More of Charlie please Rick, he has insight into the how technology has changed the industry and it needs documenting and also may offer insight to where we are going, plus he seems really interesting.
I went and saw Depeche Mode on tour in November, they have always been a synth - drum machine band. But i was blown away, by Christian Eigner, their live drummer for many years. He's fantastic!!
Super fun to hear this from Charlie and his memory is spot on! Andy Summers tech did inspire me to start Glyph! There were others as well. How I started it in Ithaca is another story. What a ride it was. And this is Steve Gorney.
Hey Gorn! I'm glad you got to see the interview, since you were featured prominently and the history of Glyph. Was a big part of my history in the tech world. I just recently moved from Massachusetts to Asheville NC and had to downsize A LOT and I took a carload full of old Glyph drives over to Glyph and traded the whole mess for a 2 TB drive that fits in my shirt pocket with room to spare! Things have certainly changed my brother!!
Back in 1984 the Cars put out Heartbeat City which was HUGE for them. In a Rolling Stone interview, drummer David Robinson said there “was not one hand played drum on the recording of Heartbeat City” which shocked the drumming world. Most thought it was Ric-O being a control freak but years later David said he was all for doing it. They always were a cutting edge tech type band and that was cutting edge at the time. They were his drum parts which he played live but in the studio he did all the programming.
Wow!! I had no idea Cubase was that old, it’s amazing you guys have seen the evolution of sequencing, midi/synthesis first hand. We REALLY need a full episode with Charlie !!!!!
Glad Charlie was there, look forward to the jam. Thanks, I love the shared memories, I always end up reminiscing about my teen years playing the bass and jamming in garages and basements in the 70's.
Hello from Ithaca Rick. Great to hear you and Charley talking about your lives when you lived in Ithaca! I’m ‘79 grad. My roomie took lessons from Steve.
Back in the late 90s I was working at Starstruck Studios in Nashville. One of our clients at that time was the late, great Roger Nichols. He’d mix for a while then stop and tell a few stories, then go back to work. One thing he talked about was creating Wendell… his first drum machine. He said that both he AND Roger Linn were taking an 8088 machine coding class, both with the idea of building a drum machine (oddly enough). He added that his was meant to be high fidelity, while Lin’s was meant for commercial sale. He went on to say that at that time it cost him $70,000 to make Wendell (realize that a meg of RAM cost him over ten grand at that time). Since hard drives at the time weren’t fast enough, he’s had sixteen hard drives built with a common spindle so that he could store one bit of the sixteen bit word on each drive and had them recalled in sync. He also said something like, “remember, this was before MIDI, so we had to record drum trigger tracks to trigger the playback from Wendell. He was a real genius, for sure, as well as a very fun guy who also lived on the cutting edge of audio. This was only ONE of the many stories that he told me during his brief stay at the studio.
5 Meg? In 1987? I wish! 😊 My music pc had 384 KB memory - but I upgraded to 640 KB - Whoopi !!! and a 7 MHz 8088 processor, with two 5.25" floppy drives. NO hard drive! You had to transfer the OS, then your music software, to memory every time you booted up.
He's got his dates wrong, the Atari Falcon came out in 1992. He's likely thinking of the 520STE (512k) and the 1040STE (1MB). Both of those machines were released around October in 1989.
I worked in a music store in 1991 that sold software for Atari, Amiga, McIntosh and Windows computers. Most of the software was for MIDI sequencing. Cubase and Cakewalk and others...You would hookup your synths and drum machines to the computer through a MIDI port. Atari had built in MIDI ports. We also sold software for recording audio. A 20 MG hard drive cost about $400 back then and it could hold about two minutes of stereo sound at CD quality. We would talk about how one day people would be recording albums on computers. But at the time there was not enough memory available to even record one song on a computer.
I had that same basic setup with a 9-pin dot matrix printer. Cost me a whopping $1200 for less computing power than my phone (by a lot!) but at the time, it was the thing...
I can remember starting high school in 1990 and they had an Atari ST running Steinberg (My teacher never referred to it as Cubase). That was my first introduction to DAW :)
Still have my Atari 1040ST from the 80s with Hybrid Arts smpte track. Synchronized with my Teac 3340S. It all still works too, but now I use Studio One.
Great shoutout to the Atari Falcon, yay! There are still devoted Falcon and ST owners to this day. For those who don’t know, the ST computers came with built-in MIDI ports and was used in music recordings in the 80s and 90s. Those were great computers for their time.
I know exactly what you’re talking about…I am a musician but I spent 30 years as a Computer Tech..mostly Mac . I remember CORVUS 20meg hard drives the size of a tabletop in the 80’s ! Its been a new world for awhile. I enjoyed this.
