Reply 20 of 75, by Scali
wrote:I have read interviews in which Rob Hubbard talks about composing music on a Casio and writing the score on musical score paper before coding it on a C64.
I don't know if you have ears, but clearly his music is not just a transcription of some Casio keyboard music to C64. He's doing all sorts of things that you could never ever do on any Casio keyboard or most synths at the time.
He may have used a Casio to fiddle about to get some melody ideas and such (as he describes in the interview), but he most certainly did not compose an entire piece first, and then just transcribe it to the C64 (let alone use a MIDI sequencer). Most of the work was in the 'improvising' he describes. Both to flesh out the melodies themselves, and to fine-tune the SID sounds and special effects that his music is so famous for.
wrote:By the time MT32 became popular composing music using midi keyboards, synths and sequencer sortware was common place.
Not for games. Nearly all Amiga music was done with Sound/Noise/ProTracker or derivatives.
I think it's also pretty safe to assume that virtually no C64 music was ever done with MIDI. Same would go for many other platforms at the time, such as NES, Sega etc.
PC may be the exception here, because the MT-32 was actually a device that was a MIDI device... it neither had the polyphony limits that most other sound chips had, nor did it have any special filters or other effects that were not MIDI-compatible.
But that still leaves the case of AdLib and its suckage in 99% of all games (which actually do sound like cheap transcriptions of generic MIDI songs using generic MIDI instruments, rather than fine-tuning things to make the most of the sound chip, like game devs did on other platforms).