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0 3 7 lab — techniques & theory (summary) summaryProse and data extracted from 037-lab , a single-file browser app that teaches music theory in semitones for tracker musicians. Twelve "chip & tracker techniques" cards, eight theory cards, an interval table and the …
64'er 10/1986 — Musik wie noch nie: the Soundmonitor article and manual summaryThe article with which 64er published chris-huelsbeck 's soundmonitor as its "Listing des Monats" (listing of the month) in October 1986 — the editor that started the C64 tracker era and the first documentation of his …
64'er 2/88 — Von der Spielidee ins Regal (Rainbow Arts, with Hülsbeck) summary64'er visits rainbow-arts in Gütersloh to trace how a game is made — and sound comes last in the pipeline. Hülsbeck's segment is a four-question mini-interview taken while great-giana-sisters was new and To Be On Top …
Arcade Attack — Matt Gray (VGM Maestro) interview (2020/2021) summaryA short late interview with matt-gray : the Last Ninja 2 brief in one sentence, the NES port of his player, and the three Reformation albums.
Asger Alstrup — Examination of SID triangle waveform / noise waveform (The SID Homepage, 1995) summaryTwo pages of measurements from andreas-varga 's SID Homepage ( sid-homepage ). asger-alstrup read voice 3's waveform output register $D41B on a real C64 once per clock cycle — a REU (RAM Expansion Unit) DMA transfer of …
Brief introduction to Super Commands (FTC) summaryfrantic 's own introduction to defmon 's "less known" batch-editing mode: Super Commands multiply any ordinary edit keystroke over many steps, many repetitions, every Nth line, or all sequences at once — defMON's …
C64 Programmer's Reference Guide, ch. 4 — Programming Sound and Music on Your Commodore 64 (1982) summaryThe official 1982 introduction to the sid from the BASIC programmer's side: ten example programs that POKE the chip's registers, each with a line-by-line explanation, plus a short "technical explanation" of frequency, …
C64.COM interview #36: Matt Gray (2014) summaryThe most technical of matt-gray 's interviews: how his player was organised, what made its vibrato "his", which games he did in which year and how long each took, and the Compunet-to-System 3 career path.
C64.COM interview #8 — Charles Deenen (2010) summarycharles-deenen 's own long-form C64 Q&A: the fullest first-hand list of what he actually did per game — and it is mostly sound effects , with music on a shorter list. Introduces himself as "co-founder of Maniacs of …
C=Lehti 4/89 — SIDin hollantilaiset valjastajat (Maniacs of Noise) summaryThe only contemporary (1989) profile of maniacs-of-noise in this wiki — written by Jori Olkkonen while Tel was 16 and Deenen 19, with details no retrospective interview repeats: the driver's version number, a …
Charles Deenen interviews: Domination #11 (1998) and Designing Sound (2010) summarycharles-deenen in his own words — the programmer half of maniacs-of-noise on the driver, the tool and the money, and later the sound designer looking back at how it started.
Charts and Tables for SID-Wizard 1.6 (document version 1.0, 2014) summaryA fifteen-page cheat sheet for SID-Wizard 1.6: one page per screen or table with the value schemes, then key tables that list every C64 key next to its vice equivalent, and four reference tables (decimal ↔ signed ↔ hex, …
CheeseCutter — the repo, the man pages, and the release paper trail (2011–2026) summarycheesecutter carries almost no documentation of its own — the repo's AUTHORS and NEWS are empty, ChangeLog and doc/README just point to theyamo.kapsi.fi/ccutter ("for instructions on program use"), and that site has …
chipmusic.org — Advanced LSDj Tutorial: The Ghost Channel (2013) summaryThe thread accompanying tyler-barnes 's video tutorial ( s-tylerbarnes-ghost-channel-tutorial ), and the place the name ghost channel comes from. Its value beyond the video is the reply by nitro2k01 , which supplies the …
chipmusic.org — C64 Music for Dummies (ant1's SID-Wizard 1.0 tutorial, 2012) summaryA forum tutorial that takes a complete beginner from starting sid-wizard 1.0 (released 2012, on SourceForge) to an exported .sid , by making three instruments, a pattern, an orderlist and a SID-Maker export; updated the …
chipmusic.org — CheeseCutter video tutorial thread (2014) summaryA short thread announcing scarzix 's video tutorial series for cheesecutter — the series the SIDin #14 interview mentions ( s-sidin14-scarzix-interview ). Its main value: the complete list of four tutorials (the scout …
chipmusic.org — LSDJ Advanced Tricks thread (2012) summaryA chipmusic-org thread started by a tracker who had "PU1 as a kick, PU2 as the main melody, WAV as the lower notes, NOISE as hi-hat" and ran out of channels. The replies are the Game Boy scene's consensus on channel …
chipmusic.org — LSDJ Chord Cheat Sheet / Advice on Learning Tables threads (2015) summaryTwo chipmusic-org threads: LazierGunz's chord cheat sheet for C commands and arpeggio tables (an image; the discussion carries the values), and a beginner asking how anyone learns to write tables — answered by herr_prof …
chipmusic.org — LSDJ FAQ thread (2010–2011) summaryA catch-all question thread on chipmusic-org from the LSDj 3.9–4 era. Beside hardware chatter (cartridge power problems, keyboard wiring, USB transfers) it settles several command questions that the manual leaves …
chipmusic.org — LSDJ kit creation and kit volume threads (2013) summaryThe community's working version of little-scale 's tutorial ( s-little-scale-lsdj-kits ), in Audacity rather than Peak, plus the thread where everyone agrees the stock kits are too quiet.
chipmusic.org — LSDJ live performance thread (2010) summaryWhat live mode actually gives you, argued out by people who tour with it.
chipmusic.org — lsdj wav channel release? (2013) summarySomeone who had used lsdj for a year asks why a volume envelope that gives a release on the pulse channels does nothing on the wave channel. The answer is the frame-envelope method — the wave channel's volume envelope …
chipmusic.org — Noise snare / Complete Drum Kit on Noise Channel threads (2014) summaryTwo chipmusic-org threads from late 2014 on making drums in lsdj 's noise channel alone, with concrete instrument settings and tables from several members, and the recurring advice that drums are best spread over …
chipmusic.org — sid music hints'n'tips (2013) summary4mat opens by pointing at a CSDb thread of SID tips "with contributions from Jammer, Jeff and many others" (link not preserved) and at "a really good article" on the waveform differences between 6581 and 8580 (link not …
chipmusic.org — speech synthesis thread (2012) summarySomeone asks whether a three-to-four-minute spoken-word piece is possible with lsdj 's SPEECH instrument. The answers are the only first-hand account of the speech instrument in this wiki, and they are discouraging in a …
chipmusic.org — the defMON megathread (2014–2026) summaryThe de-facto support forum, changelog and design diary for defMON , run for twelve years by its author frantic himself. He opens on 2014-06-08 ("If you are one of those people who tried it out and actually did …
chipmusic.org — two Johan Kotlinski interviews (2012, 2014) summaryTwo short interviews with johan-kotlinski reposted on chipmusic-org : a 2012 e-mail interview for a school paper on Game Boy music history, and a 2014 piece for Devise Magazine. Both predate the longer 2020 intense-tech …
chipmusic.org — Wav Instrument Tutorials for LSDJ (2014) summary"Specifically I want to create a flute wave instrument, but all the tutorials I find are just about kick drums and snares." The answers are the wiki's best sourced material on articulating a wave instrument, plus a …
chipmusic.org — What are the typical C64/SID sounds/instruments? (2015) summaryA keyboard player joining a video-game cover band (in the vein of Press Play on Tape or Machinae Supremacy) asks which sounds make a SID tune sound like a SID tune, and how to fake them on a rompler (Yamaha MOXF6, Korg …
Chordian — SID Musicians (JCH's verdicts on the game composers, 2018) summarychordian — a coder-composer who wrote his own editor in the 1980s — rates the famous game composers "absolutely not overrated" or "indeed very overrated", judging instruments and player as much as tunes. Opinion, but …
commodore-64.eu — The C64 SID Chip (6581 vs 8580 overview) summaryAn accessible, unsigned overview of the sid for a general audience. It is a secondary source : nothing on it carries a reference, and the page sells things. The wiki uses it only to confirm or annotate claims that …
Composing in SID Factory II, Part 4 — Instruments (Chordian) summaryA tutorial blog post by chordian on making instruments in sid-factory-ii : what the ADSR bytes do, why hard restart exists, the four waveforms and their combinations on old and new chips, the noise lock-up and the test …
Creating Chiptunes with SID-Wizard, Second Edition (summary) summaryA 75-page e-book (document version 1.0, 11 February 2014, written for sid-wizard 1.6) by witchmaster with chapters by hermit taken from the 1.2/1.4 manuals. Its stated purpose: explain "some stuff left out that SID …
CSDb forum: Huelsbeck TFMX? (2006) summaryA short thread that settles what the scene knows about the C64 tfmx editor: nothing of it ever circulated.
CSDb release pages: Soundmonitor V1.0 (1986) and Shades (1986) summaryThe database entries for the program and the tune, useful for downloads, dating and the scene's own view of them.
Cybernoid I / Cybernoid II 'behind the notes' videos (2014) and the Lemon64 thread summaryTwo short YouTube videos that play jeroen-tel 's cybernoid and cybernoid-ii against the Turbo Assembler source they were typed into, and the forum thread that explains what is (and is not) being shown. The videos …
Defense Mechanism — LSDj Learning Lab shorts: Limit and Vshift, Long Filter Sweeps, Self-Resonating Bass (videos, 2020) summaryThree short clips from the wave-channel stream series, each carrying one thing the wiki did not have.