This brought back memories. I started with Ensoniq in 1984 and many of the brands mentioned in this video were in their embryonic stage back then. Thankfully, Ensoniq had an abundance technical people to resolve compatibility issues. Fun times.
Adapted to playing to 20 people in a local Bar?! Are you kidding me, Beato?! The last time I went into the Studio I knocked up a DAW Backing Track to play along to. Then I did one attempted drum Recording, which was awkward because the bass was wobbling all over the place, and then the Producer said, "I prefer the Backing Track" and sent me home. Drummers haven't adapted, except the lucky few, we have been DESTROYED!
I still have several Atari 1040 STEs, and a colour and B&W monitor; and knew a guy with an Atari Falcon. We recorded a two bar loop of me playing drums into the Falcon, in the early 90s. The result was incredible but we could only record in little chunks and it took a long time to process; so long that we thought the machine had crashed. We were elated when we saw the newly-rendered file on his desktop, ready for playback!
Amazing, I never thought I’d hear anyone talk about the Atari Falcon on Rick’s channel. The Atari ST series of computers had a bit of a niche following with musicians. One of Atari’s leading proponents back then was electronic music pioneer Jimmy Hotz who had a device called the Atari Hotz Box.
My father's armature radio club began using digital recording in the mid 1970s after the 8-track tape they used to self-identify their repeater (like a cell tower) began garbling in the winter. One of the club members worked for Bell Labs and built a solid-state digital player using integrated circuits. It seemed unbelievable at the time. My brother & I couldn't wait for it to be used in the commercial music world. It wasn't till the early 80's when "Giant Cassetts" were launched that it became a reality, quickly replaced by CDs.
Yes! I had an Atari ST which if my memory serves me had an inbuilt MIDI Din socket.... I used my Casio MT70 to record midi. Can't remember what software I had, but was basic 8 tracks. Lots of fun but you needed a lot of patience!. We measured memory in KB in those days!
A college Studio Drummer buddy of mine at Hartwick/SUNY Oneonta in the late 80's dealt with it by learning how to improvise really well (while jamming with his band) on his drum machine. With drum set sounds, or hand drum sounds or whatever. He was amazing at it.
I almost forgot until I saw this. Back in 1990-91 I had a Sound Tools set up with stereo audio recording that was fantastic by then. Mainly jingle production, but it needed an extension card. Then they developed Pro Tools - and the rest is history
I wish Rick would re-interview Sting about Synclavier - Sting was one of the pioneers of digital audio production as a matter of fact. His sophomore "...Nothing Like The Sun" was practically made with Synclavier. Some tracks like "The Lazarus Heart" are 90% Synclavier-sequenced and sampled songs, even more so on the B-sides like "Conversation With A Dog" or the incredible "If You There...".
I had an Atari Falcon too, with Cubase Audio (8 digital audio channels, later 16) and the Steinberg interface boxes. Steinberg also had Avalon sample editing software and Synthworks for synth patches.
Awesome episode of Rick Beato 2! Really looking forward to having Charlie return, whether it's playing or chatting - revisiting past adventures, talking current events or looking at predictions/potentials of future directions/impacts of music. What a great guy! Understanding that RB 2 has often been a kind of sounding board for the RB 1 channel's content and direction, I hope that RB 2 can continue to provide that dialog between creator and community. Time availability and schedules always being difficult to weave, we really have been fortunate the past few years to have had the opportunity to 'parley' with the main man. Aye matey! ;-) On that harmonious note :) let's hope RB 2 can also provide a place to maybe expand the content of 'everything music', to anything that the 'everything' has been, can be and may become. Bravo Rick! Cheers!
Steinberg made the pro 16 already back in 84, and it ran on a Commodore 64. In 86 they came with pro 24 that ran on the Atari 1040 ...and then it morphed into Cubase that came in 89.
Huh, I took some electronic music classes at IC 92 or 93. Wonder if Rick was haunting the halls of Ford Hall back then. There were a few Moogs in the electronic music studio that were given to the department. Not modular but a keyboard based model that wasn’t the MiniMoog. They weren’t worth anything back then lol. Anyway, think there was a Mac Quadra in there and we had just gotten a 512mb hard drive. We also had just gotten a DAT machine. I still used the 4 track 1/4” Otari to record to. Fun times.
I did you man. You speak and interview people that speak my language. You and your guest speak it much better than I, but you are truly my favorite..... Thank you
I had an Atari ST in 1988 with Passport Master Tracks Pro midi software which could sync to tape. Then C-Lab developed Notator in Germany, which became Emagic Logic, later bought by Apple in 2002. Revolutionary at that time.
