Amiga Music Preservation -

Interview

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TLb. ,dMP' all rite, now you get the chance to read

TML.dMMP some facts about some of the major amiga

,nmm`XXMPX musicians. read about their history in

,#MP'~~XNXYNXTb. the scene and their plans in future.yes,

,d~' dNNP `YNTb. that's meant to be read while listening to

,~ ,NN' `YNb their modules. read 'em over and over and over..

dNP `Yb.

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Handle:

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Group:

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Date of birth:

1-How did your interest for computers start? Which year was that?

My dad bought a C64 when they first came out in about 1982. I think it
probably cost over $1000, which in those days would have been a LOT of money
:-). I was about 7 years old and over visiting him (my parents were
separated and he lived in Australia), and he saw how much I loved playing
with the computer, playing the terrible games that came with the machine
(Commodore funded productions - really crap! Stellar Wars and Depth Charge
but I loved them), and typing in the BASIC programs from the manual. So he
gave it to me and I took it home completely mesmerised.

2-What machines did you previously have? What did you do with them?

After the C64 I saved up and bought an Amiga 500. I mail-ordered it from
the UK and got it about half-price weighed against local stores in New
Zealand. I remember going to the bank... a small, insecure 14/15 yr old
with a huge wad of cash in my hand, and getting a bank draft for 400 pounds,
then mailing it to the UK. After I'd put it in the mailbox I realised I
forgot to seal the envelope!!! I spent the next two weeks terrified that
I'd lost all that money and would never see my A500 BAtman Pack with 10 free
games including Mercenary (which I *really* wanted). But then it arrived...

Since then I've owned various Amigas, Macs and PC's. At the moment I am Mac
only, though I still have an old A4000 and a couple of A500's in a box. The
A4000 is actually Andrew Blackbourns (programmer of Skidmarks). We did a
swap for my original A500 (can't remember why... but I was certainly happy
with the deal! :-).

3-For what specific reason did you end up making music rather than gfx, coding?

My great grandmother left me $500 when she died. And at that time I really
wanted to be a games programmer. She specified in her will that the money
was to be spent on things for my future. So I convinced my parents that
AMOS (a games-centric BASIC-based programming language for the Amiga) was
the best investment. At the same time I bought GMC, which was an
AMOS-specific soundtracker clone. After discovering the joy of writing
music, using a bunch of samples on a couple of 800K disks, I gave up on the
headache of coding and focused on making music instead. Somewhere I still
have a halfway-aborted horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up I was developing
in AMOS - its funny because I had about 5% of the graphics done, and about
10% of the code, and 100% of the music complete: a different track for each
of the eight levels, title music, high-score music, various jingles,
end-of-level baddie music and game-completion-sequence music :-). So it was
pretty obvious what I really wanted to do.

4-Which composing programs have you been using? Which one in particular?

On the Amiga, I mainly used MED/OctaMED. I liked it because it was
system-friendly so I could still multitask. Most other soundtrackers
wouldn't let you do that, which I thought was a shame. I bought a Predule

16-bit soundcard at one point, and had a midi interface, and did a bunch of

tracks where OctaMED was playing 16-bit samples through the soundcard, and
also playing external sound modules and synths via midi, and I'd record the
whole lot plus the odd bit of live-mixing/performance onto DAT or external
hard disk recorder. A couple of these tracks are still up at:

http://www.garageband.com/artist/CoolCapture (ignore my silly descriptions
that were written about 6 years ago :-)

The Amiga ones are Nest and Divide by Zero. The other is a Reason track
which is what I primarily use to make music now.

5-With which module did you feel you had reached your goal?

Many of my modules were never heard by the outside world, so as far as what
anyone would know is concerned, I was really happy with the Skidmarks 2
tune. Unfortunately it was done on an absolutely terrible pair of speakers
(like you have no idea how bad these were - but they were loud and thats why
I liked them at the time :-), and so the drums are too loud with reference
to the guitar. If I could go back I'd beef up the guitar volume. I really
liked that track as I had a clear picture in my head of how I wanted it to
sound and I achieved exactly that.

Also, I'll let everyone know now that some of my tunes had secret messages
hidden in them... not audible ones, but either visual when you loaded the
track into the music program it was created in (Skidmarks 2 has this, but
you need to load the original MED module into the correct version of OctaMED
and then hunt around the track for the messages ;-), or things like text
files hidden in the instrument bank. I notice some entrepreneuring
individual found one of these in the Guardian soundtrack as it was right
there when I unarchived the track from your website. Nice work - but they
never sent me a photo of their genitalia, which is most unfortunate. Maybe
I should've included an email address.

