Steinberg story: Long after it was forgotten, I started using Steinberg PRO-16 on a Commodore 64 (1992). After a year the floppy disk became corrupt, so I wrote to Steinberg (no internet). Two weeks later a motorcycle courier knocked on my door with a huge box. Inside was a new Floppy Disk along with a letter from Steinberg explaining how this is a gift as they couldn't believe I was still using this system! What wonderful people. I went on to write sketches for The Pet Shop Boys and Sting with this very system. I stayed loyal to Steinberg and then bought Cubase which was not so user-friendly in my opinion. However, the 21st century versions looks perfectly logical now I have been accustomed to the standard DAW interface. Stay creative people. 🌞🇬🇧🎹

@RadiAsian

Жыл бұрын

salute to you. amazing story. thank you

@markmooch

Жыл бұрын

That’s awesome. Sting was using computers on dream of the blue turtles too.

@dommidavros2211

Жыл бұрын

Oh come on!! If you'd just used Logic pro x, you'd have had a much easier time!!

@nictrax

Жыл бұрын

That's great they sent it to you.

The Atari ST, BBC Micro, the C64 and the Spectrum 128K all in one show with Lesley Judd dressed as a character from Blakes 7 and Fred Harris dressed as a Maths teacher. True nostalgia.

@jdm65

Жыл бұрын

And Tony doing a road test of Andre Agassi's mid 80s mullet. Quality all round.

@Iffy

Жыл бұрын

Fred used to be a school teacher.

@culttelevision

Жыл бұрын

Was just thinking Blake's 7 !! was expecting her to whip out a blaster and take out 80s tucked in shirt and mullet combo man

@MrMusicbyMartin

Жыл бұрын

Would Lesley Judd have made a good Servilan? Not bad, but Judith Hann seemed more ruthless.

@culttelevision

Жыл бұрын

@@MrMusicbyMartin haha Judith Hann is my friend's mum. She's lovely.

RIP Dave Smith, Father of MIDI

@Gabbanadj

Жыл бұрын

I had no idea Dave Smith passed , may his soul rest in peace 🙏

@Blahdnb

Жыл бұрын

@@Gabbanadj couple months ago :(

Tony's super-mullet is everything. 😁🤣

@jamesmacleod671

Жыл бұрын

That mullet probably has midi inputs built in as well. 😆

@jeshkam

Жыл бұрын

@@jamesmacleod671 It probably works like Jean-Michel Jarre's laser harp. 😂

@TerekkiTerekki

Жыл бұрын

...and that green jumpsuit

@drindy5166

Жыл бұрын

@@jamesmacleod671 Lmfao 👊🤣👍

Leslie returned from Jupiter and went straight from the spaceship hangar to the studio. Such dedication and focus.

@Domarius64

Жыл бұрын

And the irony, the first thing she says is "Let's come back down to Earth for a moment..." XD

@AtariForeva

4 ай бұрын

Commodore 84, proof she's came back from the future

Imagine the BBC producing something this educational and insightful nowadays.

@AmazinglyGayPhil

Жыл бұрын

So sad isn't it.

@davidf6326

Жыл бұрын

@@AmazinglyGayPhil Even more sad is the fact that despite all that deterioration, the BBC is still among the best options available 😢

@ftumschk

Жыл бұрын

@@davidf6326 Agreed, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. Those calling for the defunding/dismantling of the BBC don't know which side their bread's buttered.

@paulfidler3710

Жыл бұрын

There is great content out there on the BBC. The science hour on the world service is incredible, and Roland Pease is a polymath, getting to grips with any subject matter. It seems to be isolated, however.

@K.KILLORAN

Жыл бұрын

As an American who pays to watch the BBC over here, I hear you and don’t disagree, but it still has very high quality stuff when compared with most of the world and even 90% of our programming here.

I had an Atari STE and a relatively cheap Casio keyboard that I used to write tracks on, then would borrow a better synth and Akai sampler to record tracks. Was such a great hobby, and enabled thousands of people with good ideas but little musical training to write great music. This is what led to so many songs entering the charts by people that basically wrote them in their bedroom. The whole electronic dance music scene probably wouldn't have existed without MIDI.

