Commodore!

i'm not sure what causes these things, but today i started thinking about the Commodore 64. it may have come from watching old episodes of the 'Computer Chronicles' show on archive.org, especially the one about the c64. it didn't take me more than 3 minutes of searching to find Power64, a really good C64 emulator for osx and a great site for old C64 music software.

i've just started playing with it, but as most C64 geeks know, the SID chip that commodore used to make sound is pretty damn cool. entire hardware synths have been built around the SID6581 chip, as well as a pretty decent vst plugin, the QuadraSID. i've used the QuadraSID a bunch of times on recordings and you definitely can't fake that SID sound with any other synth.

but i really did want to spend some time away from my usual point n' click music apps, Live, Cubase SX2, Reason, etc etc. and write some music the old fashioned 80s way. so far i've only gotten to ProDrum2.0, which is a pretty neat sort-of-808-style drum programmer. (and i love how they spell it 'basedrum') it didnt take more than a minute to start cranking out pretty raw sounding 80's videogame drum sounds. fantastic! with names like 'music construction set' and 'cybertracker' it has to be cool. any actual hardware C64 geeks out there with any advice? i've pretty much been a mac user for music since my late-80s Mac SE days, and before that it was the Atari 1040, so i missed all this C64 fun the first time around.