A 90s home studio with a 386, a handful of resistors and two cassette decks that couldn’t agree
Being a musician wasn't easy in the 90s. It meant improvising with whatever junk you had lying around the room. My old IBM PS/2 was almost useless for anything remotely musical. But I had high hopes for my AMD 386 DX-40 MHz, which, of course, didn't come equipped with an audio interface. It did, however, have plenty of boring hardware, like a couple of serial ports, COM1 and COM2, and a parallel…
My early forays into music production in the 90s were far from glamorous. My AMD 386 computer, with its modest 40 MHz clock speed, provided little more than a platform for digital experimentation. Lacking a dedicated audio interface, I resorted to the parallel port – a port typically reserved for printer connections – to build a rudimentary Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) using resistors and a homemade audio interface. The results were raw and unrefined, plagued by static noise and a lack of dynamic range.
To compose music, I turned to a tracker program called MODEDIT, which relied on a library called MODRES. Curiosity led me to delve into the MODRES library, studying its inner workings and eventually contributing my findings to the Interrupt List, a publication I greatly admired. The tracker approach forced me to view my compositions holistically, considering the entire structure of a song rather than isolating individual elements.
This forced me to confront limitations such as channel and pattern restrictions, which many neurodivergent individuals found liberating.
While I had no way to record live instruments, I managed to improvise a makeshift mixer using a handful of resistors and a few chips. This device featured two stereo RCA inputs and an output, allowing me to record my guitar tracks onto a cassette deck. I also borrowed my sister's portable cassette recorder, which, though lacking in quality, provided a means of capturing my musical creations.
The pièce de résistance of my setup was a basic 10-Watt Aria amplifier, which, when paired with my homemade mixer, produced recordings that were far from professional-grade but still managed to capture the essence of my musical vision.
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