The Amiga is one of the most enduring computer platforms out there. Although its been around as long as the NES, its often overlooked as a source of amazing games and awesome chiptunes. This might be due to the fact that its not a console but more of a computer. Which, at that time, had a higher price and more technical delivery, many people have forgotten a whole generation of amazing artists who’ve created music for this awesome machine. Here’s four artists you need to check out.
The Amiga definitely has a smoother sound than the NES or Gameboy and its ability to load samples and manipulate them really helps push the limits of what it sounds like. We’ll look at some straight-up music makers and 2 killer game soundtrack composers that bring out the best in the Amiga.
Jochen Hippel
If I had to pick one chiptune song to listen to for the rest of my life, it’d be the opening track from Prehistoric Tale by Jochen Hippel. Jochen and his associates started out in the demoscene and then morphed their endeavours into a legit operation called Thalion Software who released tons of killer games packed with great music. Jochen’s sound is smooth and moody and fits perfectly for all the games he has been a part of. They have a heroic fun side and a more serious somber one too.
Jogeir Liljedahl
Jogeir Liljedahl’s music is rock-based and really captures the feeling of the 80’s in my opinion. There’s often a synth that is very clearly meant to be a guitar. He’s probably one of the best synth designers for the Amiga, his tracks sounds amazing and often composed of very few samples.
XTD
Somewhere in the 90’s, XTD cranked out loads of awesome tunes on the Amiga. They range from heavy industrial pieces, trance dance songs and smooth down-tempo jazzy sounds.
Jester
Jester makes awesome use of samples and has a very 90s electronic sound. It’s really cool to look back at this stuff now and hear how ahead of its time it was. You hear sounds in some of this stuff that is basically what we hear on the radio today.
There’s a million other awesome artists out there, not to mention some amazing games for the Amiga system. Check them out today.
The music featured in this article is Amiga tracker music, sure, but it isn’t Amiga “chiptunes”. Chiptunes on the Amiga was about having a few extremely short samples which looped and therefore in essence behaved like simple square-, sine- or triangle-waves etc. This made the songs very small in size and suitable for demos/intros, and chiptunes often had a C64-ish sound because of these waveforms (also, just like on the C64, chords were often made using fast 1-channel arpeggios).
1st one is by Jogeir Liljedahl too, not by Jochen Hippel. Play 2nd video from 5:37. It’s called “Nearly there”.
That’s not right. The tune was composed by Jochen Hippel for Thalion’s “A prehistoric tale” and was just renamed by Jogeir L.
Prehistoric tale is one of his best known soundtracks, its by Jochen Hippel. Nearly There is by Jogeir L and based on the original Jochen Hippel track.
As the blog post didn’t contain any links to the musicians, I’d like to share my “Jochen Hippel” tribute site with you: http://home.wtal.de/gmb/Hippel/hippelm.htm
Thanks for sharing that Gerry!