@TheSpudlyMcgudly

Жыл бұрын

@Intuition I agree with you.. a bit. Ah, Octamed - was always envious of the Trackers the Amiga had. Most Drum 'n Bass? Think that's stretching it a bit, but the Amiga was an excellent jumping off point

@jessihawkins9116

Жыл бұрын

no electronic dance music would’ve still existed without midi

@jessihawkins9116

Жыл бұрын

@Intuition I never said they did

@jamessisson3703

Жыл бұрын

Absolutely right. It led to a bunch of us coming together to form Funky Transport. An underground, globally recognised Deep House collective. Worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing. My music making started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and a gadget called RAM Flare Music Machine and a Casio home keyboard, A basic line mixer and a couple of tape machines!

@emmanuelleroy2915

Жыл бұрын

And Hip Hop/Pop, and lazy but innovative production you wouldn’t be able to do without MIDI

I'm loving Lesley Judd's jumpsuit!

@goatpepperherbaltea7895

Жыл бұрын

I love how she said let’s come back down to earth while dressed like a space alien😂

Not only is this a brilliant glimpse back to where we've come from, it's also unintentionally hilarious. Love it.

@anundesireduser

Жыл бұрын

amogus

Imagine rocking up with Garageband on an Iphone in that studio. They would have been convinced you were an Alien.

What an odd twinkly green her bodysuit is, I've only ever seen that colour used to wrap mint chocolates.

@AtheistOrphan

Жыл бұрын

Good call! I believe it was made from many, MANY of the said wrappers.

@onespeedyboi9835

Жыл бұрын

Ah the 80s..

Stunning thumbnail beauty Lesley Judd appears at 4:19.

I appreciate the fact Fred calls them sythths instead of synthesisers.

Fred: "that must be difficult" Also Fred: rewrites a piece with a "word processor".

Disappointed to not see an appearance by Synthesiser Patel

@davedogge2280

Жыл бұрын

lol

@dcpayne5264

Жыл бұрын

These days synthesisers so bloody expensive

@Wagoo

Жыл бұрын

I stole all his synthesizers

@brizzieleif5258

Жыл бұрын

They didn't feature new music either like rapping.

@kildogery

Жыл бұрын

Glad I'm not the only one.

Lesley Judd in a Blake's 7 outfit is making me feel unusual, and I like it.

So proud to be there at the beginning. Still got most of my equipment from the day.

Those humble beginnings ❤️ How far we’ve come. Great time to a musician in 2022

@prltqdf9

Жыл бұрын

I'd imagine so... but where is the great, truly novel music, nowadays? Where are the ARTISTS? Nowhere.

@RSProduxx

Жыл бұрын

@@bassc ya, I guess the challenge is gone and thus an important part of the creative process

@dussie920

Жыл бұрын

Working with limitations makes creative. I keep falling back to Atari Cubase every now and then, just because of only the core being there. Working without a internet connected computer makes it more easy to focus on what I planned to do: making music. No distractions by chats and mail and no temptations for getting lost on KZread. I really like working that way. And afterwards I always can use the MIDI information produced working on the Atari on the PC if I like to do. I notice that I'm not tweaking to death on the Atari and hardware synths/processors/mixers, where I very often seem to be doing this on the PC.

@dickbanger8924

Жыл бұрын

I think technology has ruined people's creativity, being only limited to synths and the Atari st was how all the best music was created.

I was at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 1982 when MIDI was presented. Most people didn't realize at that time what this interface could be used for. The technical development is simply immense. In my day, an AKG spring reverb for the stage (BX-20) cost around 20,000 Swiss francs, was highly sensitive, and to delay the reverb, we had to connect a Rexov spool tape recorder in front of it. And yes, MIDI has totally changed our musical life. Thank you for this great Video ! musical greetings from Lucerne in Switzerland

@80ssynthfan48

Жыл бұрын

That might have been the first large-scale presentation in Europe, perhaps?

@a.brantschen6912

Жыл бұрын

@@80ssynthfan48 exactly, 1982 was the start in Europe. It was very surprising for us and as I wrote, nowbody could imagine what this Interface would mean for our future. The first visible application was connecting a synthesizer to the rack sound modules. So a sound extension of the synthesizer via 16 MIDI channels.

