Boing Boing » commodore

Small world, tracker music edition

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 16:38:31 +0000

I love to hang out with online pal Cabel Sasser, founder of Portland software company Panic, whenever our paths cross in real life. But I only just realized that he was an early 90s tracker musician whose work I listened to in England as a kid, on my Commodore Amiga, decades before we met.

One of my favorite things to do on my Amiga was write music in trackers, a unique, note-by-note way to write tunes that was half-music, half-programming. ... Then, Cut to Yesterday. Rob Beschizza, out of Boing Boing, read my post about The Incident music. To summarize: not only did [a U.K.] magazine actually publish my dumb song, but a 13-year-old Beschizza remixed it, and as internet pals we had no idea until yesterday that we shared this connection.
You’re pretty cool, universe.

Cabel says his work's aged badly; bear in mind that these were free digital sampling apps hacked to run on home computers a fraction of the cost of a Fairlight. But what made his tune cool and useful to 12-year-old me is the fact that it was a simple, melody-based track with just two or three cleanly-looped instruments sampled at the same pitch.

Back in the glory days of tracker music, songmakers would hurl in every possible feature to push the low-tech hardware to its limits. Notes would be programmed to warble at as high a hertz as possible to emulate chords on a single audio channel. There'd be elaborate collections of samples in multiple keys, intricate envelopes coded into the notation, and general nerdliness throughout. The underlying code was often impenetrable--and effectively uneditable.

Cabel's track, however, sounded great, made perfect human-readable sense under the hood, and was fun to experiment with. It's no surprise at all that he's now the co-founder of an app-maker renowned for its perfectly-designed, no-nonsense creative apps.

Commodore 64 creator dies

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 01:03:27 +0000

"We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes" — Jack Tramiel [Mercury News]

Commodore is beautiful

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:35:42 +0000

Boing Boing reader Byron shares this photograph of one of our ancestors in the National Museum of Scotland:

An old Commodore PET computer (complete with tape deck for loading and saving programme and a built in monitor). I think this model was the very first home computer (as we know them) that I ever saw, when I was a wee boy, late 1970s. My dad's friend was an amateur meteorologist, had a room full of (for the time) hi-tech equipment like a HAM radio, a print out that fed him data right from a weather satellite and the like. He got himself one of these and knowing I like science fiction he thought I'd like it so he got dad to bring me round. Two or three years late I'd have my own home computer, a Texas TI-99 4/a and I've pretty much had a computer of some sort right through till today.

Thanks for sharing it in the Boing Boing Flickr pool, Byron!