Ghe...in 1983 i built a circuit, from a german magazine, it connected one side to a mono jack, the other side to a joystick connector, and it enabled me to record digitally something like 10 seconds in 4 bit mono into my commodore 64, then the ram was full. It sounded horrible. But it was great ! :)
If Atari released a new version of their STe range that handled modern audio and plug-ins, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. In 1992 I ran Cubase on a 1040STe synced to a Fostex 8 track using SMPTE and it worked like a dream, zero latency with rock solid, jitter free MIDI.
Much Respect RB. Admire your accomplishments, incl You Tube massive success. I was on the same road, but life bumps us off our main roads more than we ever imagined, so we try to catch up on the side trails, just out of reach of success. Keep Rocking! 🎸🎹🎥🎼📀
The atari ST was responsible for the rave scene because it was cheap, easy to learn and had built in midi ports. Most musicians who used synths had them. I started on Cubase too.
Opcode... I used to do customer tech support for Opcode, Studio Vision Pro, Max, Galaxy Librarian, and Overture, all that stuff. I think this was from 1997 up to when Gibson bought them and it went out of business.
I had an Atari Falcon with Cubase and I made my first CD on it. I remember telling Nettwerk Records I made my demo on it. They never called me back LOL. I didn’t care, it was a cool system and I loved it.
I love watching Rick videos. I'd love if he did a behind the music type channel. I know PunkRockMBA is doing that a bit, but Beato seems to be on another level through his experience.
Another great interview. I use drum samples for all my work but I'd rather have a drummer collaborating on my music. It would sound more natural, more organic.
So nice to see Charlie and connect a few more of my favorite dots! My brother just sent me all his old Glyph drives & I feel like a kid in the candy store, except for the cost of adapters. Recording in rural VT means slow internet, so the Cloud is still not in my purview for storing music files. Nice to meet you, Rick! xo
@@RayCarlos045 We were first friends in middle school, and have stayed in touch over the years ... both being musicians spawned at about the same, in the same location :)
As a longtime web developer Charlie gave me PTSD mentioning Microsoft Front Page ... used to have numerous projects that clients would bring in that they started in Front Page and we would just ask what they were trying to build and would start mostly from scratch in HTML since Front Page could turn even the most simple web page in a death spiral that you couldn't manage. But PTSD aside please bring Charlie back, seems like a great dude.
Kenny Arronoff had a similar situation. Instead of surrendering 🏳 , he adapted to the change in technology: he learned to program drums. He played with John Mellencamp, Corey Hart, Smashing Pumpkins 🎃 and other musicians.
Rick. You should try to contact Jimmy Bralower about his intrepid drum programming on so many albums. Great guy and producer with a million stories. He was on the ground floor with Roger Linn.
I had no idea it was such a rare beast back then. I was just looking for a way to record audio to a computer. I had a Commodore Amiga (was also into IT always since I was a kid) and I heard about Ataris for music, for MIDI sequencing... and then Falcon came out and that was it.
I grew up in the '80s so drum machines always fascinated me especially since my tastes were a lot of electronic/hybrid bands like The Cure, New Order, INXS. I embraced learning how to program drums along with actually playing drums. To this day, I do session work and sometimes I will show up at your studio and play or I will craft some drums in my studio den using Superior Drummer 3. Drummers will always have live performances and even studio work. I feel drummers should evolve with the era they are in.
People that complain about drum machines are usually just complaining about the genre of music they're used in. Imagine if you took every classic Hip Hop, House/Techno, Industrial track that used percussion using an Akai MPC, TR707/808/909, DMX etc and replaced it with percussion from a live kit, most of the music would sound completely absurd.
I do like the point Charlie brought up that's as a musician interested in the many aspects of using computers in recording you can get away from playing your instrument. It's something that bothered me and to my credit would limit my time with pro tools & for the longest time used it much like my tascam 4 track. What I mean by that is being a good enough musician to get down the tracks without using the editing bells and whistles that are built into pro tools sophisticated software. As a hobbiest songwriter you're forced to learn some of the skills of a professional recording engineer which inevitably takes you away from playing your instrument. Even though this had it's own feeling of satisfaction learning this I have to admit I envy the session player that don't have to bother with this learning curve and just focus on their instruments.
Good mini-episode, Rick. Charlie seems to have taken a similar tech path to myself (1st Drum Machine was a Sequential Circuits "Tom"), then shortly after became an electronics tech at Symetrix. More stories from the "old days"! :)
OMG! I was using Atari ST with this program called “SMPTE Track” synced up with Otari 24trk machine using SMPTE code in the late 80’s into the 90’s. I remember the syncing was incredibly fast and tight. I didn’t start recording audio digitally ’til I got a Mac with SoundTools(predecessor of ProTools) in the mid 90’s. Is there anybody out there who had AtariST with SMPTE Track back then?