What an extraordinary getup Lesley Judd is wearing!😁

Goodness me !!! This my childhood flashed before my eyes. Remember watching this and picking up an Commodore Amiga. It feels like yesterday. Quite depressing ..lol

@jamesmacleod671

Жыл бұрын

Yes, I remember my first gaming computer the Amiga and having hours of fun playing games from psygnosis and the Bitmap brothers. Happy days, yes it does seem like yesterday, 30 odd years ago.

Quite rare for technology but the MIDI standard for interfacing with musical electronic instruments is very much still the standard and largely unchanged even down to the 5-pin DIN connectors today! Not many other standards have that claim to fame. Steinberg (the makers of the first bit of software) are very much still in business and some of the note editing software paradigms (changing note length graphically etc) are still de rigueur today.

@symbiat0

Жыл бұрын

And they only just ratified MIDI 2.0 in the past couple years… 😉

@thoang101

Жыл бұрын

We stop using 5-pin DIN quite some time ago. I've been using USB for at least 7 years now.

@symbiat0

Жыл бұрын

@@thoang101 And yet, new instruments come out every day that still use DIN connectors… 😞

@thoang101

Жыл бұрын

@@symbiat0 They're there for backward compatibility only. Thanks to that, I can still connect with my old synth for the vintage sounds.

@symbiat0

Жыл бұрын

@@thoang101 There is no consensus or consistency - some instruments don’t have USB, some have only TRS (and sometimes the “wrong” kind requiring a dongle and guess what? The dongle ends in a female DIN connector…).

Sitting in front of my macpro rig, this video makes me appreciate the progress in music tech that accelerated during my early childhood.

@Mamotreco

Жыл бұрын

Yet so much remains the same. MIDI is still the standard (virtually unchanged from those days) and some of the features and interface ideas (esp. from Steinberg) are still relevant today. Not only that there are producers who swear by the Atari ST and its rock solid timing for MiDi sequencing

@christianokami2220

Жыл бұрын

@@Mamotreco agreed that midi is long overdue for it's 2.0 update to be implemented, but considering how much we've managed to knock out with ye olden MIDI, still a solid platform.

@AutPen38

Жыл бұрын

It's kind of amazing that today's music producers can do it all on a laptop, but home studios often feature 2 or even 3 4K widescreens, but in the 8-bit/16-bit era, people used those chunky CRT monitors that have really low resolution. The screen connected to the Atari ST in this clip is almost comically small. I used a sequencer back in the early '90s and it was so clunky compared to today's versions, but it got the job done.

Banging synth music.

People still use the Atari ST.

@dussie920

Жыл бұрын

Definitely yes.

@claudedespres4772

Жыл бұрын

Yes, I use Atari tt 032 since 1991 with Cubase because it’s more faster than PCfor some manipulation.

Fred really knew his stuff - a proper nerd.

How far we have come along! This gives us perspective and much appreciation. Glad y'all shared this! :) 🎹❤

Thank you guys so much for sharing this! Born and raised in canada so I never got to enjoy these programs. I had an Atari ST because of the MIDI ports and it was life changing. SMPTE tracks, Cubase with an 8 track reel to reel and an Alesis keyboard made me feel like I was king of the musical world.

Woooo !! Agassi and the Atari ST!

So summing up - these concepts and the MIDI interface standard is ~40 years old. As a musician and moreover as an IT architect I must say "Respect! Well done!" I think the MIDI standard was *the event* in evolution of musical instruments ... unbelievable. Thanks for sharing, this is a so great piece of history / documentation! Liked and have a great day!

Good to see my favorite gear all together on a BBC feature, the ESQ1, CZ101 and the C64, except I have the mighty MSSIAH instead. Let's rock like it's 1986!

I haven't seen one comment yet on just what the hell Lesley Judd was wearing! LOL I remember watching this and that was normal attire in the 80s!

How lovely to stumble across this ! I've got a Casio CZ101 now and I love it, very under rated cos of how it looks and feels. And Music 5000, 'Ample', BBC Micro....Fred Harris aaahhhh I can only handle so much nostalgia at once !

