Labels:text | screenshot OCR: AM/FM Title : F.0.P 3, "Onstage" Producers : The MED Users Group : The Raven 17bit No.: 2696 Musician No. Disks : 1 No. Tracks: 2 *00000 0000000000***** AM/FM *0000000000000000000000000000000000 F.O.P, which, incidentaly stands for "Friends of Paula" are apparantly a 'cult' pop band who write, record and perform all their music using a humble A500 and a copy of OctaMed. copy of OctaMed. That's what all the intro screens say anyway, reading on the screens also go on to say that this disk contains some of F.O.P's songs that were performed at a gig in Ibiza earlier in the year. Act One : After lots of crowd cheer samples, and several drum intros, we're finally off into into the music. I'll admit it's not quite what I expected, the last I heard the only stuff that gets played in Ibiza is Solid Rave and dance numbers, this music isn't quite either. The drums were a bit boring, a standard Bass/Snare drum combination rattled along without much variety, but was joined by some soft bass pads, which was then joined by an electric piano melody. Rather than a recurring theme with variations around it, F.0.P have put several of their songs into the one module, so there's quite a lot of variety, but no real central theme. There were some nice bit though, a house-styled piano part (although the piano chords were sampled rather weakly), plenty of different basses, and a few vocal samples. Quite an overall different style of song, but with some strong and likeable melodies..... ...Rating 6 Act Two Some more crowd noises, followed by that nice robotic vocal sample, "Is anybody out there", and were off into some of F.O.P's other songs. This starts off pretty strangely, it's very fast and ‚er.. bouncy is the best word T I can come come up up with, it almost sounds like a joke song, but has a very addictive melody thrown in around it's vocal snatches of "Woo". This soon Changes changes tack completely and moves into a piano ballard backed up with string chords. Chorus: It sounds like a very nice song, but unfoutunataly, as in act one. the piano samples are very weak to the extent that it was hard to differenciate between the piano chords, and the single notes. the single notes. The piano melody is joined by drums and bass, HC 100 goes through several melodic variations, some good, and some bad (mainly down to poor sample choice), this then gives way to another song, this one keeping the bass, and string parts, and playing another string melody that transforms into a nice string/guitar sound... and .....Rating 6 Compositions : The trouble with jamming lots of songs into the two modules, is I can only come up with something like, "Some bits I liked, others I didn't", I can't point out specific songs. On the whole, though it was pretty good, some nice melodies, and of course plenty of variety. A better choice of samples would have made it much better though.....….……...Rating 6 Samples : I think the main culprit in this department is the piano, it was really quite weak, and just didn't have any "Oomphh"; so instead of leading the tune, it just hung around in the background. There were some samples that didn't fit in with the rest of the tune, making it all sound a bit off, and some of the string samples sounded a few years old. On the plus side, there were some nice bass, and synth samples about which were used well... ..Rating 5 Presentation : Very nicely done, some colourfull info screens appear as the disk loads up, some other screens included a nice digitised picture, and the usual few credits screens. The music is actuall selected from a standard Workbench (remember that ?) screen, which then loads up the standard OctaMed player, and plays from there. It all works perfectly well, and of course one advantage is the fact that it multitasks quite happily…... ..Rating 7 AM/FM Rating : It's a bit difficuly to describe the type of music on this disk, it's not Rave, or dance, and it's not really pop. It is quite interesting to listen to though, and is well worth a go.... ..Rating 6 AM/FM
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