Defense Mechanism — LSDj Learning Lab: Overtones / Ghost Channel with Allpass Filter (video, 2020) summarySeven minutes of a live stream by defense-mechanism , answering a viewer who asked whether LSDj can do a distorted guitar power chord. It is the 2020 answer to the 2013 hand-drawing method ( …
Defense Mechanism — LSDj Noise Channel Tutorial (v9.2.L) (video, 2022) summaryWritten because the noise channel was rebuilt in 9.1.0 and the standard reference no longer applied: "there's a tutorial by Bowie Meets Robot about the noise channel for version four and it's really good … but it …
Defense Mechanism — LSDJ Wave Channel Tutorial..? (More of a ramble) (video, 2020) summaryThe video companion to the Wave Synth Deep Dive articles ( s-intense-tech-01-wave-synth-deep-dive-part-1 , s-intense-tech-02-wave-synth-deep-dive-part-2 ), demonstrated with an oscilloscope on screen. Two things make it …
Defense Mechanism — Making every LSDJ kick I can think of (video, 2024) summaryA compendium: every kick he can build, one per channel and per method, on LSDj 9.4.0 — the newest version any source in this wiki uses. The project file is offered in the video description.
defMON wiki — DIN/MIDI/LSDj/Nanoloop sync, stereo SID, manual BPM tables summaryThe defmon wiki's hardware pages: Scannerboy's user-port sync adapter (with the assembly code to drive it from your own programs), the 2SID stereo feature set, and frantic 's defBPM calculator/tables (2013-03-02) that …
defMON wiki — features, interface overview, seqED key map summaryThe unofficial documentation of defmon , frantic 's C64 sid music editor, from the wiki mirror at defmon.vandervecken.com ("There is no official support for the program, but on this wiki you will find some bits and …
defMON wiki — release history 2008–2020, creations, links summaryThe dated release list of defmon with frantic 's named releases and per-release notes, plus the wiki's list of music and demos made with the program. Version numbers "are essentially just date stamps that reflect the …
defMON wiki — using a defMON tune in your own program summaryThe defmon wiki's developer pages: how to link a packed defMON tune into an assembly project, the init/play/update entry points (including the multispeed split), and the self-modifying global-volume location. "The …
defMONing 101: A defMON Operator Field Guide (iLKke, 2013) summaryA compact survival guide to defmon by iLKke, "the result of my limited defMON knowledge based largely on experimentation… not intended as an exhaustive explanation of the program, but rather a brief survival guide and …
defMONing 102: extended field guide (iLKke et al.) summaryThe extended, multi-author revision of iLKke's defMONing 101 for defmon — same reference core, plus precise timing semantics (fraMES), the full speed/timer key set, Super Commands, and long practical sections on the …
Domination #1 — Interview with Jeroen Tel (Jazzcat, 1994) summaryThe earliest of the wiki's long Tel interviews — jeroen-tel at 22, still mid-career, walking through the whole C64 road from BASIC player to Probe Software and the Nintendo CD.
DUET docs: DUST and DUSK, the two synths (summary) summaryduet 's two own synths (m64's tracker, not yet published): DUST , a sid synth — one whole reSID per slot, three voices, table programs and a mod matrix on the patch's own clock — and DUSK , wavetable synthesis over the …
DUET docs: instruments, the mixer and the bounce (summary) summaryWhere sounds live in duet (m64's tracker, not yet published), what the built-in console does, and how audio gets out — from instruments.md , mixer.md and bounce.md .
DUET docs: libduet, the engine as a library (summary) summarydocs/dev/libduet.md — everything in duet that makes sound is the Zig module duet , with the C ABI libduet putting a C header over the same engine, "in libopenmpt's shape". Bytes in, samples out: the library opens no …
DUET docs: sessions, formats and round-trips (summary) summaryThe file-format contract of duet (m64's own tracker, not yet published): what each file kind holds, the four session kinds and what SAVE writes, the byte-identical round-trips, the project container's law, and what .wav …
DUET docs: the grid and the two sides (summary) summaryFour user pages of duet (m64's own tracker, not yet published): the SID half ( the-duet.md ), the sid-wizard half ( sid-wizard.md ), the impulse-tracker half ( impulse-tracker.md ) and the shared pattern editor ( …
DUET docs: the system clipboard and its text format (summary) summaryHow pattern blocks move between duet (m64's tracker, not yet published), openmpt , schism-tracker and any program that writes text to the OS clipboard. system-clipboard.md is the DUET-side reference; clipboard-format.md …
DUET README (summary) summaryThe README of duet , m64's tracker (v0.1.0-alpha). Ingested first for the basics; the repo's docs/ and SID-Wizard research followed on 2026-08-30 — see s-duet-docs-grid-and-sides , s-duet-docs-formats , …
DUET research: SID-Wizard 1.97 formats and player (summary) summarym64's engineering research (session 2026-08-01) for duet 's pure-Zig reimplementation of the sid-wizard 1.97 player: byte-exact .swi / .swm format specs validated against 324/324 example instruments and 143/143 SW 1.97 …
DUET research: SID-Wizard player.asm deep dive (summary) summarym64's implementation-grade appendix to s-duet-research-sidwizard : three exhaustive extraction passes over sid-wizard 1.97's player.asm (4062 lines, 64tass), with 6502-exact pseudocode including carry and flag …
electro·pizza — defMON, VICE, and the Pocket CHIP (2019) summaryA 2019-07-29 blog post by Ryan Oles documenting, step by step, how he set up vice on a Pocket CHIP (a small Debian-based handheld with a keyboard) to practice defmon without dedicating desk space to a real commodore-64 …
FastTracker v2.08 Manual (Urban Jonsson, 1996) summaryAn extension of fasttracker-2 's built-in help "with examples included for all the functions", written by Urban Jonsson between June 1995 and February 1996 (published by Triton Productions and Under World Digital …
Furnace tracker — C64 (SID) system and instrument documentation summaryTwo pages of the manual of furnace , a multi-system tracker (GPL-2.0 repository), describing how it drives the sid . Furnace is not one of this wiki's focus tools; the pages are kept as a second, independent description …
Game Audio Network Guild — Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2011) summaryA career-summary interview for the game-audio trade guild; little technique, but Hülsbeck's own one-sentence version of the Soundmonitor story and of his self-taught, tools-first approach.
GamesArt interview — Jeroen Tel (2015) summaryThe Tel Me More-era interview: why he crowdfunded remakes of his 1987–1991 C64 work, where the funk in his basslines comes from, and his first game credit named — Hawkeye .
Getting started with LSDj with Infu (course) summaryA single-page beginner course in fourteen sections by infu (CC BY-NC 4.0): setup and emulators, the sequencer, the ENV envelope, commands, three noise drums, a snare table, a wave kick and bass, the synth screen, and …
GitHub realdmx/c64_6581_sid_players — Cybernoid II in Deenen's MUSICFILE, the MoN SFX player, the Driller listing summaryA GitHub collection of "original and reverse-engineered music players for the C64", converted to the ACME assembler so that "every assembly file should produce a .sid file". Its Tel_Jeroen_MON/Tel_Jeroen_Cybernoid2.asm …
GoatTracker v2.72 readme (summary) summaryThe manual of goattracker 2 by lasse-oorni — "a tracker-like C64 music editor running on Win32 or Linux platforms" with reSID emulation (Dag Lem; distortion model by Antti Lankila) or HardSID hardware, distributed under …
goto80.com — defMON posts and the Improv page summaryThree short blog posts (2009–2020) and the undated Improv page from goto80 's own site — first-hand statements on defmon 's authorship, its evolution as a live instrument, and his from-scratch improvisation practice on …
Hackaday.io — RetroChallenge 2019: Gameboy Audiohacks (channelhacking, splitting pulse waves) summaryTwo project logs from a coder pair (Quint and utz) who spent RetroChallenge 2019 getting more than four voices out of a DMG-01 in software. Useful to this wiki for two things: an outside definition of the ghost-channel …
Happy Computer 3/87 — Der Soundprofessor (Hülsbeck at work) summaryA reporter takes the 6:35 Intercity from Munich to visit the 18-year-old chris-huelsbeck in Langen — the earliest eyewitness account of his workplace in this wiki, published the month he joined rainbow-arts .
Hugi #38 — Up Close & Personal: Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise (2014) summaryMagic of Nah-Kolor's interview with jeroen-tel for the diskmag Hugi, early 2014: biography, what rob-hubbard and martin-galway meant to him, his working methods in 2014, the state of maniacs-of-noise , and his live …
HVSC — SID file format description (PSID v1–v4, RSID) summaryThe reference description of .sid files as used by the High Voltage SID Collection: a big-endian header (magic, version, offsets, addresses, song count, speed bits, three 32-byte strings, and from v2 on flags for clock …
Impulse Tracker HINTS.TXT — Hints for Composers (summary) summarySeven short contributions shipped with impulse-tracker .
Impulse Tracker ITTECH.TXT — technical reference (summary) summaryThe byte-level description of the it-format used by every IT player since (libopenmpt, Schism, duet ): header, instrument, sample and pattern layouts, the volume and slide formulas, the channel-allocation procedure and …
Impulse Tracker User's Manual — IT.TXT (summary) summaryThe manual shipped with impulse-tracker : introduction and technical limits, running the program, the pattern editor with the complete effect list, order list and channel settings, samples and sample functions, …
IMR interview — Chris Hülsbeck (1996) summaryA short questionnaire with one big claim: Hülsbeck believes he beat martin-galway to sampled sound on the sid — and lost the fame to a release delay.
