Atari ST & Cubase: A Recording Session Using the DAW of the 1980s!

Thirty years ago, no studio would be without the Atari ST: it’s role in music represented a tour de force of design, low-cost and reliability. I even used one at university to do 16-bit audio editing: there was an added massive hard disk drive of 200 MB (0.2 GB or 0.0002 TB!). It did take a while to do edits though, with its 8 MHz clock speed being a little on the slow side...

Put it with Cubase version 2 however, and get it to do its MIDI duties, and it stands up to modern computing, a bit like the Morris Minor of 1949 keeping up with modern traffic conditions...

In this video, I do a quick recording session, where the keyboard goes into the computer via MIDI, and then the computer outputs the piano data on any of the 16 MIDi channels. The output of the computer feeds a multi-timbral sound module, where any of the instruments built in can be assigned to any of the 16 channels. The resulting audio comes out of two jacks, left and right, and there you have your sounds.

Later on in the session, I decide to record audio (vocal mic), but of course the Atari can’t do that: instead, it outputs MIDI time code (MTC), which can be read and understood by a hard disk multitrack recorder, in this case the veritable Fostex D-160. The Fostex recorder sees the time on the Atari and locks itself to it. The setup is then 16 MIDI channels and 16 audio channels. That’s quite enough for most purposes.

To cap it off, the overall mix is sent to an analogue reel-to-reel tape recorder, which was what happened back in the day...

Enjoy and Share!

To all those over 40: reminisce, while those under 40 will say “why would you use this stuff today?”. My answer is that to fully understand modern DAW, one needs to know where we came from...

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