I have been subbed to RB1 since then - and enjoyed RB2 but for some mysterious reason have not subbed - now I see title "How Drummers Dealt with the Rise of the Drum Machine" - SUBSCRIBED - speaking as a drummer/beat/basss/elektroniks obsessed musician here \,,/
All thru highschool I pledged to never play with a drum machine. Now days I converted my 80s swing star kit to mesh heads and trigger's. And I own an mpc and a maschine. oh, I have an old Linn as well. Came from my buddies dad's studio.
I like this Charlie guy! I was into computers much earlier and on the internet since like 1992 in windows 3.1 and/or NT4, and probably had a much slower dial up at the time. My first drum machine was an Alesis HR 16, which I would meticulously program tweaking every single beat moving it hundredths of notes back or forward in time and then some, just to make it sound as human as possible. I couldn't have a drummer in my space, nor afford the high rent for a suitable one, so I faked it the best I could, trying not to have it sound obviously sterile. My programming fooled a lot of people, including other musicians, well at least until a few years later where anyone could just recognize it by the sampled drum sounds and ask: "HR 16?"; Oh crap, it became instantly worthless! Only a few years later I had Windows 95, Kakewalk and then some to make music with, and could even record myself playing guitar and bass, and whatever else I could get my hands on, program drums and keyboards... and yeah, a large enough hard drive set me back quite a bit. For the same reasons I was an early user of SSD's which were very expensive too when they first came out, but their speed made everything on the computer much faster, and the improvement was mind blowing, especially with such tasks as recording music with gobs of instruments and plugins...
I like how you guys are laughing about a half of gig of storage. I started using Cakewalk in 88 and I had a PC clone with two 10MB (yes MB) drives. And my friends were envious of the storage I had :).
If you are going to have a discussion on the rise of the drum machine, consider adding Bruce and Ben Forat to the mix. They are arguably the most knowledgeable drum machine gurus on the planet.
More of Charlie please Rick, he has insight into the how technology has changed the industry and it needs documenting and also may offer insight to where we are going, plus he seems really interesting.
I went and saw Depeche Mode on tour in November, they have always been a synth - drum machine band. But i was blown away, by Christian Eigner, their live drummer for many years. He's fantastic!!
Rick just gets better and better guests and topics. Captivating.
I remember those early internet/ digital days.
Super fun to hear this from Charlie and his memory is spot on! Andy Summers tech did inspire me to start Glyph! There were others as well. How I started it in Ithaca is another story. What a ride it was. And this is Steve Gorney.
Hey Gorn! I'm glad you got to see the interview, since you were featured prominently and the history of Glyph. Was a big part of my history in the tech world. I just recently moved from Massachusetts to Asheville NC and had to downsize A LOT and I took a carload full of old Glyph drives over to Glyph and traded the whole mess for a 2 TB drive that fits in my shirt pocket with room to spare! Things have certainly changed my brother!!
Thx for the shout-out to Steinberg and Cubase. I remember when we just moved from recording on an Atari to Cubase VST in... 1992/3? Time flies.
Rick you are a creating the best content on RUclips. You are a gift to the music community. Thanks for all the hard work
Back in 1984 the Cars put out Heartbeat City which was HUGE for them. In a Rolling Stone interview, drummer David Robinson said there “was not one hand played drum on the recording of Heartbeat City” which shocked the drumming world. Most thought it was Ric-O being a control freak but years later David said he was all for doing it. They always were a cutting edge tech type band and that was cutting edge at the time. They were his drum parts which he played live but in the studio he did all the programming.
Wow!! I had no idea Cubase was that old, it’s amazing you guys have seen the evolution of sequencing, midi/synthesis first hand. We REALLY need a full episode with Charlie !!!!!
Steinberg goes back to Pro 16 on the Commodore 64, then evolved into Cubase.
Rick... don't worry... I'm subscribed to both channels! :) I just love watching two close friends talk about the good ol' days!
I‘d merge the channels.. great content on both!
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
Glad Charlie was there, look forward to the jam. Thanks, I love the shared memories, I always end up reminiscing about my teen years playing the bass and jamming in garages and basements in the 70's.
Hello from Ithaca Rick. Great to hear you and Charley talking about your lives when you lived in Ithaca! I’m ‘79 grad. My roomie took lessons from Steve.