IMR interview — Jeroen Tel (1996) summaryThe scene-questionnaire Tel: aliases, group chronology and his own theory of why his music mattered. Settles his birthplace : "I was born on the 19th of May 1972 in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I have lived in Helmond …
Intense Tech #01 — LSDj Wave Synth Deep Dive, Part 1 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe first intense-tech article: defense-mechanism explains the lsdj wave synth's SIGNAL, VOLUME, FILTER, CUTOFF and Q by way of the harmonic series, and shows how to extract a sine wave — the deepest bass the Game Boy …
Intense Tech #02 — LSDj Wave Synth Deep Dive, Part 2 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe second wave-synth lesson of intense-tech : PHASE (and its Resync modes), DIST (Clip, Fold, Wrap), LIMIT and VSHIFT — "how to add some real noisy crunch to your wave sounds", from a silky lead to a gnarly bass ( …
Intense Tech #03 — Don't Sleep on Z (Defense Mechanism, after Hypnogram) summarySeven worked examples of lsdj 's Z command by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ), rewritten from a 2016 blog post by hypnogram : random vibrato, duty cycle, panning, gating, melody, chords and a sweep. The article is …
Intense Tech #04 — Manage your LSDj save files with libLSDj (Defense Mechanism) summaryA command-line tutorial by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) for 4ntler 's liblsdj tools lsdsng-export and lsdsng-import : listing what is in a pile of lsdj .sav files, pulling single songs out as .lsdsng files and …
Intense Tech #05 — LSDj Wave Cruncher Instrument Library (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) introduces a library of sample-derived wave-synth instruments for lsdj and the liblsdj tool that patches them into a save: the wave synth "as a rudimentary sampler".
Intense Tech #06 — Groovy Groove and Tick Tricks, Part 1 (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism on lsdj timing: what a tick is, how grooves assign ticks to lines, a numbering convention that makes G commands readable, per-channel swing, and phrases lengthened with H ( intense-tech ).
Intense Tech #07 — Groovy Groove and Tick Tricks, Part 2 (Defense Mechanism) summaryMore lsdj groove tricks from intense-tech : slow tables, Hop + Groove combinations, 3/4 time and triplets from grooves, and a two-channel delay made of nothing but grooves ( defense-mechanism ).
Intense Tech #08 — DOTCNT's LSDj Wave Cruncher (Defense Mechanism) summaryHow to turn a one-note sample into an lsdj wave-synth instrument with lsdj-wave-cruncher , by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) — the companion of the library article s-intense-tech-05-wave-cruncher-instrument-library .
Intense Tech #09 — Let's Table This Discussion! (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism 's lesson on lsdj tables in the intense-tech series: the four columns explained with the details the manual skips, nesting tables with A , a quirk that turns one table into a stereo effect, and attack …
Intense Tech #10 — Get your Kicks with Version 6, Part 1 (Defense Mechanism) summaryWave-channel kicks in lsdj 6, expanding a video tutorial: why the wave channel, the new P/L/V instrument setting and its DRUM mode, a robust kick table, the "Kyoto kick" attack, and two ways to go from kick to bass. A …
Intense Tech #11 — Kicks Part 2: Kick Heaven in Version 7 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe second kick lesson of intense-tech : what lsdj 7 changed for DRUM pitch, wave snares, drums on the pulse channels, the PU1 hardware sweep, noise kicks and layering channels ( defense-mechanism ).
Intense Tech #12 — Scoping Out New Features (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) tours the new features of lsdj 7.7.4 — the B command, FX/SPEED, silky wave, the super-fast retrig — while warning that version 7 "is still buggy and WILL CRASH" and that 6.9.0 remains …
Intense Tech #13 — Interview with LSDj Developer Johan Kotlinski (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism interviews johan-kotlinski shortly before lsdj 's twentieth birthday: why the Game Boy, his background in the Swedish C64/Amiga scene, the birth of the Game Boy music movement, live mode, the changes …
Intense Tech #14 — Let's Appreciate Version 8 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe changes from lsdj 7 to 8, listed by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): the two-row screen map, ADSR on pulse and noise, Z on almost every command, renamed table modes, and playback optimisations that ended the …
Intense Tech #15 — Let's Mix It Up (and Down) (Defense Mechanism) summaryMixing with four channels and "four bits of dynamic range": defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) treats volume, stereo placement and frequency range as three separate levers in lsdj , and adds two volume tricks — a snare …
Intense Tech #16 — So You Want a Cartridge Family? (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) on how to run lsdj on a real game-boy : three kinds of flash cartridge, what each needs, and a warning about "LSDJ cartridges" sold online. The page carries a 2024 update that …
Intense Tech #17 — The Joys of Noise (Defense Mechanism) summaryA deep dive into lsdj 's noise channel by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): how the shape byte maps onto the LFSR's octave and divisor, short-loop versus long-loop mode, how S , P , C and transposes act on shapes, the …
Intense Tech #18 — ADSR Makes Life Easier! (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism on the pulse/noise ADSR that lsdj 8.1.0 introduced and the switch from hardware to software volume in 8.8.0: how the stages are written, how the speeds compare, instant decays, percussion transients …
Intense Tech #19 — New Noise and 9.1.0 News (Defense Mechanism) summarylsdj 9.1.0 reorganised the noise channel into ordered notes; defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) explains the new layout, offers a converter for old shape values, and lists the other 9.0.1–9.1.0 changes — P , C and V on …
Intense Tech #20 — Customize LSDj From Scratch with LSDPatch (Defense Mechanism) summaryA tour of lsdpatch 1.10.4 by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): upgrading an lsdj ROM in place, managing songs, building sample kits with proper resampling, and editing fonts and palettes.
Intense Tech #21 — What's New in LSDj v9.2 (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) on the changes from lsdj 9.1.0 to 9.2.H: rebuilt sample timing, new synth PHASE modes, the noise PITCH FREE/SAFE setting, an envelope visualiser, a RESYNC wave play mode, row queueing …
Lemon64 threads: SID and ADSR re-triggering? (2008) / Hard restart – what's the story? (2015) summaryTwo short Lemon64 forum threads that between them give the practical understanding of the sid envelope problem behind hard-restart . In the first (2008, 4 posts) a game coder cannot retrigger a sound effect; lasse-oorni …
Lemon64: How does one learn SID sound design these days? (2020) summaryA returning C64 user with an Ultimate64 has found sid-wizard ("reminds me of ScreamTreacker/ImpulseTracker in terms of composition") but cannot turn what he knows about subtractive synthesis into instrument values — the …
Lemon64: SID-Wizard instrument recommendations? (2021) summaryA thin thread. The opening question — do you use, tweak or make sid-wizard 's example instruments, and what are your tips? — got no answer at all; the only instrument in it, a bass drum, was posted as an image that the …
Little Sound Dj v9.2.6 Operating Manual (summary) summaryThe official manual of lsdj (79 pages, dated 9 May 2021) by johan-kotlinski . Chapter 1 covers the game-boy 's four sound channels, keys and hex; chapter 2 walks through the nine screens (song, chain, phrase, …
little-scale — $1 Nanoloop MIDI Sync (2009) summaryThe minimum viable sync box: one CMOS chip and no microcontroller , syncing nanoloop to MIDI clock. It is the design people actually built, and the comment thread is a good record of what goes wrong.
little-scale — Abrasive on LSDJ Microtuning (2009) summarylittle-scale reposts abrasive 's own announcement of lsdj_tune , the script that turns the hand-editing of the previous day's post into a one-line command. Unusually for this blog, everything is in the text.
little-scale — All 4-bit Waveforms That Have 32 Samples (2009) summaryA Max/MSP patch that enumerates every waveform the game-boy-apu 's wave channel can hold, and fails — usefully.
little-scale — extracting samples from Game Boy and GBA ROMs (2010, 2012) summaryThe generic trick for getting audio out of any ROM, with the settings that work for the Game Boy Advance — and one worked result.
little-scale — How to: Prepare Samples and Create LSDJ Kits (2008) summaryThe canonical kit-making tutorial, and the one the forum threads keep pointing back to. Its subject is the half the wiki did not have: what to do to a sample before lsdpatch ever sees it.
little-scale — Let's Tune the Game Boy Like a Japanese Koto (2009) summaryA commission, and the clearest worked example of a just (ratio-based) retune in the cluster: the whole ROM tuned to the pentatonic hirajoshi scale on A. The spreadsheet screenshot shows every intermediate column, so the …
little-scale — LSDJ Tuning Tables (2009) summaryFour sentences and two pictures, and the pictures are the post. They show where lsdj 's pitch tables live in the ROM — the prerequisite for every rom-retuning job that follows on this blog.
little-scale — Microtonal Chipmusic Compilation, call for tracks (2009) summaryShort, and included because it is where little-scale states the point of the whole 2009 tuning project and lists the routes into it — a contemporary bibliography of chip microtuning as of December 2009.
little-scale — Nanoloop Tuned to 18-TET, Hacked ROM (2009) summaryThe earliest post of the cluster, a day before the LSDj tables, and the one that explains the arithmetic in words. Same technique, different tracker: nanoloop 1.3d retuned to 18 equal divisions of the octave.
little-scale — Overclocked Game Boy (2008) summaryFour lines and three audio clips, but they close a question the 2009 underclocking posts left open and they attribute the ProSound mod.
little-scale — Sync Options for Game Boy Music (2008) summaryThe census of Game Boy synchronisation as it stood in October 2008: eighteen devices, what each one can and cannot do, and who made it. Nothing else in the wiki maps this territory.
little-scale — Syncing something *to* LSDJ, and the un-sync piece (2006–2008) summaryEvery other post in this series makes the Game Boy a slave. These two make it the master clock for the rest of the studio — and the third, from 2006, throws the clock away entirely.
