Old School Midi Controllers

[SandBag]

Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum and happy to be a part of it.

I've got a question pertaining to older midi controllers and other external devices used for making video game music in the late 80's and early 90's.

Does anyone know what types of controllers (specifically models) people like David Wise, Nobuo Uematsu and Jeremy Soul used for their amazing musical concoctions? It's kind of a history assignment if you will.

I myself am more interested in external devices, as I am more hands on, kinesthetic, whatever you want to call it, and would like to play around with some old school devices as long as they don't cost $3000 +.

Thanks for your time guys, hope someone can help me out.

[tacman7]

The only old school controller I can think of is a therimin (sp).

Just an antenna that you wave your hand over. Most everything else was done with some sort of keyboard or just programmed by numbers as far as I know.

There are several synths out there that emulate the old sounds if your looking for that. You can find the actual hardware on ebay.

Not my cup of tea.

[garww]

The Doom WADs sound like any FM module. Or, I was getting those sounds from ISA sound cards - ensoniq, blaster, and yamaha.

[SandBag]

I'm sure when video game composers worked, they were given all kinds of equipment not commercially available at the time: special keyboards, computers and related programs.

I guess my question is in context with a guess. I'm guessing that along with the keyboard and other recording equipment, there was a primary synth/module they used. And I'm trying to find out what it is.

I was told that Uematsu (due to Square's small budget at the time) had to work with a dinky little synth that he managed to get a lot of miles out of, because of his skill.

So I'm trying to figure out how they did it. How were video game songs composed and recorded? If it's possible, names of models and brands would be great.

[garww]

I would not be surprised if they only used the atari and commodore for a long time. Much of it was platform dependent and they could try to port the sound over.

By the '80s, PC were only becoming home equip and there was no sound other than the one beep, two beep, etc. From the web; "To be in a Doom wad, a wav file has to be 11025 Hz, 8-bit, and mono..". From there on out(1993), sound only got better by leaps and bounds.

What is it you are thinking of before the Doom era ??

[tacman7]

I played around for some time with the commodore synth and different software sequencers for the 64. It was mono so you had to buy another synth module to have stereo, still have it I think.

As garww was saying I think things were a lot more low tech back then, I had some special game programming software made for game developers, there might have been something like that for game music development. You had to really know a machine to be user yet alone a developer, my bet would be that things were done with pure programming.

[garww]

Ya, the C64 was my game machine for a long time. I'm pretty sure the games I played had sound coded - rather than performed. I don't really remember PC games 'til the Doom era. I had a fair collection of Electronic Arts for PC, but I can't remember one of them now.

A lot of the neat synths back then didn't know MIDI in any form. A lot changed with the roland and adlib pc cards. With my Genesis, I pretty much just played Road Rash.