Back in the late 90s I was working at Starstruck Studios in Nashville. One of our clients at that time was the late, great Roger Nichols. He’d mix for a while then stop and tell a few stories, then go back to work. One thing he talked about was creating Wendell… his first drum machine. He said that both he AND Roger Linn were taking an 8088 machine coding class, both with the idea of building a drum machine (oddly enough). He added that his was meant to be high fidelity, while Lin’s was meant for commercial sale. He went on to say that at that time it cost him $70,000 to make Wendell (realize that a meg of RAM cost him over ten grand at that time). Since hard drives at the time weren’t fast enough, he’s had sixteen hard drives built with a common spindle so that he could store one bit of the sixteen bit word on each drive and had them recalled in sync. He also said something like, “remember, this was before MIDI, so we had to record drum trigger tracks to trigger the playback from Wendell. He was a real genius, for sure, as well as a very fun guy who also lived on the cutting edge of audio. This was only ONE of the many stories that he told me during his brief stay at the studio.
5 Meg? In 1987? I wish! 😊 My music pc had 384 KB memory - but I upgraded to 640 KB - Whoopi !!! and a 7 MHz 8088 processor, with two 5.25" floppy drives. NO hard drive! You had to transfer the OS, then your music software, to memory every time you booted up.
He's got his dates wrong, the Atari Falcon came out in 1992. He's likely thinking of the 520STE (512k) and the 1040STE (1MB). Both of those machines were released around October in 1989.
I remember the 5.25” dual floppy drives hooked up!!
I worked in a music store in 1991 that sold software for Atari, Amiga, McIntosh and Windows computers. Most of the software was for MIDI sequencing. Cubase and Cakewalk and others...You would hookup your synths and drum machines to the computer through a MIDI port. Atari had built in MIDI ports. We also sold software for recording audio. A 20 MG hard drive cost about $400 back then and it could hold about two minutes of stereo sound at CD quality. We would talk about how one day people would be recording albums on computers. But at the time there was not enough memory available to even record one song on a computer.
@@frankmarsh1159Brilliant post. Informative, non combative, not condescending in any way.
😊
I had that same basic setup with a 9-pin dot matrix printer. Cost me a whopping $1200 for less computing power than my phone (by a lot!) but at the time, it was the thing...
I can remember starting high school in 1990 and they had an Atari ST running Steinberg (My teacher never referred to it as Cubase). That was my first introduction to DAW :)
On my desk, to my immediate left, I have an E-MU Drumulator circa 1983-4 with the MIDI upgrade...still works, but has a couple of fussy buttons.
Motu wow. Needed to hear this about playing and not focusing on tech. And Roy Buchanan, that's real playing!
Please bring him back, good to see friends and personal stories.
Still have my Atari 1040ST from the 80s with Hybrid Arts smpte track. Synchronized with my Teac 3340S. It all still works too, but now I use Studio One.
Great shoutout to the Atari Falcon, yay! There are still devoted Falcon and ST owners to this day. For those who don’t know, the ST computers came with built-in MIDI ports and was used in music recordings in the 80s and 90s. Those were great computers for their time.
I know exactly what you’re talking about…I am a musician but I spent 30 years as a Computer Tech..mostly Mac . I remember CORVUS 20meg hard drives the size of a tabletop in the 80’s ! Its been a new world for awhile. I enjoyed this.
This brought back memories. I started with Ensoniq in 1984 and many of the brands mentioned in this video were in their embryonic stage back then. Thankfully, Ensoniq had an abundance technical people to resolve compatibility issues. Fun times.
87? I remember working with an Alesis HR-16 drum machine and MMT8 sequencer back then! Great machines.
Adapted to playing to 20 people in a local Bar?! Are you kidding me, Beato?!
The last time I went into the Studio I knocked up a DAW Backing Track to play along to. Then I did one attempted drum Recording, which was awkward because the bass was wobbling all over the place, and then the Producer said, "I prefer the Backing Track" and sent me home.
Drummers haven't adapted, except the lucky few, we have been DESTROYED!
My first computer was an Atari 520ST running Steinberg Pro24. It was MIDI recording only. Steinberg started with Pro16 software for the Commodore 64.
Ahhh, the old 520ST, my first computer too
Rag brown, Steve browns brother, was my music teacher. TRUE GENIUS. Rick had the best mentors
Didn’t even realize I wasn’t subscribed to this channel UNTIL Rick popped in and talked about it🤯🤯
I still have several Atari 1040 STEs, and a colour and B&W monitor; and knew a guy with an Atari Falcon. We recorded a two bar loop of me playing drums into the Falcon, in the early 90s. The result was incredible but we could only record in little chunks and it took a long time to process; so long that we thought the machine had crashed. We were elated when we saw the newly-rendered file on his desktop, ready for playback!
