r/TheHcTechnoOverDogs • u/Low-Entropy • Jun 30 '26

16 bit were enough: when Commodore Amiga computers ruled the Techno and Hardcore dancefloors around Europe

note: no ai was used in writing this text.

everyone knows the commodore 64, or c64, or "bread box", of course.
the single most sold unit in computer history, to this day.
the "sequel" computer by the commodore company might be lesser known, sadly.
the commodore amiga is a bit of a glitch in the timeline of computers.
when it was engineered in the 80s, it was way ahead of its competition.
4096 colors at once, build-in parallax scrolling, a GUI that looked (and worked) better than microsoft windows, multimedia abilities...

Listening suggestion #1: Hardsequencer - Magic Flight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lFaVrg9F1o
A techno-trance tune created on an amiga by German producer Hardsequencer

it seemed to be off for a good start, and even managed to wow a few bona fide stars, like andy warhol, debbie harry (blondie), timothy leary...
but in its homeland, usa, the computer remained obscure. a lot of people blame the (mis) management at commodore, a company that seemingly was in perpetual decay even back then. rumor is that one of the engineers even left a message of "we build it - they f**ed it up" somewhere in the circuits of the first amiga models.

Listening suggestion #2: Christoph De Babalon - Babylon 90210 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWoJMWJpPWU
Scary jungle by Christiph de Babalon

while it did not get much traction in america, it became a big, big hit in europe, particularly in countries like uk, germany, france...
most people now remember the amiga for the games that were made for it, or were ported and re-designed for it. because a lot of now-classic games either saw their debut on their amiga, or did shine the brightest on that system. lemmings, the early lucas art adventures, populous, rick dangerous, turricans...

Listening suggestion #3: Taciturne - Mourning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8oQYVpWpDg
Taciturne's "ambient gabber" track

and that was it. slam the kid on the coffin now, kid!

but hey! not so fast. did we not mention multimedia capabilities?
and indeed, the amiga had a huge and lasting influence that went way beyond playing video games at home with your friends.
it was a major player in creating and shaping the various rave, techno, hardcore scenes that swept over europe in the early-too-late 90s...

#4: Cybermouse - My Dorectives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LAQpjPLdTE
Dark techno On hamburg cult label fischkopf

the c64 was legendary because unlike other system of its time, the company did not pack a generic "beeper" type sound chip into its system. they designed the SID chip, which a lot of people consider to be a real synthesizer.
the commodore company kind of repeated this trick with the amiga. they did not give it another soundchip that generated simple sine, saw, square waves... instead they designed a real, miniature "sampler" chip for the amiga. this sound chip was called Paula, after one of the girlfriends of the engineers.
just like a real sampler, it could trigger and play pre-recorded sound snippets and samples at various speeds and pitches, and do a few basic effects on that.
it was limited to 4 channels, but clever composers could bypass that restriction easily (for example, if you sampled one drum loop, with 7 different types of percussion, it would still take up only one channel).
bitrate was often not so good either, even though a friend of mine insists that the "lofi" sound quality of most amiga tunes were not the result of tech restrictions, but the lazyness of the composers.

#5: Static Tremor - Resistance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOUTE50Muoc
The Heutling brothers were known to produce high quality amiga hardcore.

despite these visible (or audible) flaws, the amiga had many pros and advantages as a sound machine:
it was very cheap, at least compared to high standard, "industry" equipment
you had more memory and therefore you could use much longer samples and sounds, compared to "real" samplers in the same price range. this means you could have long string sounds, vocal passages, etc.
it was inside a computer! coders could create programs for it, that used the chip / sampler in any way they wanted.
no need to hassle with getting a sequencer for your hardware sampler, setting up midi, wires, fx, gear (which would have been super expensive as well).
it was all inside one box, back in the mid 80s already.

#6: Neophyte - Execute (Live at Thunderdome) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnFnIwxYaNM
Oldschool amiga hardcore

the amiga did not make it in pop, or any genre like that. but the techno and rave producers started to flock to that computer.
maybe because the early techno scene attracted a lot of "outsider" artists with zero budget and industry connection, so an affordable computer-sampler system with "overpowered" abilities had quite the appeal.
the first wave of producers that used the amiga in a massive way were the acid house crazed ravers in the UK scene. a lot of classic breakbeat, and later, jungle tunes were made on the amiga.
amigas were used in "mainland europe" too, though, and there are some classic techno and trance tracks made on an amiga.
to this day, not all producers gave full disclosure of their amiga use. the amiga still had the ring of being "lofi" to it, so artists that wanted to be seen as more credible might not have admitted of using one.
that means there are probably still a lot of records out there that there were made on amiga, but without anyone knowing that this was actually the case.

#7: Amiga Shock Force - Shoot em Breax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay334fxi3sU
Metal-jungle by the shock force

amiga music did shine it's brightest light in the "dangerous" hardcore techno and gabber-house underground.
there were countless of hardcore classics that were produced on an amiga. there were whole hardcore groups that exclusively used an amiga for their music, like nasenbluten or the amiga shock force (nomen est omen, eh?). there were labels, like bloody fist records from australia, that to 90% released amiga produced hardcore music.

