Posted By
Csabo
on 2020-01-29
09:14:54
|  Re: How did you make music in the old days for demos?
We have to look at each different "era" separately. So, very briefly:
- "Pre-scene" era: music in commercial games is written "by hand". There are no formalized music editors or players, each piece is a work of art unto itself (just like the games themselves!). Notable tunes: anything by David Whittaker (exemplary use of the TED's capabilities), Terra Nova (a masterpiece in both composition and TED usage - volume, noise, adding extra notes to make it sound like there's more than 2 channels), anything by Brigitte Gertz.
- "Old-school scene" era: the only person composing music is ern0 (one of the greats!), using the (lost) Vanguard player. It has a very distinct sound. Otherwise music in demos is dominated by Pigmy's conversions.
- "Scene" era: nearly everyone uses the ever-evolving freq converters. Often badly. Wit (one of the greats!) revolutionizes the scene with the wave-converters. Only 3 exceptions that I can think off the top of my head: TEK (using their own stuff), LOD (that's us, using Future Composer) and Steve (he did a couple of tunes, also FC).
- "Post scene" era: this is now. Dominated by LOD Player (that's just me), and the eventual arrival of TEDzakker and Knaecketraecker.
That about covers it in very large strokes. As you can see, there's not much, and the tools that were used are mostly lost.
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