Amiga MODS: back to the old school beat

I’ve always loved the ability of the AMIGA to produce great music with minimal (back then) effort. Does the names OCTAMED or PROTRACKER sound familiar to you?

OCTAMED and PROTRACKER were editors/ track sequencers (4 tracks with 15 instruments / samples in total) with which you could layout your song into tracks that could be arranged in any sequence you desired from a master list. So basically what you did is to edit every track according to your talents and then arrange these tracks on the master list to play one after the other in any order you set it up. Each track would contain samples that would be played on the timing you set it up. It was gorgeous and I’ve spent many allnighters writing music with it. The best part of it was that it didn’t even require any additional hardware such as a piano keyboard to prove your musical talents 🙂 I loved OCTAMED purely for it’s interface style but many people preferred PROTRACKER instead.

It was very popular back then and even the very first rave bands begun their career on MOD writing. (.mod was the extension of the sequencer file – the mod contained the tracks, the master list and the samples you’ve used for your track – which also determined the .mod file size) In fact some of the very first rave demos were actually recorded .mod files on tape! Not to mention the game industry which used the format almost exclusively

Anyways just to remember the good old days, I’ve found this page which has some Amiga, Atari ST and ZX Spectrum (!!!!) written mods for free download (on mp3 format). I might add more pages whenever I find some 🙂

Enjoy a bit of nostalgia 🙂

More mod stuff >>>

• .mod file descritpion on Wikipedia
• The .mod Archive
• Ankman’s Amiga Mod Page
• World of Game Mods
• Amiga Music Preservation
• Classic Game Soundtracks
• Metas Amiga Mod Page (good site with loads of varied songs)
• FlatRich’s EPs
• pt-mods.de (all the underground rave, techno, trance, acid, drum’n’bass, electro, synth, ambient plus more you’ll ever wanna hear! MASSIVE!)

… more to come …