little-scale — the Arduino Game Boy sync boxes: syncThing, Sync Tank and the AU$15 build (2008) summaryThree months in which a breadboard became a documented build anyone could copy for about AU$15. The important content is the pin-level wiring , which differs between lsdj and nanoloop and is stated nowhere else in the …
little-scale — the chip sample packs (2008–2012) summaryBetween 2008 and 2012 he recorded a dozen sound chips onto disk, systematically, and gave the results away. As audio they are raw material; as documents they are a survey of what each chip can be made to do, because …
little-scale — the LSDJ kit releases, and the stock kits extracted (2008–2014) summarySix years of giving lsdj kits away, from Street Fighter voices in 2008 to a louder TR-808 in 2014. Individually these are announcements; together they are the record of who supplied the scene's kits, and one of them …
little-scale — Underclocking a Game Boy, and retuning it afterwards (2009) summaryThe pair that makes the point of the whole cluster: there are two ways to move a Game Boy's pitch, one in the hardware and one in the ROM, and doing the first without the second leaves you out of tune. The second post …
little-scale — USB MIDI Game Boy Sync for $16, and DIN sync 24 (2011) summaryThree years after the Arduino boxes, the same job with no MIDI socket, no optocoupler and no power supply: a Teensy 2.0 that the computer sees as a MIDI device. This is also where the wiki gets a Game Boy link-plug …
Matt Gray's Dominator subtune 6 source (PLAYER V4.2, 1987) and the Reformation driver competition summaryThe only C64 driver in the wiki published by its author: matt-gray 's own 6502 source for one dominator subtune, released under Creative Commons on 2014-11-26 as a gift to SID composers and the basis of a composing …
MOS 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) datasheet — the text behind Appendix O summaryThe manufacturer's twelve-page specification of the sid : block description, the 29-register map, a paragraph per register bit, the envelope rate table, the filter, pins and electrical data, the note table with a …
My Computer Chronicles — Jens-Christian Huus / JCH (2017) summaryJens-Christian Huus — JCH of Vibrants , today the wiki's chordian — tells his whole computing life from 1983 to 2000: how a Danish postman with no musical education built the C64 music editor "that has since inspired …
Newman — Driving the SID chip: Assembly Language, Composition, and Sound Design for the C64 (2017) summaryAn academic article arguing that the C64's sound is as much the product of the composers' bespoke player routines ("drivers") as of the sid itself: rob-hubbard and martin-galway wrote their own 6502 drivers, and the …
Old C64/PC Player/Editor Notes — Chordian (2017) summaryWhile compiling his memoir ( s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles ), chordian scanned the paper notes he kept in the 1980s and 90s for his C64 and PC music players and editors, and published them in five captioned …
OpenMPT manual — About OpenMPT summaryThe manual's own description of openmpt : what kind of tracker it is, its feature list, limitations and history from ModPlugin to open source.
OpenMPT manual — Compatible Playback summaryWhy openmpt has a "compatible playback" mode and a list of every quirk it can emulate, format by format — in effect a catalogue of how impulse-tracker , fasttracker-2 , scream-tracker-3 and protracker really behave, and …
OpenMPT manual — Effect Reference summaryThe complete command table of openmpt for every format it writes — MOD, XM, S3M, IT and its own MPTM — with the effect-memory rules, the oscillator waveforms, the retrigger volume table and the "sound control" …
OpenMPT manual — Instruments summaryThe instrument tab of openmpt : multisampling and the sample map, volume/pan/pitch-filter envelopes, New Note Actions, the resonant filter defaults, random variation, pitch/pan separation and plugin routing — the IT …
OpenMPT manual — Module formats summaryWhat each module format can hold, in openmpt 's words: MOD, S3M, XM, IT, MPTM and MIDI import, followed by the fifty-odd import-only formats and the compression containers OpenMPT opens.
OpenMPT manual — Samples summaryThe sample tab of openmpt : formats, the edit toolbar, tuning per format, loops and sustain loops, auto-vibrato, time-stretching, the drawing and resizing tools that make chip samples, and the OPL (AdLib) FM instrument …
OpenMPT manual — Song Properties (and Tempo Swing) summaryThe global switches of a module in openmpt : format conversion, the playback flags (linear slides, fast volume slides, filter range, IT old effects, compatible Gxx, ProTracker mode, Amiga limits), mix levels, the three …
OpenMPT manual — Zxx Macros summaryHow the Zxx (and smooth \xx ) commands drive openmpt 's built-in resonant filter, plugin parameters and external MIDI — the PC tracker's equivalent of a SID filter table ( filter-programming ).
Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP1: Instrument Retriggering (video, 2016) summaryThe first of six episodes, framed as "hidden tricks in LSDj that are probably in the manual but not necessarily gone over in enough detail". The subject is one fact with a long tail: a note and an instrument number are …
Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP2: In-depth WAV channel walkthrough (video, 2016) summaryA musician's tour of the wave instrument, synth and wave screens, four years before defense-mechanism 's ( s-defensemech-wave-channel-ramble ) and on an LSDj of the 4.x era. Its value now is the parts the other sources …
Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP3: \"Isometric\" save-file walkthrough (video, 2016) summaryOne song taken apart screen by screen — his lsdj cover of Madeon's Isometric , used as a live opener. The framing is worth keeping: "when you have covers you don't have to focus on actual composition, you have to focus …
Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP4: Sidechaining (video, 2016) summaryHow to get the pumping of sidechain compression on a machine with no compressor, demonstrated on a cover of deadmau5's Strobe . His definition first: a compressor fed by the kick "crush[es] the volume of every other …
Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP5: Shortcuts and Workflow (video, 2016) summaryKey combinations and the habits built on them: the clipboard, cloning, marking, key repeat, and live transposition. Filmed with an on-screen controller visualiser (gamepadviewer.com) so the button presses are visible.
Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP6: Fantastic Grooves and How to Use Them (video, 2016) summaryThe episode that reframes lsdj 's time: TEMPO is not BPM . "What actually governs the structure of your song is not the tempo setting, it's grooves. What tempo does is govern the clock speed and the tick rate."
Pan Docs — Audio Details summaryThe internals-and-quirks page of the pan-docs audio section — "The PPU is a bunch of state machines, and the APU is a bunch of counters." It follows the signal from generator through DAC, mixer, master volume and …
Pan Docs — Audio Overview summaryThe opening page of the audio section of pan-docs , the community Game Boy hardware reference (CC0). It names the four channels of the game-boy-apu , the VIN cartridge input and the shared concepts — triggering, …
Pan Docs — Audio Registers summaryThe register-by-register specification of the game-boy-apu : the NRxy naming scheme (x = channel, 5 = global; NRx1 length/duty, NRx2 volume/envelope, NRx3 period low, NRx4 trigger, length enable and period high), then …
ProTracker 2.3A ReadMe, 2.0A effect and format docs, version table summaryThe distribution texts of protracker 2.3A (1993) with the changelog back to 1.0, Lars Hamre's one-page effect list and MOD file-format description from 2.0A, and a later table of every ProTracker version and its makers.
ProTracker 2.3d help file (edited by echolevel) summaryThe complete built-in help of protracker 2.3d — main screen gadgets, Disk Op, PLST and preset editor, sampler, the two setup screens, MIDI, the position editor, Edit Op screens 1–3 with the chord maker, the effect …
realdmx: Charles Deenen's two test tunes — an undated MUSICFILE build and the 'Scoop designs' Maniacs of Noise player summaryTwo of charles-deenen 's own sources in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ). Test Tune is the musicfile code base — the same routines, labels and table formats as the Cybernoid II file, in a slightly …
realdmx: Johannes Bjerregaard's own player — the James Bond 3 demo (a Maniacs of Noise commission) and Myth summaryTwo of johannes-bjerregaard 's own Turbo Assembler sources from 1989, in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ) under Bjerregaard_Johannes_MON — but the player is his, not charles-deenen 's musicfile : nothing …
realdmx: Jonathan Dunn's Daley Thompson '88 and Ocean Loader 5 in Paul Hughes's Ocean music driver summaryTwo original Ocean Software sources from 1988 — not reverse-engineered — in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ): the Daley Thompson '88 soundtrack (six tunes) and the loader tune HVSC calls Ocean Loader 5 , …
realdmx: Martin Galway's Arkanoid — Tognon's SIDin #4 reverse-engineering, with the 'sample' synthesis through $D418 summaryThe full Arkanoid (Imagine, 1986) music and sound-effect program of martin-galway , reverse-engineered by Stefano Tognon for sidin #4 and converted to ACME by dmx87 ( s-realdmx-sid-players ). It is the later, larger …
realdmx: Martin Galway's Rambo II loader — the macro-language player, reverse-engineered by dmx87 summaryThe loader tune of Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1986) — matt-gray 's "favourite C64 tune of all time" ( s-c64com-matt-gray-interview ) — in martin-galway 's own player, reverse-engineered by dmx87 for the realdmx …
realdmx: Reyn Ouwehand's Armada (MUSICFILE, 'Special version for Reyn Ouwehand', 1989) and Dutch Breeze (the 1990 MoN player) summaryTwo original Turbo Assembler sources of reyn-ouwehand 's in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ). Armada (1989) is charles-deenen 's musicfile — the Cybernoid II code with a longer banner: "Scoop Designs …
realdmx: Rob Hubbard's driver — McSweeney's Monty on the Run disassembly and the Commando title summaryTwo files from the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ) hold the 6502 driver rob-hubbard used, per the header, "(with small modifications) for his first approx. 30 tunes": Anthony McSweeney's commented …
realdmx: three smaller drivers — Fred Gray's Mutants (song as code), Jeroen Kimmel's 'Red's music player' (1989) and David Whittaker's Panther driver summaryThe remaining three players of the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ), each a different answer to the same problem. fred-gray 's Mutants is not a sequencer at all but a song written as code — 26 hand-written …
realdmx: two scene players with their own sources — Francois Prijt's Audial Arts 'zong player' v1/v2 (1991) and Adam Bulka's FAME 'Sound Routine f 4.1.0' (1988) summaryThree original Turbo Assembler sources in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ) from the demoscene rather than the games industry: Francois Prijt's "zong player" for the Dutch group Audial Arts (two versions, …
Remix64 — An Interview with Anders Carlsson aka GOTO80 (Neil Carr, 2002) summaryNeil Carr interviews goto80 (Anders Carlsson, born 1981, Swedish) for Remix64 on 2002-09-18 — early in his career, just after moving to Gothenburg. The intro frames him as a maker of "rather funky and experimental SID …
Remix64 — An Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2001) summaryNeil Carr's 2001 interview with chris-huelsbeck for the remix community: why he started on the C64, what shades did for him, what he loves and dislikes about the sid , and how composing changed once real instruments …
Remix64 — An Interview with Martin Galway (Neil Carr, 2001) summaryNeil Carr's e-mail interview with martin-galway for the remix community site Remix64, dated 2001-03-28, when Galway was Audio Lead on Freelancer at Microsoft's Magic Anvil studio. Mostly about taste, remixes and career, …
Remix64 — Last Ninja 2 vs Ninja Remix: what's the deal? (Chris Abbott) summaryWhy the cartridge re-release of last-ninja-2 has a completely different soundtrack — a one-page case study in the practical meaning of "a game has one music driver".