Rick...Charlie is great! Have him back soon, plz. Wonderful interview.
Amazing, I never thought I’d hear anyone talk about the Atari Falcon on Rick’s channel. The Atari ST series of computers had a bit of a niche following with musicians. One of Atari’s leading proponents back then was electronic music pioneer Jimmy Hotz who had a device called the Atari Hotz Box.
"Come with me if you want to ROCK." - Cyberdyne Systems Model TR808
My father's armature radio club began using digital recording in the mid 1970s after the 8-track tape they used to self-identify their repeater (like a cell tower) began garbling in the winter. One of the club members worked for Bell Labs and built a solid-state digital player using integrated circuits. It seemed unbelievable at the time. My brother & I couldn't wait for it to be used in the commercial music world. It wasn't till the early 80's when "Giant Cassetts" were launched that it became a reality, quickly replaced by CDs.
Yes! I had an Atari ST which if my memory serves me had an inbuilt MIDI Din socket.... I used my Casio MT70 to record midi. Can't remember what software I had, but was basic 8 tracks. Lots of fun but you needed a lot of patience!. We measured memory in KB in those days!
A college Studio Drummer buddy of mine at Hartwick/SUNY Oneonta in the late 80's dealt with it by learning how to improvise really well (while jamming with his band) on his drum machine. With drum set sounds, or hand drum sounds or whatever. He was amazing at it.
I almost forgot until I saw this. Back in 1990-91 I had a Sound Tools set up with stereo audio recording that was fantastic by then. Mainly jingle production, but it needed an extension card. Then they developed Pro Tools - and the rest is history
That was AMAZING! Thank you Rick! Can’t wait to see Charlie on the channel again!
I wish Rick would re-interview Sting about Synclavier - Sting was one of the pioneers of digital audio production as a matter of fact. His sophomore "...Nothing Like The Sun" was practically made with Synclavier. Some tracks like "The Lazarus Heart" are 90% Synclavier-sequenced and sampled songs, even more so on the B-sides like "Conversation With A Dog" or the incredible "If You There...".
I had an Atari Falcon too, with Cubase Audio (8 digital audio channels, later 16) and the Steinberg interface boxes. Steinberg also had Avalon sample editing software and Synthworks for synth patches.
This man has so much more to tell us I believe. Bring him back!
great interview & very cool insights. I had the atari ste runnign cubase & when the Falcon came out I drooled but never got one.
Great video. Love hearing about the history of the technology in music. Unreal how we can do what we can do now at home.
Awesome episode of Rick Beato 2! Really looking forward to having Charlie return, whether it's playing or chatting - revisiting past adventures, talking current events or looking at predictions/potentials of future directions/impacts of music. What a great guy!
Understanding that RB 2 has often been a kind of sounding board for the RB 1 channel's content and direction, I hope that RB 2 can continue to provide that dialog between creator and community. Time availability and schedules always being difficult to weave, we really have been fortunate the past few years to have had the opportunity to 'parley' with the main man. Aye matey! ;-)
On that harmonious note :) let's hope RB 2 can also provide a place to maybe expand the content of 'everything music', to anything that the 'everything' has been, can be and may become. Bravo Rick! Cheers!
Please have Charlie back. Amazing stuff. Amazing history
Steinberg made the pro 16 already back in 84, and it ran on a Commodore 64. In 86 they came with pro 24 that ran on the Atari 1040 ...and then it morphed into Cubase that came in 89.
Dude, no way!! Ithaca in the house. Charlie, congratulations, so good to see you on here. It been a while, hope your still hangin and jammin. ❤
Huh, I took some electronic music classes at IC 92 or 93. Wonder if Rick was haunting the halls of Ford Hall back then. There were a few Moogs in the electronic music studio that were given to the department. Not modular but a keyboard based model that wasn’t the MiniMoog. They weren’t worth anything back then lol. Anyway, think there was a Mac Quadra in there and we had just gotten a 512mb hard drive. We also had just gotten a DAT machine. I still used the 4 track 1/4” Otari to record to. Fun times.
I did you man. You speak and interview people that speak my language. You and your guest speak it much better than I, but you are truly my favorite..... Thank you
I had an Atari ST in 1988 with Passport Master Tracks Pro midi software which could sync to tape. Then C-Lab developed Notator in Germany, which became Emagic Logic, later bought by Apple in 2002. Revolutionary at that time.
Rock on. Thank you infinitely Rick.
That was awesome. Like a trip down memory lane (no pun). Best takeaway- "close your eyes". ❤
Rick, one of your most interesting interviews
Charlie is brilliant. Love this!
