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Good morning and welcome back to the ValorosoIT channel, the channel dedicated to retrocomputers and vintage electronics. I'm still at Varese Retrocomputing 2023 with Michel Mammoliti, that's right, who has to explain to us something beautiful, which combines vintage computers with music! Exact. So, basically, what we see here is a simulation of how music recording studios worked in the 80s, early 90s. Practically, we had a computer which was the fulcrum of all the equipment, which drove through a system called MIDI a whole series of electronic instruments that we see here. We have various synthesizers, various keyboards, in fact. Here we have two hybrid digital and analogue keyboards, meaning that the control of the keyboard operation is digital, managed by an internal microcontroller, but the sound generation is analogue. We have a Juno-106, a rather famous keyboard and also widely used in the 90s in dance house music. We have a Korg DW-8000. The MIDI cables are the ones down there, right, that connect the keyboards…
That's right, actually several cables come out of here, both MIDI cables and audio cables. The MIDI cables can be seen better here, on these other two. These two are two digital keyboards, completely digital. This one here is a Yamaha DX100, which is basically the small, low-cost version of the Yamaha DX7, which was a very popular keyboard in the '80s and was used on a ton of records. The MIDI cables are these here. Through these cables, practically, the computer that we will soon see over there completely controls the entire instrument. It tells him what notes to play, how loudly, what sound to use as the song progresses.
Ok, so it's not you playing the keyboard, it's the computer playing on the keyboard. Exactly: the computer drives all these keyboards in real time. The Atari, which we are now going to see. The Atari drives the keyboard, which has sampled sounds inside and its internal sound banks, which are switched as the song progresses. If, for example, I need a bell sound here, it rings the bell, then it switches to the next sound which can be a horn section and plays the horns and does everything automatically. Then, from the keyboard, everything that converges into the mixer is recorded, exactly, from the keyboard. Then, in a real studio context, the audio outputs ended up in a multitrack recorder on which the sound engineer then made the final master of the song.
Here, now, for the purpose of the demonstration, everything simply goes into a stereo system. And here we have the Atari Mega ST, which is the fulcrum of all the discussion we were saying before, and from here everything is controlled automatically. Now I'll do a short demonstration, I'll start a song. Let's turn up the volume a little.
And it's all automatic and all in real time. Basically, the Atari is reading the sequence, it's proceeding, moving forward on the sequence and it's sending all the MIDI messages to the various instruments, which play what the Atari is telling them to play. Ok, that is, it is a communication that starts from here. Exact. He moves towards the keyboards. Exact. It goes through these two boxes here, which are basically splitters, and then the keyboards generate the various sounds, which then return and then come out on our stereo system.
Show! Thanks so much for the introduction, Michel. It was a pleasure. To see the other videos related to Varese Retrocomputing 2023, search the channel, or I'll also put something in the description. HI! HI!