Retro Gamesmaster — Matt Gray Interview (Peter Ward) summaryThe interview with the most complete game-by-game commentary from matt-gray — dates, fees, what was cut — and his one-paragraph description of the C64 workflow.
Retrogaming Planet / EmuWiki — Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2011) summaryThe interview in which chris-huelsbeck describes his actual C64 workflow — two machines, soundmonitor then TFMX Editor, hex numbers shown as A-2 / G#3 — and the idea behind tfmx 's per-note script.
roboctopus — LSDJ & You: Collapse of the Waveform (2014) summaryThe introduction to drawing waves rather than generating them, aimed at players who can already write a song: "My goal is to help intermediate users learn techniques to really fill out their songs and take their sound …
roboctopus — LSDJ & You: Echo Chamber (2014) summaryFour echo techniques for lsdj , from one that costs no channel at all to one that spends a second. The framing is arrangement, not effects: "Echoes can help fill an arrangement out and give it a greater sense of depth …
roboctopus — PWM, I Choose You! (2014) summaryPulse-width modulation on the wave channel, where the hardware offers none: draw a square in the first wave and narrow it a little in each of the following fifteen, then let the instrument animate through them. "PWM …
roboctopus — The Kinda Sorta Supersaw-lite; or, a Beefy Saw Bass (2013) summaryA short post with one instrument and one abandoned idea, both worth recording.
RVG Interviews: Matt Gray (2016) summaryA forum-sourced interview whose value is one answer on technique: matt-gray on the "note or chord plex", pulse-width sweeps on chords, drums by waveform switching, and the fact that "even putting a vibrato on a sound …
Sabrepulse — Getting started with LSDJ tutorial (mirror at Adventure Kid) summaryA beginner's walkthrough of lsdj by sabrepulse that builds one small song — bass, lead, kick, snare and hats — screen by screen. Adventure Kid mirrored it because the original "seems like it is falling off the …
Schism Tracker wiki and README summaryWhat the schism-tracker project says about itself: a free reimplementation of impulse-tracker on top of a modified ModPlug engine, why IT deserved a clone, a FAQ in Storlek's voice, links to fonts, other trackers and …
Scream Tracker 3.2 User's Manual (ST3.DOC) summaryThe manual of scream-tracker-3 , written by Kalle Kaivola ("Edge") for "those who have worked with similar programs before" — a musician, "not a coder". Four chapters: introduction, a brief guide with the complete …
Scream Tracker 3.20 File Formats And Mixing Info (TECH.DOC) summary"The OFFICIAL information on s3m format and much more" — the S3M header, the instrument/sample header, the AdLib instrument layout, the packed pattern format, the STIMPORT and SIMPLEX exchange formats, the …
SID-Wizard 1.8 User Manual (summary) summaryThe short TXT edition of the user manual shipped with sid-wizard 1.8 (2018), written by hermit . It is readable on a real commodore-64 and covers: an introduction to SID-Wizard and the sid chip's registers, usage …
sid-wizard-vessel README — MIDI sync IN and live-act features for SID-Wizard summaryThe README of m64's fork of sid-wizard 1.8.7 for the Vessel MIDI interface : "A SID-Wizard version for the Vessel MIDI interface, with features for using in a live act" — external MIDI tempo sync IN , free movement in …
SIDId (cadaver/sidid): the player-signature list and its notes summaryThe tool HVSC and DeepSID use to say which player a SID file runs in. Its config is a list of byte patterns per player name; its .nfo is a terse who-wrote-what with release years and CSDb links — the most compact …
SIDin #1 — Iseq music composition program: the comp.sys.cbm threads and Steve Judd's Commando cover (2002) summaryTognon reprints the June 2002 comp.sys.cbm/alt.c64 argument over Steve Judd's iseq — "a new kind of music player for the C64", "very different respect all the other players around" — and then Judd's own cover of …
SIDin #1 — Luca Carrafiello (Luca/FIRE) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryThe first interview of sidin : Stefano Tognon asks the Italian Plus/4 scener and SID composer luca-carrafiello how someone without a SID chip came to write SID music — through converted Plus/4 editors, a SIDcard and a …
SIDin #1 — Ripping a game: Dig Dug (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryTognon's walkthrough of turning a 1984 cartridge game into a PSID the hard way — "disassemble the game and give a source for the rip" — followed by his commented source of the Dig Dug music routine, an interpreter of …
SIDin #10 — Goattracker 2: a cover in the table-based GT2 (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryTognon's look at goattracker 2 in mid-2006 — "now tables based and so it can compete with the best C64 music tools available" — done by making a cover of Haddaway's What is Love in it, from a MIDI file, on Linux. A …
SIDin #10 — Richard Bayliss interview (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summarystefano-tognon interviews richard-bayliss , the prolific British C64 game-maker and musician ("maybe you are the unique scener around today that can release a game a week?"), in July 2006 for sidin . The useful part for …
SIDin #10 — Tiny Sid 2, part 1: XL5, Mini Digi Drum, RM, Miniature Rhapsody (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryFour entries of the Tiny Sid 2 compo (2006) — two of 256 bytes, two of 512 — with full source and Tognon's analysis: how a whole tune, player and note table fit into one disk block ( tiny-sid-compo , sid-player-routine …
SIDin #11 — Laxity interview (Stefano Tognon, 2007) summarylaxity (Thomas Egeskov Petersen) of Vibrants and maniacs-of-noise , "a old composer … He recently started to compose again with sid", interviewed by mail in January 2007 — about the ten C64 sound drivers he has written, …
SIDin #11 — SID Factory vs Ninjatracker (Stefano Tognon, 2007) summaryTwo native C64 editors "released about the same day": laxity 's SID Factory (the 2007 ancestor of sid-factory-ii ) and lasse-oorni 's ninjatracker V2 . Tognon documents the data formats of both — the SID Factory …
SIDin #11 — Tiny Sid 2, part 2: BLOCK ACID DUB and Resolution (Stefano Tognon, 2007) summaryTwo more Tiny Sid 2 entries ( tiny-sid-compo ), the sequel to s-sidin10-tiny-sid-2-part-1 : Frantic's 256-byte BLOCK ACID DUB , a generative dub tune whose player treats notes and instruments as one stream of SID …
SIDin #12 — Mihály Horváth (Hermit) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2008) summaryhermit four years before sid-wizard : Tognon interviews him about "a tracker that can control 3 sid chips", written on a real commodore-64 between January and May 2008. The interview gives his real name, age and job, …
SIDin #12 — Ripping Trivia Arcade (Stefano Tognon, 2008) summaryA worked example of turning game music into a .sid file when the player does not follow the init/play convention: the music of The Trivia Arcade sits in a separate file, has three entry points, and runs four times per …
SIDin #12 — Tiny Sid 2, part 3: Plaster (512 b) and Back To Basics (256 b) (Stefano Tognon, 2008) summaryThe end of Tognon's series on the Tiny Sid Compo II : the two remaining entries, GRG's 512-byte Plaster — "the tune that take more points over all the others" — and Jaymz Julian's 256-byte Back To Basics , both "done by …
SIDin #13 — Inside JITT64: the player routine (Stefano Tognon, 2010) summaryThe player behind jitt64 , explained by its author with the source: how init and the IRQ routine are organised (and why the SID is written at the start of the interrupt), how a pattern row is decoded into command bits, …
SIDin #13 — JITT64 Tracker: Tognon's Java Ice Team Tracker from the user's side (2010) summarystefano-tognon documents his own jitt64 (Java Ice Team Tracker), "my C64 cross-platform music tracker … written in Java for being portable", from the user's side: screen layout, the track commands, the 16 pattern …
SIDin #13 — TSM & Freedom interview (Stefano Tognon, 2010) summaryTwo Italian SID composers who wrote music for the (then unreleased) C64 conversion of the Amiga game Pushover , questioned in parallel: how they came to the SID, why both ended up in goattracker , what they think of …
SIDin #14 — Inside Hunter's Moon (Martin Walker's sound-effects engine, reverse-engineered, 2015) summaryTognon reverse-engineers the sound-effects engine of hunters-moon (Thalamus, 1987) — code, graphics and effects by Martin Walker, music by matt-gray — because "the hives seems to be true living": the most realistic game …
SIDin #14 — Inside Matt Gray's Dominator player (Tognon's commented PLAYER V4.2 and the musician's guide to composing in it, 2015) summaryWritten for the Reformation driver competition ( s-matt-gray-dominator-source ): Tognon takes matt-gray 's released dom6-public.asm , comments every line, explains 64tass syntax to non-programmers, walks through the …
