Skuggemannen
One of my big dreams in the late 80s was to get my own home computer. The C64 and later Amiga 500 was amazing beyond words to me at the time, but my family could not afford them. I had been playing guitar for some time when the Atari Falcon was released in the early 90s. It had MIDI and audio recording capabilities and was exactly what I thought I needed to create and record music. The cost was significant for the core machine itself, and I didn't realize I would need a bit more than that to actually start recording with Cubase Audio Falcon. So my music productions of the time involved mostly messing around with "Digital Tracker". The Falcon itself somehow managed to stay relevant and in occasional use over the next couple of decades but not much for making music. The PC would take over by the end of the 90s with interwebs and everything. Still the Falcon represented the core, heart and dreams of where my digital journey with music started.
In 2017 I finally had space to permanently setup the Falcon as part of my Home studio/DAW. Since then I have enjoyed experimenting with chiptunes, much thanks to software like MaxYMiser and Ace Tracker. I don't use any emulators for this because part of the enjoyment is to actually be creative on my good old Falcon that keeps working after almost 30 years of service.
Shades of Circuits
"Shades of Circuits" is a chip music album made with MaxYMiser during 2018/2019. Bowdog (track #2) won the old schol music compo of Solskogen 2019, a pretty sweet victory as this was the first release ever done with my wonderfull Atari Falcon after 26 years of service.
The album was later released as a music disc at Sommarhack 2021 with intro/outro and pixel art and poetry to accompany each track.
Shades Of Circuits album is dedicated to Ståle Solem (R.I.P) who shared a mutual facination and interest in the Atari Falcon 030.
Spotify
YouTube playlist
Atari Falcon Music disc release
Also available from
l'Abbaye des Morts
After releasing the Shades of Circuits chiptune album, I came in touch with Joska who was working on releasing a Falcon version of the l'Abbaye des Morts game. He was looking for new and original music for the game. I made 15 tracks for in the end using MaxYMiser with 3 channels only using the YM chip and with cpu friendly sounds. We experimented quite a bit with different trackers and sample based solutions to use the Falcons capabilities to its full potential, but could not find a good solution within the limited time. So MaxYMiser being a rock solid tool got the job done.
Demoscene
The Falcon opened up new paths for me to explore, and I have in recent years enjoyed creating music on different platforms both solo and in collaboration with friends. An Amiga 500 and a couple of C64 has also been included in the studio setup finally, modified for MIDI control.
Most of my demoscene releases can be found at my Demozoo profile.