Wow, this takes me back!

Wow! 8 different voices!

@bigboxerable

Жыл бұрын

Er, that’s impressive, 8-part multitimbrality. Most synths of the time could only produce one sound. Still today, most synths produce only one sound.

Great stuff. More please! ☺

These shows were so well made.

Lesley Judd. Hair by Vidal Sassoon, make up by Yves Saint Laurent, jump suit by Quality Street.

@KidMrRemixes

2 күн бұрын

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I still have my Atari 1040 STE although I don't use it anymore. (I will say that the MIDI timing of sequences in Cubase in the mid-90s was tighter than on the £10k Mac Pro I use today.) So funny to watch the hosts here enthusiastically waxing lyrical about the horrible-sounding telephone on-hold music generated by these machines. Great times.

Music Programs has really come a far way! I remember when I use to dream having something like these to work on. Now for the first I finally got my powerful studio. 😃

I remember at school having the music 500 system on the BBC , it also had a controller keyboard called music 400 .

I had the same setup, happy days! Pro24 was great software

I had a Commodore 64 and didn't realise it had that MIDI capability, but it looks like just about any 8-bit computer could. Great piece of archival footage that told me I should have used my first computer a lot better than I did!

Still have my Atari ST, still works too. ST, Midex & Cubase SMPTEd up to an 8 track cassette machine.. good times!

I still have Atari STs and a BBC Micro. I remember Steinberg Pro-24 was the thing at the time. Fun times.

Wonderful clip, thanks for this!! It took me back to my teenage years, without a budget trying to squeeze something musical from my Commodore Vic 20. This had a cheap (by today’s standards) sound chip which I recall could be controlled by a SOUND (x,y,z,a) command - pitch, duration, timbre and volume I think. A few of those, with a GOTO 10 at the end to loop it, and I was dreaming of replacing T’Human League in the charts.

@BlueStratRedStrat

Жыл бұрын

Same here, my friend.

@10MinuteGuitarJams

Жыл бұрын

My first computer was a VIc 20.. Hard to believe it had 19k of memory after it booted up! 19 KILOBYTES!!!!!

@BlueStratRedStrat

Жыл бұрын

@@10MinuteGuitarJams You must’ve upgraded your one. My standard VIC came with 3.5K of RAM (and 20k of ROM.) I got a 16K RAM-pack eventually so that I could play Jet Pac on it. Happy days.

@10MinuteGuitarJams

Жыл бұрын

@@BlueStratRedStrat You're right! 20k of ROM! I had the 8k "expansion cartridge".. Seems insane now that my watch is infinitely more powerful than my first computer.. Mind you, it has been 40 years!

Pro 24 was my first sequencing software and I made many records with it. All these years later im still with Steinberg with Cubase Pro 12... it's been one hell of a ride!

daym this is amazing !!!!!!!

I like that shiny silky green nylon jumpsuit. XD Man. Fashion was crazy in the 80's

Amazing

My god my god !! I have worked on Cubase for years. Didn't know this is perhaps the precursor to modern DAWs. And honestly the work flow is still the same. I guess the ability to record audio came later on as this version seems to record just MIDI. Amazing video !!

コレが今でも使われ、通用することは驚くべきことだ

I remember going to a demo of MIDI in 1983 which was presented by one of my former music teachers. It seemed amazing and confusing at the time. 8k sound… whohoo!

Dreamed of having this as a kid! My studio now puts that early midi to shame!

Fred's coda/coder joke though 🤣

Our music class in High School used Atari STs, and so did the music class in the college I went to as well. Amazing, and never once spared a thought to latency etc. because it all just worked, we just made music. Which in modern times I've learned that was a particular feature of the Atari ST, thanks to direct MIDI support at the hardware level, and artists would continue using Atari STs to compose music long after it was supposedly obsolete for that reason.

what a fantastic mullet

I hope Tony had a good monitor. That Atari ST is displaying in Medium Resolution, which was very hard to read on standard colour CRTs. The ST's high resolution monochrome monitor was pin sharp, though, and that's what most users had for productivity software.