SIDin #14 — Scarzix interview (Carsten Berggreen: JCH's editor, CombatZone, the return with CheeseCutter, 2015) summaryTognon interviews scarzix (Carsten Berggreen), a composer of the 1989–90 JCH-editor generation who came back in 2013, joined Offence, and made himself the public voice of the cheesecutter editor — the interview is the …
SIDin #15 — Inside Matt Gray's Serpent Demo player (the 4-bit sample voice, reverse-engineered, 2015) summaryAnswering Gray's remark in the same issue that the Serpent Demo drums were "too loud" ( s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview ), Tognon reverse-engineers the tune's player: the Driller -generation matt-gray-player plus a …
SIDin #15 — Matt Gray interview (technical questions during Reformation, 2015) summaryThe most technical of the matt-gray interviews: why his tunes are tuned to A4 ≈ 424 Hz, when he started using filters, how the matt-gray-player took shape and what he borrowed from Hubbard, the Serpent Demo samples, and …
SIDin #1–15 — Editorials and News digest (Stefano Tognon, 2002–2015) summaryThe News section of every sidin issue reported the releases of the SID scene "from an issue to another": editors, players, emulation libraries, hardware, competitions and collections. This page condenses all fifteen …
SIDin #2 — David Whittaker's Lazy Jones music routine (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryTognon's reverse-engineering of the hvsc rip of Lazy Jones (Terminal Software, 1984) — david-whittaker 's earliest routine in the wiki and, in his words, "the most simple I had seen until now": two voices of raw …
SIDin #2 — Lasse Öörni (Cadaver) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryA short e-mail interview with lasse-oorni made in November 2002 — the year goattracker was new — in which he explains why he kept writing players (memory and rastertime), why GoatTracker's music "takes too much memory", …
SIDin #2 — Matt Gray's Driller music routine (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryStefano Tognon's reverse-engineering of the driller player, published in his free SID e-zine sidin in 2002 — the documentation of the matt-gray-player as it was in 1987: song/track/pattern structure, the pattern command …
SIDin #3 — Music Engine pattern searching, part 1 (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryHow to tell which music routine a .sid was made with: scan the file for a byte sequence that only that engine's code contains. Tognon gives the method (with source: pick characteristic code; without: compare …
SIDin #3 — Ripping BASIC based tune: Sheba and Testcard (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryHow Tognon turned two BASIC programs from Commodore's Introduction to BASIC course — Andrew Colin's The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (part 2, Appendix A) and the Testcard demo (part 1) — into PSID files. A BASIC-driven …
SIDin #3 — Stephan Schmid (Steppe) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryThe sidin interview with stephan-schmid — Steppe, webmaster of the Demodungeon and since October 2002 a member of the hvsc crew: three weeks of Soundmonitor in 1991, what an HVSC crew member actually does all day, a …
SIDin #4 — Chris Abbott interview (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryAn email interview with chris-abbott — occasional SID composer, but above all the man behind C64Audio.com, the Back in Time CDs and the BIT Live concerts — done for sidin #4 in June 2003. Biography, the economics of the …
SIDin #4 — Martin Galway's Arkanoid music routine, the explanation (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryTognon's prose around his reverse-engineering of arkanoid — the explanation of the galway-player that the code alone does not give: why he picked this tune, what he thinks of the code, which instructions exist on which …
SIDin #4 — Ripping a BASIC program into RSID: Telengard (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryHow Stefano Tognon turned a BASIC-only rip of Telengard (Avalon Hill, 1983) — a text adventure whose sound is written entirely in BASIC, without interrupts — into machine code a SID player can run: every BASIC statement …
SIDin #5 — Chris Huelsbeck interview (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryA short e-mail interview with chris-huelsbeck whose one long answer is the most precise account he has given of his C64 drivers: Soundmonitor built on his third player, then TFM and a sample revision, then tfmx — and …
SIDin #5 — High Voltage Music Engines Collection (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryTognon announces hvmec , his collection of the C64 music-making programs themselves — editors, trackers and their player routines, with binaries, sources, documentation, examples and credits — as a companion to hvsc and …
SIDin #5 — Music Engines Pattern Searching, part 2: the Lostack database (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryThe format of Lada 'Ray' Lostak's database of about 450 C64 music engines: Player blocks of Name , 3–16 ID=offset:value pairs, optional Message s and the addresses where the player keeps its track and pattern positions …
SIDin #6 — Asterion Sid Tracker v1.0 reviewed (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryTognon's walkthrough of a native C64 tracker released in 2004 by Asterion of the group Tinnitus: a one-screen editor whose instrument lives in a 13-parameter sound table with independent wave and arpeggio macros, whose …
SIDin #6 — Inside DigiOrganizer, Polonius's 4-bit sample editor (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryTognon's manual-plus-disassembly of digiorganizer , "a great peaces of software wrote by Polonius of Padua for making 4bit sample music using SID volume register": an editor that adds a fourth, sampled voice — drums, …
SIDin #6 — Jan Diabelez Arnt Harries (Rambones) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryAn interview with jan-harries — Danish demo-scener (The Supply Team), Soundmonitor composer "Rambones", the ripper behind the Ripped-Off series and a founding member of the hvsc team — made in February 2004 for Stefano …
SIDin #7 — Dustbin (Stefano Palmonari) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryAn interview with dustbin , the Italian composer who wrote game music for Simulmondo in the early 1990s on C64, Amiga, PC and Game Boy without formal musical training — on learning the SID from taped Hubbard and Tel …
SIDin #7 — Inside Modules: Ivan Del Duca's music engine (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon's reverse-engineering of the music engine of Modules , an Italian C64 game of 1988 whose coder, Ivan Del Duca, "probably wrote the first Italian music engine around, instead of used the one's that were available" …
SIDin #7 — xxlarge: Ninja's 256-byte cover of 'X large' analysed (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryxxlarge is a C64 tune by Ninja/theDream that fits in less than 256 bytes — player, tables and music — and is a cover of Jeff's "X large", "played a little slower that the original", whose own data is "large about 800 …
SIDin #8 — Aleksi Eeben interview (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon interviews aleksi-eeben , "a coder and a musician that had created some useful tools for creating music" — the low-rastertime C64 editor John Player and the four-channel sample tracker Polly Tracker , released …
SIDin #8 — Catweasel Mk4: a PCI card with two SID sockets (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon buys Individual Computers' Catweasel Mk4, a PCI floppy-controller card with two sid sockets, fits a 6581 pulled from a dead C64, and gets Simon White's Linux hardsid driver to recognise it — but not yet to play …
SIDin #8 — Tiny Sid Compo, the 512-byte entries (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon prints and comments the four entries of the 512-byte category of his tiny-sid-compo (2005): his own 15BB , Crue Gurl (A Life in Hell), Twone Five ( laxity ) and the winner Empty (4mat). Each is a complete …
SIDin #9 — Catweasel Mk4 follow-up: driver, hardware buffer, two 6581s and the filter (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryTognon's second article on the catweasel Mk4 — a PCI card with two sid sockets — after the first one ended with "horrible" sound. He finds and patches a timing bug in Simon White's Linux driver, explains what the card's …
SIDin #9 — Nata (Stephan Parth) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryTognon's interview with nata , "a very young and active Italian composer" who started SID music in 2003 and composes in goattracker — a portrait of the mid-2000s cross-composing scener: GoatTracker 2.2 with reSID …
SIDin #9 — Tiny Sid Compo, the 256-byte entries (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryThe ten 256-byte entries of the 2005 tiny-sid-compo , with code and Tognon's notes — the counterpart of s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b . At this size the players stop looking like drivers: code is copied into the zero page and …
Soundmonitor lineage and wiki pages: tracker-history/soundmonitor.txt, C64-Wiki.de, de.wikipedia summaryThree small pages that fill in versions, dates and the German-language view of soundmonitor .
