RAM Music Machine was a hardware add-on for the
ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer.
Referred to during development as the ''ZX81 Colou ...
and
Amstrad
Amstrad was a British electronics company, founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar at the age of 21. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in April 1980. During the late 1980s, Amstra ...
CPC 464
The CPC 464 is the first personal home computer built by Amstrad in 1984. It was one of the bestselling and best produced microcomputers, with more than 2 million units sold in Europe. The British microcomputer boom had already peaked before Am ...
/
664
__NOTOC__
Year 664 ( DCLXIV) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 664 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era be ...
released in 1986. It was more advanced than the earlier
SpecDrum and it could play melody
samples,
drum patterns or be used as an
echo machine. One could sample sounds in 19,444 samples a second and use them.
It also had
MIDI
MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, an ...
ports to connect to
synthesisers
A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...
.
By 1990 the hardware was advertised with a price of £50.
Notable users include a teenaged
Aphex Twin
Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), best known as Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ. He is known for his idiosyncratic work in electronic styles such as techno, ambient, and jungle. Journalists from publication ...
.
See also
*
SpecDrum
References
{{Sinclair computers and clones
Drum machines
ZX Spectrum
Musical instruments invented in the 1980s