@kim_otcj – I remember the Amiga, quite the cats meow at the time but far too pricey for a starving college student. I was using a homebrew Z-80 system at the time, with an old ADM-3A terminal that I picked up surplus. And I was perpetually broke from buying analog synths and buying parts for a fully polyphonic monster that I built (and drugs, alcohol, and women, but that is another story… 😳 ).
But you are absolutely right about the “sheer exuberance of messing with the software.” I keep meaning to get down to some serious composing with ZynAddSubFx / Podium, but I wave my mouse around and cool music comes out! With no scotch tape or razor blades in sight! It is difficult NOT to just play around 😀
I must admit that I am beginning to chafe under some of the limitations of ZynAddSubFx – it took me the better part of 2 weeks to build up the patches for the percussion instruments I used on “eTune,” and I am not at all happy still with some of them. But it is open source, and I almost have the code compiling in my environment, so I’ll be fixing that shortly 😯 Someone also gave me a broken and disassembled Moog Source that I am trying to bring back to life, and that will add some nice, fat analog minimoog sounds to my palette, and I dug my old pickup out of the shed and put it in a cheap 12-string guitar so I can add some guitar licks.
Now I just need some more time to play with it all…..
