Hello everybody! My name is Cédric and I am 38 old.
I’m DJ since 1996 (artist name DJ Collins) and I had gigs on all the clubs in my region until 2003. From 2003 up to 2015, I was the resident DJ of the club in my little town (Saignelégier in Franches-Montagnes). A little region, a dream landscape, ideal for inspiration for sure! In parallel with all this, i have always been making music on computers.
How long have you been using the Amiga?
In the beginning, when I was 13 in 1993, a friend showed me something special… a VHS tape. That tape was recorded from his Amiga 2000 and contained a video of a fabulous demo: Odyssey from Alcatraz. This was a key period for me: I was totally amazed by this VHS. Then my friend gave me my first Amiga: an A500 with GVP Hard drive and kick switcher. Later, I got some other models: an A600, an A1200, a CD32, and finally an A3000T UX. I used to make some music with Soundtracker Pro2 and Octamed on them.
In 1996, I only made a few house tracks on Amiga. After this, I had my first Pentium: a 233Mhz on which I composed many tracks on FT2 and later on Dreamstation but at that time I already had understood that nothing can beat the real Paula. Why you might ask? Because it only had 2 channels on a soundcard with all tracks mixed on 2 with interpolation at the same sample rate… This is very technical but as I am an audiophile, I think that the sound is not only a matter of technical numbers but mainly feeling based.
Next on the road was propellerheads reason until 2000 and next was my first iMac G3 with the OSX 10.0 beta.
I played during many hours with GarageBand and later Logic on my G4. From 2000 until 2016, I was only on Mac with all Amiga stuff stored in my heart until… NOW! The Amiga virus caught me again with the discovery of the Vampire Accelerators from the Apollo Team. I have realized that the Amiga scene was still very hyperactive and gave me a boost to the maximum! Now I’m making tracks again with my actual vampirized configuration.
What is your current configuration?
My setup is (for now): an A2000 in original desktop with 2MB ChipRAM mod, Vampire V500 V2+, 2x CF drives, Gotek and Floppy drives, network, HP Laserjet printer, and Toccata soundcard for some testing with Digibooster.
What are your favorite activities in Amiga?
I don’t play games and mainly use my Amiga for work. I launch games only to see intros and hear music but I never really take time for gaming. I like to watch demos and testing the Vampire.
I now use some word processing apps with my HP Laserjet CP1515n and …. it works 🙂 I really want my Amiga to be the main station for all daily tasks. But still, my main activity on Amiga is to listen to mods, mods, mods, mods, mods…. During my last holidays, I have sorted around 500 modules over a listening of 10’000 tracks! This selection is very precious to my eyes and a little fragment should be available on the next version of Coffin, yes!
As a DJ, do you think that the Amiga with Vampire will remain a competitive machine in the field of sound?
I use a Vampire because it is simply the best, the fastest, the high-end Amiga EVER! The Vampire is for me for pre-production and 4+ channel composing but on the dancefloor, I use two A600s to have the very authentic Amiga sound for the people. People are mostly not audiophiles but when the Amiga sound comes on the dancefloor, something special is going and makes people crazy. The Paula sound is raw, authentic, not compressed, even better than MP3 like other DJ… Very high dynamics due to the lack of processed samples and a very crisp sound due to my capacitor removal modification and without any aliasing at all. The Amiga sound is authentic, unique and no other computer in this world can reproduce THAT sound, that’s simple.
What is your opinion on AmigaOne X5000?
Sorry, but this is out of the subject, we are speaking only about Amiga, right?
Finally, do you have something to say to our readers?
With this interview, I would like to share a special modules selection for you (and if you have mods in the style of my selection, I’d happily to get them too).
I have a special wish for all Amiga people, I’m addicted to mods and I’m always looking for new tracks to listen and then sort them for my private collection. I’m very open to your wetransfer shares to me, and maybe, you will make me happy with a few new mods for me.
For contact/booking and your mods share, please contact djcollins@me.com. Big thanks to Stephane and Renaud from the Apollo Team for their first contact with Vampire and Benoit Wiblé for his generous loan of one of his Vampire card while I was waiting for mine! Hoffman & cTrix changed my life on YouTube during hours of watching their movies, great job with PT-1210mk1, this is the ULTIME tool for an Amiga DJ! And don’t forget my favorite Amiga Shop relec.ch for his huge job and service for Amiga hardware in Switzerland! Thanks to Amitopia for this interview!
Source: Amitopia Own Experience
