K-OS (Pronounced chaos) was born in 1992 during a
meeting at a local watering hole in the heart of Essex, known as Fairlop Waters.
That night, there were three guys with a vision of taking the dance market by
storm. Gav was the marketing man, Scott was the keyboard man and I was the
technical guy with the kit. The aim of the game was to produce commercial
quality dance music, not by playing real instruments but by sampling and
sequencing the tracks on a computer. At the time of the venture, groups such as
Altern-8 and Urban Shakedown were in the charts. Urban Shakedowns track, 'Some
Justice', was produced on two Amiga computers and an effects box using just
8-bit samples.
Basically a sample is a digitally recorded sound.
this can be a vocal track, a single drum beat or a complete drum rhythm (known
as a breakbeat). Breatbeats include bass drums, snares, cymbals and everything
else you need to create the drum beat. Samples can be recorded directly from a
sound source or can be purchased on disk or CD. Once they are loaded into the
computer, the samples can be played on the keyboard over a range of octaves.For
instance, you could get the dog to bark 'twinkle twinkle little star' - very
amusing.
The Amiga has a number of great programs called
'trackers'. Trackers started off on the Atari ST and were used to play the
samples at pre-set times using pre-set frequencies thus producing a song. The
notes were played into the compuetr keyboard (or midi attached instrument) and
appeared in a spreadsheet type display. The rows on the display symbolised the
different 'tracks' available and the columns were pre-set time intervals.
The next step on from the tracker program was MED on the Amiga and it was OctaMED that I used to write my tracks. OctaMED was an absolute corker of a program. I could not believe that some of the demo disks were actually created on an Amiga until I loaded them in and watched them play on screen. The Amiga was 'the' creative machine - nothing else came close at the time. The PC's I was using at work were laughable in comparison, with their DOS screens and ZX81-esque sound capability.
For each of the five K-OS tracks, I designed a loading screen which was displayed while the track played on the Amiga. I have only ported four of these across from the Amiga. Click on the thumbnails to view a (slightly) larger version.