Ghe...in 1983 i built a circuit, from a german magazine, it connected one side to a mono jack, the other side to a joystick connector, and it enabled me to record digitally something like 10 seconds in 4 bit mono into my commodore 64, then the ram was full. It sounded horrible. But it was great ! :)
Same with my Sony boom box.
If Atari released a new version of their STe range that handled modern audio and plug-ins, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. In 1992 I ran Cubase on a 1040STe synced to a Fostex 8 track using SMPTE and it worked like a dream, zero latency with rock solid, jitter free MIDI.
Much Respect RB. Admire your accomplishments, incl You Tube massive success. I was on the same road, but life bumps us off our main roads more than we ever imagined, so we try to catch up on the side trails, just out of reach of success. Keep Rocking!
🎸🎹🎥🎼📀
The atari ST was responsible for the rave scene because it was cheap, easy to learn and had built in midi ports. Most musicians who used synths had them. I started on Cubase too.
I’ve still got a 1 terabyte Glyph hard drive in my studio that I use for storing old projects on.
Opcode... I used to do customer tech support for Opcode, Studio Vision Pro, Max, Galaxy Librarian, and Overture, all that stuff. I think this was from 1997 up to when Gibson bought them and it went out of business.
you should have him back for more interviews!
I had an Atari Falcon with Cubase and I made my first CD on it. I remember telling Nettwerk Records I made my demo on it. They never called me back LOL. I didn’t care, it was a cool system and I loved it.
I love watching Rick videos. I'd love if he did a behind the music type channel. I know PunkRockMBA is doing that a bit, but Beato seems to be on another level through his experience.
Another great interview. I use drum samples for all my work but I'd rather have a drummer collaborating on my music. It would sound more natural, more organic.
Drum machines did great job on electro funk in the mid 80's and 10-15 years on. Great era. No so much nowadays.
So nice to see Charlie and connect a few more of my favorite dots! My brother just sent me all his old Glyph drives & I feel like a kid in the candy store, except for the cost of adapters. Recording in rural VT means slow internet, so the Cloud is still not in my purview for storing music files. Nice to meet you, Rick! xo
Charlie is a true legend with beautiful heart ❤️ did you ever meet him in person?
@@RayCarlos045 We were first friends in middle school, and have stayed in touch over the years ... both being musicians spawned at about the same, in the same location :)
Wow I guess that is memorable what the both of you shared. It’s nice to meet you. If you don’t mind can we be friends?
Loved this. I started out with MOTU Performer+… when it was just MIDI and multitrack digital audio on a computer was just a fever dream 🙃
You need to advertise this channel more. This channel mever really shows up in my feed.
As a longtime web developer Charlie gave me PTSD mentioning Microsoft Front Page ... used to have numerous projects that clients would bring in that they started in Front Page and we would just ask what they were trying to build and would start mostly from scratch in HTML since Front Page could turn even the most simple web page in a death spiral that you couldn't manage. But PTSD aside please bring Charlie back, seems like a great dude.
Kenny Arronoff had a similar situation. Instead of surrendering 🏳 , he adapted to the change in technology: he learned to program drums. He played with John Mellencamp, Corey Hart, Smashing Pumpkins 🎃 and other musicians.
Rick. You should try to contact Jimmy Bralower about his intrepid drum programming on so many albums. Great guy and producer with a million stories. He was on the ground floor with Roger Linn.
This dude is cool ! Would love to hear more if ever another video idea comes to your minds to have him on again.
Very cool Rick! Thank you for sharing!!
OMG!!!! I produced my first international album on Atari Falcon!!! Though, much later, around 1997. Incredible! Thx so much for this
I had no idea it was such a rare beast back then. I was just looking for a way to record audio to a computer. I had a Commodore Amiga (was also into IT always since I was a kid) and I heard about Ataris for music, for MIDI sequencing... and then Falcon came out and that was it.
I grew up in the '80s so drum machines always fascinated me especially since my tastes were a lot of electronic/hybrid bands like The Cure, New Order, INXS. I embraced learning how to program drums along with actually playing drums. To this day, I do session work and sometimes I will show up at your studio and play or I will craft some drums in my studio den using Superior Drummer 3. Drummers will always have live performances and even studio work. I feel drummers should evolve with the era they are in.
People that complain about drum machines are usually just complaining about the genre of music they're used in. Imagine if you took every classic Hip Hop, House/Techno, Industrial track that used percussion using an Akai MPC, TR707/808/909, DMX etc and replaced it with percussion from a live kit, most of the music would sound completely absurd.
