Anyone remember Music-X?

Want to talk about music hardware or software that doesn't include Reason?
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Baylo
Posts: 149
Joined: 17 Jan 2015

03 Jan 2022

Visiting my parents for Christmas, my father had retrieved my old Roland JV-30 and Commodore Amiga from the attic. Had fun setting it up again and letting my son discover what MIDI-based recording was like back in the early 90s... Ahhh, the days of 80MB hard drives... :-)


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Rising Night Wave
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03 Jan 2022

hehe
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selig
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03 Jan 2022

You were lucky, my first system had floppy drives (1986). Hard drives of any size were still a dream at that point. Kids today got it easy…
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Baylo
Posts: 149
Joined: 17 Jan 2015

03 Jan 2022

selig wrote:
03 Jan 2022
You were lucky, my first system had floppy drives (1986). Hard drives of any size were still a dream at that point. Kids today got it easy…
Hehe. For sure. My first Amiga was floppy only: the A500, God rest its soul. The A1200 with 6MB of RAM and a hard drive was quite the upgrade.

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StephenHutchinson
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04 Jan 2022

selig wrote:
03 Jan 2022
You were lucky, my first system had floppy drives (1986). Hard drives of any size were still a dream at that point. Kids today got it easy…
"Luuxxxxxxxurrrrrrrryyyyyyyy..." When I was a lad, me own dad bought an Apple ][+, with a cassette tape drive at first, and then a couple of 5 and 1/4 floppy disk drives. Hard drive?? Hard drive? Ahhh that would've been 'eaven to us... a hard drive it would. We only got a 128kb module installed a year later at over $1,000 CAD in 1982. And music? We'd be lucky to even get Bach to play on it.

And you try and tell the young people of today... and they won't believe you.

PS: I still have this machine... although I'm loathe to plug it in as it's been in my parent's barn for decades... don't want short out anything.

Apple ][+ 001.jpg
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Creativemind
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04 Jan 2022

Yeah I remember of it but not the software specifically. A lad on my estate who was about 3 or 4 years older than me so will be about 49 / 50 now was using it to create dance music. Me and a friend went 'round his house (about 1990 / 91) and he had an Atari 520ST and Music X and was doing stuff on it. He was a proper raver so you get the style. We were blown away. He had just gotten a Gameboy as well and I was playing Tetris on it and couldn't put it down. He had to insist I stop and said he had things to do in the end and then me and my mate left haha!

If I remember rightly, Music X came free with a magazine or did I imagine that?
:reason:

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Baylo
Posts: 149
Joined: 17 Jan 2015

04 Jan 2022

Creativemind wrote:
04 Jan 2022
Yeah I remember of it but not the software specifically. A lad on my estate who was about 3 or 4 years older than me so will be about 49 / 50 now was using it to create dance music. Me and a friend went 'round his house (about 1990 / 91) and he had an Atari 520ST and Music X and was doing stuff on it. He was a proper raver so you get the style. We were blown away. He had just gotten a Gameboy as well and I was playing Tetris on it and couldn't put it down. He had to insist I stop and said he had things to do in the end and then me and my mate left haha!

If I remember rightly, Music X came free with a magazine or did I imagine that?
Music-X was Amiga only, so it either wasn't an Atari or wasn't Music-X he was using. ;-) IIRC, Steinberg Pro24 (now Cubase) and E-Magic Creator (now Logic) were the big ST sequencers, though there were others, too. ProTools was for the studios with huge budgets. This was also when sample trackers were huge on the Amiga, so maybe your friend was using OctaMED?

I think eventually Music-X was on a magazine cover disk, but for the first several years it was very much a commercial product. Written by one guy, I believe - Talin/David Joiner - which is crazy to think of, these days. Interesting retrospective written by him here: https://dreamertalin.medium.com/music-x-b4abc68d6f78

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Creativemind
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Location: Stoke-On-Trent, England, UK

04 Jan 2022

Baylo wrote:
04 Jan 2022
Creativemind wrote:
04 Jan 2022
Yeah I remember of it but not the software specifically. A lad on my estate who was about 3 or 4 years older than me so will be about 49 / 50 now was using it to create dance music. Me and a friend went 'round his house (about 1990 / 91) and he had an Atari 520ST and Music X and was doing stuff on it. He was a proper raver so you get the style. We were blown away. He had just gotten a Gameboy as well and I was playing Tetris on it and couldn't put it down. He had to insist I stop and said he had things to do in the end and then me and my mate left haha!

If I remember rightly, Music X came free with a magazine or did I imagine that?
Music-X was Amiga only, so it either wasn't an Atari or wasn't Music-X he was using. ;-) IIRC, Steinberg Pro24 (now Cubase) and E-Magic Creator (now Logic) were the big ST sequencers, though there were others, too. ProTools was for the studios with huge budgets. This was also when sample trackers were huge on the Amiga, so maybe your friend was using OctaMED?

I think eventually Music-X was on a magazine cover disk, but for the first several years it was very much a commercial product. Written by one guy, I believe - Talin/David Joiner - which is crazy to think of, these days. Interesting retrospective written by him here: https://dreamertalin.medium.com/music-x-b4abc68d6f78
No it was definitely Music-X so must have been an Amiga 500. My bad. I did actually think it was an Amiga actually but know that Atari ST's were generally considered better for music so just thought it would've been that.
:reason:

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Karim
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06 Jan 2022

YESS!!! Before Atari ST I made first MIDI experiences with Amiga 2000 + Music-x + Akai s590 + M1 !
Top notch! :cool:
Baylo wrote:
03 Jan 2022
Visiting my parents for Christmas, my father had retrieved my old Roland JV-30 and Commodore Amiga from the attic. Had fun setting it up again and letting my son discover what MIDI-based recording was like back in the early 90s... Ahhh, the days of 80MB hard drives... :-)

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Baylo
Posts: 149
Joined: 17 Jan 2015

06 Jan 2022

Karim wrote:
06 Jan 2022
YESS!!! Before Atari ST I made first MIDI experiences with Amiga 2000 + Music-x + Akai s590 + M1 !
Top notch! :cool:
I. Am. Jealous. Somehow I let the music store salesman talk 19-year old me into getting the JV-30 and a hardware sequencer rather than the M1 I really wanted. The 24 note polyphony convinced me… I had to wait until I got my first job before I somewhat rectified that by getting an X5DR module instead. I’ve still got that, too. :-)

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crimsonwarlock
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07 Jan 2022

Early nineties I had an Atari Mega-1, running Cubase with a Midex which gave me a total of 80 midi-channels in and out. The Midex also hat SMPTE, so that was hooked up to one track of a Tascam 488. I still have that stuff, although the keyboard and mouse of the Atari got missing during a house move. I do miss this setup sometimes.

The synths I had at that time, ESQ-1, DX7, DX100, are long gone, though. Only a Kawai K1rII and an Alesis D4 are still lying around from that era. Looking to hook those up to Reason sometime in the future (need to build a new studio first).
-------
Analog tape ⇒ ESQ1 sequencer board ⇒ Atari/Steinberg Pro24 ⇒ Atari/Cubase ⇒ Cakewalk Sonar ⇒ Orion Pro/Platinum ⇒ Reaper ⇒ Reason DAW.

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