@Wagoo

Жыл бұрын

It was fine on a good TV via a SCART cable. It looks like an Atari SC1224 colour monitor being used here for Pro 24

@vwestlife

Жыл бұрын

@@Wagoo Plus in this case it was easier to demonstrate it with the color monitor because its refresh rate matched the video camera's frame rate (50 Hz for PAL). If they had used the hi-res monochrome monitor it would've had a flickering image on camera due to its higher refresh rate (72 Hz). That's easier on the eyes in real life, but not on camera.

@Wagoo

Жыл бұрын

@@vwestlife yep, good point :)

Excellent.

This is great BBC Archive, me in the late 80's,Atati ST & Cubase, a keyboard & a drum machine,..lol BTW, thanks to Mr Ikutaro Kakehashi / Mr Dave Smith for MIDI (awe...R.i.P guy's )BLESS! ✨ 🙏🏾

I still have an Atari ST with Cubase in my loft. All these years on, I’m still using Cubase and wouldn’t use anything else. But on another note I still have a spectrum 81,Spectrum 48k with the rubber keys, Spectrum 48k with the hard keys, plus 2 and a plus 3. All sat there in my loft next to my Atari st and it’s monitor. 😬

@charliehudson9827

Жыл бұрын

Ewww...just get a ps5 or x box s/x.

@fatdaduk

Жыл бұрын

@@charliehudson9827 Got one of them too, but crap for making music.😂

@andrewharing2637

Жыл бұрын

@@charliehudson9827 Why?

@greedokenobi3855

Жыл бұрын

I also still have my Atari ST (actually have 6 of them) and am still using Cubase (but not on Atari lol, on pc). Great days.

I might just get into computer music one day!

this is priceless!

I have one of those full size Commodore keyboards given to me when I bought a Emu Emulator 2. Got a plug in C64 music cartridge that produces a modular screen in black.

I love Lesley Judd's outfit... I wish they would bring the 80's back!

@nizaru100

Жыл бұрын

Let'us SHOP Vintage then ! SHALL WE ??

@KoichiFirst8092

6 ай бұрын

She in shiny green? If yes, then I absolutely agree!

Magnificent.

i had a banjo n sat on it and da spring reverb went right up my bum!

I'd pay major cash for Leslie's jumpsuit and that Micro Live sign..

I started producing music in an Atari ST with Cubase

Starting making Music wtih an AMIGA 500 incl. Sampler,Synthie ect. Great machine,work today too.

This was nostalgic. I sold my Ensoniq's back in the 90's. But I still have a working Atari 1040st from 1989 with the Sonus Masterpiece Sequencer software. Watching this reminds me of the time I was just learning all of this goodness 😁

I love that the Steinberg guy introduced quantizing to the public and within seconds said it can sound a bit "wooden" if you quantize everything - a complaint made today!

@All4Tanuki

Жыл бұрын

It's crazy how much of what he said was echoed directly by my teacher when I was learning my first DAW, just eight years ago

I wonder how much troubleshooting they did to get this to work before the show ? Lol! Takes me back to my teenage years. As a pianist, I was fascinated! In combination with MTV, I never let it go. Today in my studio I have JDXA TB3 MX-1 TI Virus Snow Launchpad Mk3 Berringer 303 Another MX-1 Modular rack And 3 controllers all hooked via MIDI. Still amazed by the vision of this technology! I love the video with Vince Clarke explaining all of this too!

Now in 2022 we have MIDI 2.0 protocol. Long path from 1983's first version of MIDI.

I remember Cubase on the AtariST, quantisation etc good ' acid house ' music machine 1990s

And now here I am sending SoundCloud new synthwave tracks I've made on an iPhone. How far we've come.

This is ace! Fondly reminds me of my business card for my wee 8-Track demo studio I set up in late 1988. Proudly displaying “Steinberg Pro 24, SMPTE, Atari, Fostex” etc. I still have that same working Atari, SM monitor and Cubase V3 with countless projects from the last 30 odd years…

@leopoldbluesky

Жыл бұрын

Stupidly, I literally threw out my perfectly working pair of 4meg STe and Mega Ataris with colour and mono screens about 15 years ago as I'd gone over to Cubase then Reaper on PC. Recently I went through my box of Cubase floppies with song ideas only to find 1) my PC won't read the Atari extended format and 2) all my songs were saved as ALL files and not MID - now I'm kicking myself. What an idiot!