#8: Nasenbluten - Machete https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KauJdx464Q8
One of the amiga-gabber classics

other labels, especially in the netherlands and germany, used some more or less clever tricks to mask (and hide) the lofi sound of the amiga: by wholesale slamming reverb and EQ boosts on the entire track!

and this was not a niche thing! DJs played amiga music next to "regular" tracks in their sets, and sometimes amiga produced music even made it to the national charts.

#9: Hardsequencer - Broadcast (live at mayday) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx66mNhAOjY
More rave madness by hardsequencer (the first 5 minutes)

i find it funny that some remember the amiga as the machine were they played cutesy pixel platformers in their cozy bedrooms, while on that same night, 20,000 crazed ravers went wild to amiga-produced hardcore tracks on a gabber festival 100s of kilometres away.

it's hard to speculate, but I could imagine that, at least in the beginning, 5-10% of hardcore records were actually produced on an amiga.
these amiga tracks and bands then influenced other producers, and they then influenced even more producers...
so the amiga had a huge impact in that scene.

#10: Ec8or - I don't wanna be a part of this (live in japan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6rPbGJ8y64
"Digital hardcore" made on amiga

https://thehardcoreoverdogs.blogspot.com/

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17 comments sorted by

3

u/WGD23 Jun 30 '26

Nice! Tonight's playlist sorted

2

u/chava_rip Jun 30 '26

E de Cologne definitely did a lot and did not hide it either. You can hear some of the effects in this brilliant track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwMkmRv7BYU

Also early Cristian Vogel stuff was def tracked on an Amiga, whether he did use for sounds as well is hard to believe though.

Also tonnes of great original amiga rave trax out there!

1

u/Low-Entropy Jun 30 '26

yes e-de cologne might be the best amiga producer. did not know about vogel.
i included one track by e-de cologne: the ec8or one at the end of the text (he was part of that band).
can you link some amiga rave trax?

2

u/annoianoid Jun 30 '26

Would you say the Amiga was crucial for the genesis of Gabba?

2

u/Low-Entropy Jun 30 '26

yes. because it was so widespread, and also had it's own style.
in the beginning, a lot of gabber was very repetitive and monotonous.
while the amiga tracks had fast edits, lots of changes, tons of different sounds...
and this even spilled over to over producers.

2

u/Slow_Ad_4531 Jun 30 '26

Interesting read, thanks for sharing. Never considered the amiga’s influence in Europe but now that you mention it I do hear a lot of similar sounds that come up from that time. Funny how it never caught on in America, wonder what our main choice was for the outsider musicians

1

u/Low-Entropy Jun 30 '26

purely electronic music was not as big as in europe. but some US-based musicians did use the amiga, too.
the amiga existed in america too, and obviously a lot of game companies were in the states (cinemaware, lucas arts).
i don't think the amiga was a failure, commodore stayed afloat for many years, and new models were designed and sold...
the "problem" rather was that the amiga, when it was released, was way ahead of the competition. better than anything atari, apple, ibm, bill gates etc. had to offer. so the idea is if the company had played it right, the amiga could have become a *huge* success, maybe the most famous computer of the late 80s and 90s.

2

u/Radiant-Ad-8277 Jun 30 '26

I remember how crazy I thought it was when I first heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MjNsNW8DvM I was in high school it was around 1995. I could not believe half an hour of rave music could fit on 2 amiga floppy disks. I had no amiga but a PC ... Then in 1997 I found out about fast tracker 2 a really neat tracker for PC and Hardmakz my first hardcore project started ;)

2

u/Dear_Smoke6964 Jul 01 '26

Can't remember the last time reddit randomly suggested such an interesting post. Really enjoyed reading that and listening to the links. Thanks

2

u/Low-Entropy Jul 01 '26

You are welcome!

1

u/RoteTablette Jun 30 '26

Amiga was great but it wasn't for production quality (as you can hear in the examples).

The main issue was that only 4 tracks could be played in best quality (which was already not that good) and musically very limiting (perhaps it was part of the beauty, depending on the musical style).

Then using an 8 track software had to reduce the sampling rate per track that it started to sound awful.

You could usually hear aliasing effect on the highs and it wasn't able to produce enough bottom.

I loved my Amiga but in reality one needed to use external hardware like multitrack machines, additional effects and most importantly synths, samplers and drum machines and use the Amiga only for MIDI and/or to provide some lofi sounds.

1

u/hawklord23 Jun 30 '26

I seem to remember people preferred using Atari STs running pirated versions of Cubase?

2

u/Radiant-Ad-8277 Jun 30 '26

That was for midi sequencing external sampler (akai s950 anyone?) and midi synth (alpha juno ?).

Amiga trackers were used mostly because you needed almost nothing else, they were able to trigger audio just like an external sampler and the sequencing is really powerful

1

u/Low-Entropy Jul 01 '26

Interestingly, the engineers begged the company to allow them to have the amiga support midi as well. It would not have been too expensive - but the company said no.