by Pulse Wave » 03 May 2014 15:10
Hoo boy, where to start...
See, I'm so old already that the years around the millennium are the same for many of you as the early to mid-80s are for me. That, and most of my life is nostalgia. Starting in the early-to-mid-90s, the newer music is, the more likely am I to dislike it. But I could write forever about the music of the 60s, 70s and 80s, also because I was lucky enough to experience the latter myself. (I shall start the occasional thread about music from the past at some point...)
My most recent flashback was probably the Full Tines preset on my Yamaha TX802. The electric piano from the release of the DX7 in 1983 to some point in the 90s when "vintage" was invented and the Rhodes was rediscovered. Give it a bit of reverb, and you've got one great ballad piano.
Lego was mentioned in this thread. Heh, I started to collect Lego a few years after the minifigs had come out. Those were the times when the AFOLs were kids themselves. Lego had three regular lines back then: Town (mine grew to an enormous size with everything a town needs within six or seven years), Space (Zeerust, anyone; I had some of that, too) and Castle (medieval theme, had yellow castles first and was rebooted with grey walls, more minifig accessories, more realistic horses and even Robin Hood sets in the mid-80s; I didn't have any of that, but I knew a few kids who did).
The Lego railway was really cool in the 80s. It wasn't battery-powered (except the one low-budget set with 3 D-cells in a separate battery car that one could always find in the catalogue ever since the 70s), it ran on 12V DC which came through a second pair of rails, and it could be operated much like a real model railway including remote-controlled switches and decouplers and functional signals. Unfortunately, it didn't survive new EU laws in 1993.
Computers and video games... Well, they had their first heyday back then. And how! The 80s were the era of the home computer. What's known today as a PC — back then known as IBM 8514 and compatible computers — were pure office machines and quite limited for their price.
Some Atari 2600 were still around, but the console of the 80s was the NES (a.k.a. Famicom). The Sega Master System was for hipsters before hipsters were invented; Sega didn't make it big before the early 90s when they competed against the first monochrome Game Boy with their Game Gear (which failed almost as miserably as the Atari Lynx despite being better than the Game Boy) and against the Super NES (a.k.a. Super Famicom) with their successful Mega Drive.
Most of the gaming in the 80s happened on home computers. The first really versatile and successful one was the Commodore C64. Not really easy to use, but the more hackable, therefore kept by a generation of geeks. Those who simply wanted to play games were more interested in the Amiga 500 which almost worked like a console but used floppy disks which could be copied. I can't recall a single Amiga user who didn't have XCOPY — or one who had legally bought a single game. A frequent activity on school yards was the exchange of floppies.
The late 80s saw the arrival of the Atari ST. It did have its share of games, yes, but it was rather a computer for the creative user, especially the synthesizer musician. The ST had a built-in MIDI port (our VSTis were hardware synths), and it was the computer platform for which Cubase and Notator were developed.
Home producing was still difficult and/or expensive, though, because the only computer system on which entire songs could be produced was the NED Synclavier — the DAW was not only not invented yet, it wasn't even possible on boxes with some 512kB of RAM and a single-core 7MHz CPU. So the cheapest way to record something was by playing what one could play by hand and leave the rest to the sequencer, mixing it in real time and recording it on cassette with no chance to make any corrections in the mix later on. Cheap multitracking was limited to four tracks on the same kind of cassette. The next step was a professional 8-track reel-to-reel tape machine which hardly any bedroom producer could afford, not to mention the space these monsters occupied. Oh, and mastering would have required another tape machine, but most musicians left that to people who actually knew their way around mastering (that was long before you could "learn" mastering on YouTube).
Speaking of tapes, I still remember the video format war. VHS vs. Betamax vs. Video 2000. Betamax was vastly better, but VHS had the better lobby, so VHS won. (Guess some of you have hardly experienced the times before Blu-Ray.)
In fact, the mid-80s were revolutionary times for TV in Germany. Video recorders came up, satellite and cable TV came up — and private TV came up after decades of having three PBS stations at any given place in Germany. The new stations like RTL+ and SAT.1 could only be received via cable or satellite, but not via terrestrial antenna (these two stations came to analogue terrestrial TV in the 90s, but only them), so many Germans bolted satellite dishes to their houses — a dish cost them only once, cable would have cost them monthly.
Something else that was serious business in the 80s was hi-fi. Those were the times when more and more Japanese hi-fi devices appeared on the market — and when component systems were all the rage. You basically had two paradigms: One was to get the entire system from one and the same company, preferably even the speakers. This had the best looks because everything looked the same, and the supporters said that everything works together the best if it all comes from the same brand. The other one was to pick the best from the best makers because no company was best at everything. So you had a Dual or Thorens turntable, an Onkyo amp, a Nakamichi tape deck (hi-fi nerds would bow before you if you had The Dragon) and so on. This was what the geeks with enough money to burn on hi-fi had...
...the same kind of people at whom the Metal (IEC IV) tapes were targeted which cost as much as three CrO₂ (IEC II) tapes. "Ferro" (IEC I) tapes were for the cheap who didn't care for sound quality and who mostly used them for spoken word. Us kids didn't use these, we always went for the "Chrome" tapes. Ah, the smell of a freshly unwrapped new cassette. Where I came from, we hardly made any mixtapes, and if we did, we only did it for ourselves. Most tapes were used for copying entire albums. A 90-minute tape could hold two 12" long-players. Guess why most of us had double tape decks. And guess why the MiniDisc introduced a copy generation bit in the 90s which rendered further copies of digitally recorded MDs impossible.
And then came the Walkman. Registered trademark of Sony, but even we used that term for any kind of portable cassette player (that was long before MP3, and MiniDisc didn't really make it big; I still have some of those, though); we mostly had Sony and Aiwa. Earbuds came up in the 90s, and those were neither earplugs nor white yet. In the 80s, we had headphones, and these weren't as fat as those overhyped Beats by Dr. Dre. Walkmen themselves came in several "classes": They started as cheap mechanically-controlled ones which couldn't even rewind. The next better ones could rewind. Then came features like electronic controls (mostly in the 90s, though) or a three-band EQ on the lid. And the best ones had a built-in radio.
I went through four or five Walkmen from the late 80s to 1997 or so when I was frustrated about another broken Walkman (and its consumption of AA-cells) and switched to a more reliable portable MiniDisc recorder (!) which should still be in working condition. Well, it had to be a recorder since I didn't have a MiniDisc deck before I bought one from my uncle in 2001, but most MD porties were recorders anyway. In school, I would always carry about a dozen tapes that I'd listen to during breaks. They also came in handy at excursions. From my job training on, however, I carried up to three wads with altogether almost 40 MDs. I spent a lot of time on trains back then. The MD's successor was one of the last iPod 4½G with a 20GB hard drive which in turn was followed by what I use today, an old Android-based monstrosity with a half-terabyte of hard disc space.
Old brony, older than old school.
Gear list, Jabber ID: see my profile.
No FL Studio, no VSTs. No Skype, no YouTube.
Sounds fly through the night, I follow Vın̈yl Scratch to Pony Wonderland.