@jessihawkins9116

Жыл бұрын

@@leopoldbluesky I still have all of my stuff 😌

@leopoldbluesky

Жыл бұрын

@@jessihawkins9116 Don't sell it, but if you do then sell it to me!

@Wagoo

Жыл бұрын

@@leopoldbluesky ironically the ST could read PC formatted DD floppies just fine 😂 You can probably image the floppies using dd_rescue under Linux and then use an emulator like Hatari or STeem to read them and convert to MIDI. However USB floppy drives don't ever seem to work properly for low level access to the drives.. you probably need to use a real floppy drive plugged into the motherboard for this to work

@leopoldbluesky

Жыл бұрын

@@Wagoo Yep, on my very long Todo list! I've got a bunch of old PCs with floppy drives knocking around and have STeem installed, so I will get around to it some time. Just never enough hours in the day when it comes to music technology!

Great ending!

Nice mullet

LOL..ive still got this exact same set up in my attic..i dont use it though but i kept it for nostalgia and good memorys..back in the rave days this was the set up for many many big rave tracks

I remember using the ST at school in the late 80s doing music production like this but also scoring where you would play parts on the keyboard and it would "write" the music for you on the screen to be printed out later. Save writing all those notes lol

And in case anyone wasn't sure when this was recorded one look at what Lesley Judd was wearing should clear things up.

Lesley Judd...she can fall off my xmas tree anytime. 😉

80's BLAST!!! OMG HAHA! So cool!

Wow this brings back memories. I had a zx spectrum, the cheetah midi interface and casio cz 101. The cheetah midi interface and software wasn't great and buggy. But I did also have their specdrum which was great to use.

@robman80808

Жыл бұрын

Specdrum was the mutts.

My MIDI journey We still have midi to this day. I have a synth from 1986, a Yamaha DX100 mini version of a DX7. In midi in out and thru (through - that's how they spelt it). To use it with a modern computer such as a laptop I would use a USB-Midi interface. I love the idea of being able to connect the new and right now to the past. Cubase I loved you I used Steinberg Cubase on the Atari ST for year, and then on Windows, but now I use Logic Pro and Ableton. The best thing is that Logic has a lot in common with Cubase, so it always has that feeling of nostalgia for me, whereas Ableton is something very different. Both these software are superb.

I started off on an Amiga, before buying an Atari ST with a midex interface and a cracked version of Cubase 3.1. I ran both, the Amiga effectively being used as a MIDI sampler, while the more sophisticated Cubase on Atari was the master, clocked to a bunch of analog gear (using a midi to cv converter) while also sequencing the more modern midi gear. It might've occasion went wonky, but it was a great set-up, virtually zero latency or jitter.

The Atari / Amiga had better sound and could do speech synthesis. The BBC Micro had MIDI in the early 80's famously used by Vince Clarke of Depeche Mode / Yazoo & Erasure

ahh the Atari st the birth of dance music

Lesley’s get up. Groovy!!

”Musical coda..” Clever chap!

I wish I had a "professional music synthesiser"... I would write popular music for the pop parade.

Fred is very accurate at the end there. I have countless plugins and options but no ideas. 😥

I first had the Steinberg Pro 12 on commodore (pre cubase)

This is basically SONIC STATE - 36 years ago.

@Mamotreco

Жыл бұрын

Based

Fred Harris was a great presenter

The Cheetah MK5, next on Ulis clone list...

@paulfidler3710

Жыл бұрын

I had a cheetah SpecDrum. Excellent, it was. Well, it would have been had I the remotest musical capability!

Ah! The golden age of MIDI. I had an Atari with Cubase, it was a dream!.

and today we have VSTs and Ableton or Steinberg still with us and lots of mastering software or even recreations of old synths like Arturia and MIDI still with as as well 🙂

Oh wow, the ESQ's are wonderful