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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Back when Prodigy did this in the late 1990's they must have used tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment... samplers, synths, sequencers, filters, etc...

Today, the entire thing can be done in a single piece of software.

Wow.

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Even in the late 1990s they had powerful audio editing software. The first version of ProTools came out in 1991 and there were a ton of cheaper tools as well.

I'm not saying they didn't do this on thousands of dollars of equipment but in 1997 there's nothing you saw on this video that couldn't be done on a single piece of software (ok maybe two) even then. It wasn't the dark ages.

And get off my lawn.

You still couldn't chop audio nearly this easily, or move it around visually like you can in Ableton. Most of the manipulations were probably done in the sampler, so they all had to be done by ear, and sequenced out using MIDI. I think the big time-saver now is the "elastic" audio capability built into modern sequencers, allowing you to easily realign transients within the audio.

Yes you could, both Cubase and SoundForge we're ~$500 products that would allow you to do multitrack editing like this on a PC.

Very true. Between Rewire and Cubase you had almost a complete music studio as early as 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCycle_%28software%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubase#Cubase_VST3.0_Macintosh

Actually he uses a lot of software. There's ableton + several vst plugins like ozone izotope, waves L2, waves GTR : it still costs thousands of dollars...

I have an Ableton driven studio with oodles of softsynths. I'd say the difference is a factor of 10 at the least even with higher end software. What you do end up spending on is some of the hardware you can't avoid (quality audio interfaces, reverb units, controllers).

The initial demo was all done with a Roland W30, and I suspect that most of the first album was just that but properly mastered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prodigy#Beginnings_into_fun...

early prodigy is not what you think it is

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