6-Is there a tune you would like not to remember? For what reason?

Some of my early GMC-creations were pretty terrible, but luckily only a
handful of people ever heard those :-).

One thing I do regret, which I had no control over - was the Skidmarks 2
sound FX... I had actually sat down and created a whole host of sound FX for
skidmarks 2 - a whole bunch of different car-crash noises (which I wanted
them to randomly select between, or select according to the velocity of the
impact) and also different skidding noises for tarseal or gravel, and gave
them all to the Acid Software dudes, but they didn't use them due to (what
they said were) memory constraints... in my opinion it would've been well
worth trashing something else to make room for decent sound FX but they
didn't so there we go. Anyway its still a wicked game!

7-In your opinion, what's the value of a music in a demo, game?

Music tends to add all of the emotion to images - film makers often
acknowledge this, and having worked on a number of video productions I've
seen how first hand this is very true. I'd get sent video & words, and see
how when I added music the whole thing would come to life emotionally.

8-At present, are you still composing? For professional or leisure purposes?

Definitely! For both purposes. I am currently producing a whole bunch of
different styles and am looking to sign some of these tracks. I have built
up a few connections so it will happen eventually. If anyone out there
knows of anyone wanting to sign some wicked music in almost any electronic
genre and a whole bunch of other styles as well, you know who to call... :)

9-What do you think of today's pieces of music such as mpeg,wave,midi,etc...?

I don't really understand this question. But I will say that I'm not a fan
of MP3. Not cause of the legal stuff, I don't care about that, people are
going to copy things if they're going to copy things and theres nothing you
can do about it. I'me talking about the quality. Sometimes I can't tell
the difference, sometimes I can - but in all cases, I *know* there is a
difference, whether I'm conscious of it or not. And that bothers me...
chucking out 80% of the information in a piece of recorded music and then
assuming its going to have the same effect on your body/mind & emotions... I
think thats a mistake.

10-Could you tell us some of your all times favourite tunes?

On the Amiga, I loved the ghosts and goblins soundtrack with the acoustic
guitar, and also many of Jogier Liljedahl's tracks. I also really liked
Moby's tracks that he did for the Sanity demo. But my all-time favourite
track would have to be Dr Awesome's Empty Spaces.

11-Are you planning to make an audio cd with some of your music remastered?

One day... I'd also like to remake some classic C64 tunes, as I believe
thats where a lot of the REALLY good music is hiding away... stuff like the
Cybernoid sountrack and some of Martin Walker's tracks. Rob Hubbard of
course had some real classics, theres just so many... I think because the
level of technology meant you couldn't rely too much on the sounds to carry
a tune, it was all about the melody and the notes and the rhythm - so it
really pushed musicians to get those elements right.

12-What bands are you currently listenning to?

Radiohead is probably about it. I used to listen to heaps of Pink Floyd
too. But I hardly ever listen to any music - I'm too busy writing it!

13-What does/did the amiga/c64 scene give you?

Too much to list. Everything. I'd probably be dead in a ditch if it wasn't
for the C64 and Amiga, the creative potential they unleashed in me has
shaped my whole life... and the inspiration coming from all corners of the
globe in the form of music and demos and games and just the whole scene
"feeling", it had a massive impact on me and how I viewed life.

14-Are you still active in the scene these days?

Not really in the sense you mean it, but also I think totally yes. Because
we each have our own "scene" and there are a million different "scenes"
everywhere... so I'm very active in the "scene" in that sense :-).

15-Anyone to greet? Anything left to say? Feel free...

You guys are great!! This is such a cool website.

The only other thing I want to say is a massive huge big-ups to Paul Woakes
who wrote Mercenary and Damocles. Damocles to me, was the best Amiga game
ever written, I spent hours immersed in it, drawing up intricate maps of
every world, and cataloging it down even to each type of building
everywhere, empty or not! I still hve those maps and the original Damocles
box. One thing I never figured out which pissed me off no end was how in
the hell to get into that dollar shaped building on the treasury planet. It
had an H key I think, which I couldn't find anywhere.. I also couldn't find
the A key for the authors house, but I found another way to get in that
seemed to exploit a bug in the program... but I think it was intentionally
left there by Paul. It was a totally wicked amazing ^&%@#$% game and, and,
and... well, you get the picture!

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please note: this interview is ©opyrighted in 2005 by crown of cryptoburners
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