The Brief History of SID — Jan Harries (SIDwave), Vandalism News #64 (2015) summaryA scener's memoir of C64 music from 1982 to the 2010s, written by a ripper who says he has "seen many players, 5600+ to be exact" — opinionated, sometimes score-settling, but full of first-hand claims about who wrote …
The CheeseCutter Guide — the recovered site manual (Wayback) summaryThe manual exists after all: the dead homepage's Guide page — enumerated out of the Wayback CDX index after the live site, the repo and the release zips all came up empty — documents cheesecutter 's default player, …
The SID Homepage — Interview with Bob Yannes (Andreas Varga, August 1996) summaryandreas-varga 's e-mail interview with bob-yannes , the designer of the sid , done in August 1996 for the sid-homepage ; some questions came from King Fisher of Triad. The first half is about intentions and regrets, the …
The SID Homepage — Interviews with Jeroen Tel (Commodore Zone 1997, 64'er 3/91) summaryTwo reprinted interviews with jeroen-tel on the sid-homepage : a long commodore-zone interview from June 1997 (Warren Pilkington gave permission) and a short one from the German magazine 64'er, issue 3/91. Between them: …
The SID Homepage — Interviews with Martin Galway (Commodore Zone 6–7, Happy Computer 11/86) summaryTwo interviews with martin-galway reprinted on the sid-homepage : a long commodore-zone one from the mid-1990s and a short Happy Computer one from November 1986, when he was twenty and at Ocean. Together they give the …
The SID Homepage — Interviews with Rob Hubbard (Commodore Zone, Happy Computer 7/86) summaryTwo interviews with rob-hubbard reprinted on the sid-homepage : a commodore-zone question-and-answer by Waz and Kenz (answered "within 24 hours", from Electronic Arts, about 1997) and a short Happy Computer interview …
The SID Homepage — The creation of the SID chip (Christer Rindeblad) summaryA short column by Christer Rindeblad, reprinted on the sid-homepage , on how the sid came to be, with three quotes from bob-yannes . Its dates (project start, team, months of development) are the ones the wiki has for …
tracker-history release notes (ProTracker, FastTracker, Scream Tracker, Impulse Tracker, Schism, OpenMPT) summaryClaudio Matsuoka's dataset of tracker releases — name, author, date with its evidence (exit messages, file dates, changelogs, Wikipedia), and "based on / influenced by" links — for the six trackers this wiki covers. The …
TraxWeekly archive at OpenMPT.org (summary) summaryThe complete run of the traxweekly newsletter, mirrored as plain text files at OpenMPT.org. All 128 files (issues 001–119, an extra 07A , a TW.025 variant and seven standalone TW-ART articles) are stored in …
TW #1 — Interview with Basehead (Populus) summaryTraxWeekly's very first interview (conducted 1995-03-05 on IRC). Populus introduces basehead as "one of the very best techno/trance/ambient trackers", a member of Imphobia, kosmic /KFMF and iCE, and lists the songs …
TW #1 — Interview with Phoenix (Populus) summaryIRC interview (1995-03-09/10) with phoenix (Andrew Voss) of the kosmic Free Music Foundation, credited by Populus with 107 songs; his own picks are The Red Horizon , Nervous Breakdown (extended mix) , Synaesthesia , …
TW #1 — Modal and Chord Theory (Leviathan) summaryThe very first TraxWeekly article, written because "a lot of the self-taught musicians out there were really only composing by ear" ( leviathan ).
TW #10 — Interview with Jugi (White Wizard) summaryWhite Wizard interviews jugi of Complex, the musician of Dope , the winning demo of The Gathering 1995 — "nobody knows anything about him", writes Populus, who edited both participants' English.
TW #100 — Tracking on Impulse (Pulse) summaryjeffrey-lim 's follow-up to #98, answering Steve Gilmore's letter in #99 and speaking up for triton .
TW #103 — Interview with Mikmak (Behemoth) summaryBehemoth's "first contribution to Trax-Weekly as a staffer": an IRC interview with mikmak , author of the MikMod and MikIT module players — chosen because "most people know only him by name, but not too many know about …
TW #105 — Interview With A Couple Of Newbies (Behemoth) summaryBehemoth interviews two beginners — Exokai (Dan Aley, 13, San Diego, a month in the scene) and Sonalore (Kevin Malin, 15, Marietta GA, listening for a year and a half, tracking for a year without a release) — "to give …
TW #106 — A Little Panning (Airon) summaryA conversion chart between Impulse Tracker's two ways of writing panning: the volume-column pan (0–64) and the Xyy effect ( 00 – FF ). Reading the chart, the relation is simply volume-column value = Xyy ÷ 4: X00 = 0, …
TW #107 — Layman's Music Theory, part one (Zinc) summaryzinc , who has "absolutely no formal music training", writes the theory primer he wished existed: how to spell a triad from interval qualities. No further parts followed in the archive's TOC.
TW #109 — Interview: Skaven (Zinc) summaryzinc 's first interview in months: skaven of future-crew , "a tracker who needs no introduction", back on #trax after a long absence.
TW #11 — How to enhance your music collection (Popcorn) summaryA short guide by TraxWeekly's then editor to building a module collection; its value today is as a map of the 1995 distribution channels.
TW #11 — Interview with Beaner (Popcorn) summaryPopcorn's second interview of the issue, with beaner — "a really cool dude, and a friend" — of ACiD and epinicion : a 16-year-old with two jobs, an ST3 loyalist who cannot write without new samples.
TW #11 — Interview with Perisoft (Popcorn) summaryPopcorn ("no time to write a long intro, must release TraxWeekly") interviews perisoft , the new president of defiance and the author of issue #8's "Samples And Rippers" piece that started the row over basehead 's NAID …
TW #111 — Interview with Khyron (again =) (Jeremy Rice) summaryJeremy Rice catches khyron of kosmic on #trax — "a respected name in the Demoscene" who, the introduction says, was there when "the #coders people wanted all the musicians to stop flooding the channel with music talk …
TW #113–#118 — The Scene and the Commercial Market: the commercial-tracking debate summaryBehemoth lectured on demos and tracking to 40–50 people at his college's electronics department (most over 30; one asked "how a computer was able to sound 'not like a computer'") and concluded with five reasons tracking …
TW #114 — Live Tracking (xiagox) summaryA reply to Behemoth's claim (#113) that "you cannot perform tracking live" (see s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate ).
TW #115 — Tracking Semantics (Exxon) summaryExxon's reply to Behemoth's five reasons ( s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate ), from Vienna.
TW #118 — Reverb and Compression (Airon) summaryAn "info-for-trackers" tutorial on the two studio effects a tracker can only apply offline , in a sample editor (Cool Edit and Sound Forge are the examples): what the parameters mean, numbers for a small club, …
TW #118 — Tracking the Format (Jesper Pedersen) summaryBlayd Zro (#116, 18 December 1997) proposed distributing songs as MP3 so nobody could rip samples or patterns; Pedersen argues the module format itself is what makes the scene worth having.
TW #119 — Interview with Mental Floss (Zinc) summaryzinc interviews mental-floss of kosmic , "a long-time tracker we all know and love", in the last issue of the archive — his first TraxWeekly interview, "lovingly edited" by Zinc. The useful core is how he plays tracked …
TW #119 — Reverb and Audio Gear (Rimbo) summaryA short supplement to the two #118 articles — Airon's "Reverb and Compression" ( s-tw118-reverb-and-compression ) and Dilvish's "The Power of Headphones" (not ingested) — "well-written and right on target".
TW #12 — Advanced Tracking Tips (Necros) summarynecros 's first tips column, "for people who already have mastered the basics", written in scream-tracker-3 notation with a conversion chart for ProTracker/FastTracker: Axx / Txx → Fxx , Gxx → 3xx , Hxx → 4xx , Dxx → …
TW #13 — Interview with Big Jim (Popcorn) summaryPopcorn heard Foreign Skys and "just had to interview the next Purple Motion": big-jim of Valhalla and the five-musicians , a British computer-science student who writes on guitar and then tracks. The second half drifts …
TW #14 — Interview with Pinion (Flood) summaryFlood interviews pinion at 7 a.m. on a borrowed Mac keyboard. (The same issue's Trax Culture column that follows in the file is a flame at PeriSoft by Lord Pegasus and is not summarised.)
TW #15 — Advanced Tracking Tips II (Necros) summarynecros adapts Jim Aikin's "Demo Tape Workshop" (Keyboard, June 1995) to tracked music: six lessons on structure, dynamics, melody, drums, harmony and samples.
TW #15 — Interview with Claim (Gator) summaryGator's "Interview 'Wiff Claim": a 19-year-old coder-musician of defiance and Lithium who started tracking seriously the week fasttracker-2 came out. The first issue with a categorised contents list ("Interviews" as a …
TW #15 — Interview with SV (GraveDigger) summaryA joke piece, summarised only as a note. GraveDigger of hornet (gd@ftp.cdrom.com) "interviews" SV — Scarlet Vinson, "famous on #trax but has never been on the channel and has never composed any music" — during a …
TW #16 — Interview with Populus (Psibelius) summarypsibelius 's farewell interview with populus , one of traxweekly 's founders, on why he is leaving the newsletter and on the "dumb techno" he sees flooding the scene in mid-1995. The issue prints a disclaimer before and …
TW #17 — Interview with AmusiC (Popcorn) summaryPopcorn — signing as "TraxWeekly Editor" of "Hornet.TraxWeekly.MC3" — talks on IRC with amusic of Bass Productions in Athens, two months before AmusiC started the 20-minute-chip-compo . Half of the log is about the …
TW #18 — Advanced Tracking Tips III: voicings (Necros) summaryHow necros turns a flat C–F–Dm–G progression, tracked as three root-position triads per chord, into C9 | Fadd2/C | Dm7 | Gsus4–G.
TW #18 — Interview With Basehead (again) (Psibelius) summarypsibelius gives basehead a second interview "because he was bored"; it covers "vastly different ground" from #1 — mostly scene politics and ethics.
TW #18 — Interview with Lord Pegasus (Psibelius) summarypsibelius interviews "Sammich Man" lord-pegasus of kosmic and ACiD on IRC, with private messages from blackwolf printed in between; Psibelius's capture failed before the end. (Lord Pegasus's earlier flame at perisoft , …
TW #19 — Interview with Quarex (Maelcum) summarymaelcum 's "complete and UNEDITED" IRC log with quarex of kosmic — some 7,000 words, half of them pre-interview chatter in which Maelcum vents about Kosmic's lost FTP site, credit for samples and the "Necros is my …
TW #2 — Interview with Leinad (Populus) summaryPopulus met leinad "by coincidence" on IRC and interviewed him on 1995-03-15 (14:57–16:13): an Amiga-era Swedish composer, most active in 1990–91, who by 1995 made multimedia for a living and tracked on a PC with a GUS …
TW #21 — Tracking Tips (Dan Hartrell) summaryA 14-year-old Mazurka member's beginner lesson, built around a hypothetical newbie called Studly, on why melodies need scales and rhythm — with the scale formulas written as tracker keyboard steps.