You picked a Great State Charlie!! From one Tarheel to another, Welcome to NC.
Good chat, but kind of misleading title. There's so much to talk about regarding machine vs drummer.
I do like the point Charlie brought up that's as a musician interested in the many aspects of using computers in recording you can get away from playing your instrument. It's something that bothered me and to my credit would limit my time with pro tools & for the longest time used it much like my tascam 4 track. What I mean by that is being a good enough musician to get down the tracks without using the editing bells and whistles that are built into pro tools sophisticated software. As a hobbiest songwriter you're forced to learn some of the skills of a professional recording engineer which inevitably takes you away from playing your instrument. Even though this had it's own feeling of satisfaction learning this I have to admit I envy the session player that don't have to bother with this learning curve and just focus on their instruments.
Good mini-episode, Rick. Charlie seems to have taken a similar tech path to myself (1st Drum Machine was a Sequential Circuits "Tom"), then shortly after became an electronics tech at Symetrix. More stories from the "old days"! :)
My first PC had a 4MB hard rive and 1MB of RAM. 1990.
Charlie made a bass outta pvc pipe? Cool! ❤️ these interviews w/ musician friends
Huge fan of what you're doing, Rick, but I was really interested in the subject of the title. Love to hear more on this?
i did not realize you had two Chanels glad you mentioned it!!! pan60
super interesting discussion Rick - really enjoyed this...
Since Charlie is living in Asheville now is he working with the Moog Museum in any way?
It was really depressing when Phil Collins starting recording with drum machines. It would be like Jeff Beck using a note machine.
12:45 charlie's right hand, he got us!
OMG! I was using Atari ST with this program called “SMPTE Track” synced up with Otari 24trk machine using SMPTE code in the late 80’s into the 90’s. I remember the syncing was incredibly fast and tight. I didn’t start recording audio digitally ’til I got a Mac with SoundTools(predecessor of ProTools) in the mid 90’s. Is there anybody out there who had AtariST with SMPTE Track back then?
released on the day the first new Billy Joel single since 2007 comes out and .. IT HAS A DRUM MACHINE
The good ol Atari Falcon! I believe the Falcon had 4mb of RAM. Non expandable. I still have an STfm in my closet, and a Mega ST2 back in Wisconsin.
I guess the drummers who survived treated the drum machine as another tool in the shed and did the programming. Stewart Copeland embraced it.
I have been subbed to RB1 since then - and enjoyed RB2 but for some mysterious reason have not subbed - now I see title "How Drummers Dealt with the Rise of the Drum Machine" - SUBSCRIBED - speaking as a drummer/beat/basss/elektroniks obsessed musician here \,,/
All thru highschool I pledged to never play with a drum machine. Now days I converted my 80s swing star kit to mesh heads and trigger's. And I own an mpc and a maschine. oh, I have an old Linn as well. Came from my buddies dad's studio.
Whose got the brain that The Rise of Drum Machine... and the thumbnail... luv it..300%
Short but sweet interview Rick.
P.s. I'm subscribed! Keep music passion alive ! That's what I want to be a part of one day !
I like this Charlie guy! I was into computers much earlier and on the internet since like 1992 in windows 3.1 and/or NT4, and probably had a much slower dial up at the time. My first drum machine was an Alesis HR 16, which I would meticulously program tweaking every single beat moving it hundredths of notes back or forward in time and then some, just to make it sound as human as possible. I couldn't have a drummer in my space, nor afford the high rent for a suitable one, so I faked it the best I could, trying not to have it sound obviously sterile. My programming fooled a lot of people, including other musicians, well at least until a few years later where anyone could just recognize it by the sampled drum sounds and ask: "HR 16?"; Oh crap, it became instantly worthless!
Only a few years later I had Windows 95, Kakewalk and then some to make music with, and could even record myself playing guitar and bass, and whatever else I could get my hands on, program drums and keyboards... and yeah, a large enough hard drive set me back quite a bit. For the same reasons I was an early user of SSD's which were very expensive too when they first came out, but their speed made everything on the computer much faster, and the improvement was mind blowing, especially with such tasks as recording music with gobs of instruments and plugins...
I like how you guys are laughing about a half of gig of storage. I started using Cakewalk in 88 and I had a PC clone with two 10MB (yes MB) drives. And my friends were envious of the storage I had :).
Whoever made this video’s thumbnail deserves a raise.
Nice interview 😊
I remember the midi sequencers and the first akai sampler I ruined myself on in the late 80s. 😂
If you are going to have a discussion on the rise of the drum machine, consider adding Bruce and Ben Forat to the mix. They are arguably the most knowledgeable drum machine gurus on the planet.