Moderators: Aesthetics, Drones, Hexagon Sun
Have you ever thought of their parents. My mom bought me my first synth, my first guitar and my drums when I was around 15 (not all at the same time). You could have found old synths back then for sure! It could have been their parent's, you never know. As far as old synths, maybe he meant old to us now, but not then.jbuonacc wrote:there's more examples for sure, but what are your thoughts on track number 16 off 'a few old tunes'? seriously. this is a pretty obvious example, but there's a lot of tracks that 'meet the criteria'to have been done on a C64. there's also a lot which utilize only two or three voices, which is a limitation of the C64 having only three oscillators to work with.
another thing is something i noticed in the Remix Magazine interview. it says:
"...Eoin and Sandison learned to play various musical instruments when they were children. Sandison formed a band and began making experimental tracks with old synths, drums and tape decks in 1980, when he was only nine years old. Influenced by television documentaries and soundtracks, particularly those by the National Film Board of Canada, Sandison named his band Boards of Canada. When Eoin became the band's bassist in 1986, Boards of Canada were mixing real instruments with computer effects and found sounds from radio and television broadcasts. Sandison dabbled with Super 8 home-movie visuals for the band early on, and by the late '80s, BoC were making full-length films accompanied by their own soundtracks."
first, how many 'old synths' do you think were available to a nine year old in 1980? there weren't even that many 'new synths' at the time, and this stuff wasn't cheap by any means. six years later they're working with computers. (please correct me if i'm way off here)
i would think that around this time the C64 was probably the most advanced and accessible computers for music at the time. not sure what other options there were at the time, but the C64 seems the most likely. an Atari 1040ST was about $1000 at the time, which could be pretty steep for a fifteen year old and his little brother. they may have been big into the C64 music scene around this time, seems it was even more popular in europe than over here.
again, could be a long shot but who knows... and really, what's more 'BoC' than this?
i would imagine that by 1986 some of the more basic anaologs were a bit cheaper and easier to come by. It came out in 82. Still pretty damned early though. Also, I don't think anything from the old tunes tapes dates back that far. I know A few Old Tunes says everything was taken from 1991-95. Not that they couldn't break the C64 back out for later recordings...domco77 wrote:Hang on : the C64 certainly wasn't around in 1980. I was 3 at the time and seem to just remember the ZX80 being around maybe; think the C64 came a couple of years later, say 1984?
right on, i tried to imply that i understood what you were saying. even still, synths weren't exactly in abundance back then unless you were loaded. there were budget models though, so it's hard to say. maybe in 1990 i could see a kid finding a bunch of secondhand synths to use, but not in 1980. who knows...Lawrence wrote:When the author of that article says "old synths" I really think they mean 'old' as compared to the synths of today, as opposed to being old for their time.
