AMS Tunes
1982-1984
History of files made by Galen Stephenson and Michael Malak for the Advanced Music System software by Lee Actor for the Atari 400/800 computers.
Pushing AMS to its limits
The Advanced Music System was developed by Lee Actor (no affiliation with this website) in 1982 and came with demos of classical music pieces. Being the 1980’s, we teens wanted to use it for the pop music of the day (which incidentally has endured in popularity to today).
Galen Stephenson had already had ten years of music lessons at the time, and developed techniques to push AMS to its limits in order to better render pop music. Michael Malak, with only two years of music lessons, was the apprentice.
In this website, you will learn the history and the techniques, plus see music files you may have never seen before, given that not all ended up in the common file repositories.
Come Sail Away (Styx)
Of the three dozen or so AMS songs you’ll find on this website, “Come Sail Away” by Styx is Galen Stephenson’s masterpiece. Some years later, someone else converted Galen’s AMS file to AMP and added lyrics. But this is the original from 1984. This was probably the pinnacle of Galen’s efforts. In order to achieve many of the effects, 1/64 notes had to be individually input with varying volumes by hand. Very tedious work but well worth the effort.