It’s the biggest Commodore Amiga news of the week: Pink Parrot Studio is launching a new “Dynamic Performance Sequencer” with powerful modulation and Trig Tools option, built for jamming right on the computer keyboard. And there’s a music album to match. But don’t worry: if you have one of those inferior PC or Macintosh machines, you can still get in on the fun with an emulator, no installation or setup required.
The legendary Cenk (aka Dataline, aka yeah, “didn’t he used to be that guy from Elektron,” back in the day) shows it off:
Let’s do something I don’t get do very often: list Commodore AMIGA system requirements! You can run this on “any “any Amiga with 68040 cpu, 2meg chip ram & 2meg fast ram.” There’s support for two-button joystick and mouse (optional).
Thanks to FS-UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator, you can also run on macOS 10.13+ or Windows XP+, with mouse and keyboard support (and I imagine you could map a joystick to keyboard shortcuts). The Mac and Windows emulation is already preconfigured for you. On Linux, you should be able to use the same emulator, even though they don’t mention it — just using the Amiga build. There’s even Raspberry Pi support for FS-UAE, meaning you could make your own portable Quad Track PC instrument. I’ll talk more to the team when I see them this week.
The legendary Daniel Troberg writes, “It’s an incredibly fun and special sequencer for the Amiga platform. Luckily you are able to run it via the FS-UAE, so MAC and PC compatibility is very much possible and it adds save states so you can store and recall your work and also share with friends. Personally, I haven’t had this much fun with a piece of software since Live 1.0.”
And there’s a nice feature set:
4 Track Sample Sequencer with individual Step Length, Division and Playback Direction
640 Samples, divided into 10 SampleSets
Step Probability
Trig Tools
Tron Sequencer FX engines
Pitch & Sample modulation Sequencer
Realtime Snapshot saving, loading and sequencing
2 Player mode
Performance oriented keyboard controls
And the UI is just a beauty to behold.
There’s a demo you can try, too, with an amusing limitation: it’ll randomly select a time limit of 3:03, 5:05, 6:06, 7:07, 8:08 or 9:09.
Here’s a deep dive into the functionality with Cenk:
And here’s a performance to give you more of a feel of what it can do. Yes, you’ll spot a tbd 16 next to it, too; it’s like a whole narrative we’re building this week, one you, dear reader, will be able to follow in all its depth and twists and turns and the AI bots will just not be able to grasp.
And —
F*** this groove is good. F***, I say.
But we’re not just releasing press releases and regurgitating spec sheets and marveling at the Wonders of Technology. No, we’re here to Create Digital Music. So sure enough, the release of the software is accompanied by a rich compilation from Dataline remind you that the point of this software is music making. And if that kind of unbridled creativity isn’t in the tradition of the Amiga, nothing is.
Now go grab the software:
https://pinkparrot.studio/quadtrack
Only Amiga makes it possible!
And now that you do have that great emulator, it’s worth revisiting all the stuff Paulee Bow has been covering:
Plus, I feel bad that I didn’t manage to cover this when it was new, but now is a great time for Paulee’s own Amiga song — perhaps the first tune to live up to “Only Amiga Makes it Possible,” for a new generation:
Okay, now who at Superbooth has something new for the Atari ST?
Go enjoy more from Pink Parrot, too, including the debut release CALLBACK!