TW #22 — Interview with Jase (Clef) summaryclef of epinicion interviews jase , the Australian winner of Music Contest 3 — "after NetSplits, capture problems, and time limits".
TW #24 — In Review: the ASM95 music entries (Necros) summaryThe first instalment of necros 's review column, "the best and not-so-best of the new music stuff out this week", devoted to the music released around Assembly '95 (ASM95). Ratings are on a ten-point scale drawn as …
TW #24, #25, #64, #65 — the sample-ripping debate (Mhoram, Psibelius, Kristian Eriksen, Beacon) summaryFour articles a year apart on "the dreaded 'R' word": taking samples out of other people's modules. The first two (1995) argue etiquette, the second pair (1996) argue copyright. Together they are the scene's own …
TW #25 — Loops and Extended Samples (The Zapper) summarythe-zapper defends long samples and loops ("texture, presence and some kind of feel") and explains how to make them sit in time.
TW #26 — Faces in the Crowd: the column's manifesto (Kal Zakath) summaryThe announcement of "Faces in the Crowd" (FITC), "a new weekly feature of TraxWeekly" by kal-zakath (John Townsend, Inferno Productions), meant to help unknown composers "make a name for themselves". Nobody is …
TW #26–#33, #50 — the 20 MeEnUhTz Chip Compo column (AmusiC) summaryThe weekly column of the 20-minute-chip-compo (20mc): its origin story, the rules, the voting system and its changes, three result tables from autumn 1995, and — in #50 — why it stopped after Christmas 1995 and came …
TW #27 — Basehead on Lotus Position (Cyberdmon) summaryA short IRC interview about basehead 's solo musicdisk Lotus Position , released under five-musicians .
TW #27 — Faces in the Crowd #1: Master of Darkness (Kal Zakath) summaryThe first "Faces in the Crowd" interview (IRC, Friday 15 September 1995): kal-zakath talks with master-of-darkness , founder of the newcomer group AIM Higher, about starting out, techno and how #trax treats newbies; a …
TW #27 — Interview with Zapper (The Finn) summaryThe Finn interviews the-zapper of Force Ten at 4:45 in the morning, Montreal time.
TW #28 — Faces in the Crowd #2: Mesonyx (Kal Zakath) summaryThe second "Faces in the Crowd" interview, conducted over two days (16–17 September 1995): kal-zakath with mesonyx , a 15-year-old from Reykjavik who had just written the music for the game Xixit . Date note: the issue …
TW #29 — Faces in the Crowd #4: Smeghead (Master of Darkness) summary"Faces In The Crowd: The Publication — Interview #4", conducted on Saturday 30 September 1995 by master-of-darkness , now an FITC interviewer, with smeghead of Terraformer; an 18-title release listing follows. …
TW #29 — Faces in the Crowd #5: Esper Division (DennisC) summary"Faces In The Crowd: The Publication — Interview #5": DennisC (Dennis Courtney; the header prints master-of-darkness 's address maz@io.org next to his name, evidently a copy-and-paste slip) with Francois-Jean de …
TW #3 — Interview with Chuck Biscuits (Epeius) summaryEpeius's first assignment for TraxWeekly: an interview with Chuck Biscuits of the Australian demogroup Heretics (formerly iCE and the ANSI group DiE), contributor to the Australian musicdisk expOZe .
TW #3 — Interview with the Five Musicians (Populus) summaryGroup IRC interview (1995-03-26) with the newly formed five-musicians (FM): Big Jim, basehead , necros and Mellow-D; purple-motion missed the appointment. The editor frames it as the answer to "all the flames" the union …
TW #3 — Music: Beginning the Tracking Experience (Psibelius) summarypsibelius on how he started tracking and what a newcomer should avoid.
TW #30 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Ender (Master of Darkness) summaryMaster of Darkness ("Mdark", Aim Higher) talks to ender , the sole musician of the small Albany demo group Foundation, in the Faces in the Crowd interview printed as "#7" and conducted on 1995-10-07. Half of it is a …
TW #30 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Paganus (Atlantic) summaryAtlantic interviews paganus of epinicion and Aim Higher (also printed as "Interview #7"; conducted 1995-10-10): a piano-centred Toronto-area tracker who came in through a local BBS and has strong views on scene …
TW #31 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Fred (Dynamic Harmony) summaryDynamic Harmony's "quickie" Faces in the Crowd interview (printed as "#12", conducted 1995-10-17) with Fred of iNK, a Virginia tracker who had just gone "net-wide" with "Bawal". No real name is printed.
TW #31 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Luv Kohli (DennisC) summaryDennisC's Faces in the Crowd interview (printed as "#10") with luv-kohli , co-founder of the two-member Virginia group Empyrean — a newcomer's account of tracker lineage, BBS distribution and the AOL ban. A correction …
TW #31 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Vicious (Master of Darkness) summaryMaster of Darkness interviews vicious , founder of the Toronto dance group V.S.L. (FITC "Interview #11", conducted 1995-10-18). The centre of the piece is a house producer's case that sample ripping is simply how dance …
TW #32 — Faces in the Crowd: Complaints (Master of Darkness) summaryA short opinion column by Master of Darkness ("Mdark", maz@io.org ) in the Faces in the Crowd section of #32, between DennisC's Zinc interview ( s-tw032-interview-zinc ) and Atlantic's "Not So Advanced Tracking Tips" ( …
TW #32 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Zinc (DennisC) summaryDennisC's "Faces in the Crowd" interview with zinc , a week after he first joined #trax; printed as "Interview #10", which is the series' own (unreliable) count, not DennisC's — the same number is printed on his Luv …
TW #32 — Not So Advanced Tracking Tips (Atlantic) summaryAtlantic's "confession" of the habits that slowed his own progress, sorted into five tracker types.
TW #32–#34 — Tracker Survey / New Tracker (Psibelius, Jason Diamond) summaryNot a survey of which trackers people used: TraxWeekly's two "Tracker Survey" notices asked readers to send feature wishes to Jason Diamond (diamond@deltanet.com, IRC nick mofochckn), who was writing "a totally new …
TW #33 — 4Channel Lives On (Trixter) summarytrixter 's reply, printed in the "Amiga Debate" section, to a correspondent who said Amiga MODs are as obsolete as the Wright brothers' plane.
TW #34 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Deus Ex (Master of Darkness) summaryThe #34 Faces in the Crowd column — editorial by Kal Zakath , Master of Darkness 's interview with deus-ex (printed as "Interview #11"), three song reviews by Atlantic (not summarised) and closing words. Deus Ex, 30, …
TW #35 — Interview with Loki (Trifixion) summaryTrifixion's first real TraxWeekly article, an edited IRC interview with loki , a 17-year-old Oregon tracker who had just joined zinc 's group Radiance. Printed under General Articles, outside the Faces in the Crowd …
TW #37–38 — The Death of the Chiptune / Chiptunes Aren't Dead! summaryA two-part exchange from December 1995 that documents what "chiptune" meant in the PC tracker scene and the effect of the 20-minute-chip-compo .
TW #39–40 — Chord Theory? / Chord What? (Maelcum, Trixter, Basehead) summarySparked by Atlantic's review in #37 reporting a #trax argument (Aahz, basehead and necros vs. a tracker who said "chord theory is not required to write good music").
TW #4 — Interview with Nemesis (Populus) summaryPopulus interviews nemesis , one of the newest members of renaissance — "a really great composer" whose tunes are "very realistic and catchy" but who "hasn't got enough exposure and respect" — in a chat that ended on …
TW #4 — Interview with Stalker (Zer0) summaryZer0's first interview ("bare with me"), with stalker of OTM, who had joined Zer0's own group defiance two days earlier. Half banter; the facts are the tracker lineage and OTM's story.
TW #40 — Interview with Blackwolf (Psibelius) summarypsibelius revisits blackwolf — "last interviewed in TraxWeekly #6, back when Populus was still running the show" — for "the last TW interview for 1995", after what Psibelius calls "a very long time since we've had some …
TW #40 — Interview with Zalt (Psibelius) summarypsibelius interviews zalt , a 16-year-old Stockholm tracker who came from Atari NoiseTracker to FastTracker 2 and placed 2nd in the Icing'95 multichannel compo — a European counterweight to the North American voices of …
TW #41 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Mick Rippon (DennisC) summaryDennisC interviews mick-rippon , a music student from Newcastle, Australia, with three years of Amiga tracking behind him and three months on the internet — the interview traxweekly 's FITC editor had promised in #34 …
TW #41 — Interview with Shawn (shawnm / NOISE) summaryDennisC interviews Shawn (IRC nick shawnm ), head of the small group New Objectives In Sound Exploration ( NOISE ), an orchestral-percussion student who tracks in scream-tracker-3 . The same shawnm wrote "Serial …
TW #41 — Interview with Zinc on the Impromptu Compo (DennisC) summaryA short follow-up interview: zinc explains the ImpromptuCompo he started in #trax.
TW #42 — Impulse Tracker v1.01 (Pulse) summaryjeffrey-lim 's release note for IT 1.01 (January 1996): a bug when saving a song with an empty order list (pattern 0 is not decompressed on load — press Alt-Backspace to restore it), fixes for the retrig command on the …
TW #42 — Interview with Balrog (Kosmic) summaryzinc interviews balrog , a kosmic trance tracker from Quebec who had "never been interviewed" because he released little during a bad year; the piece records his tracker history (ST 2.23 → ModEdit → X-Tracker → FT2), a …
TW #43 — Interview with Pariah (V.S.L) summaryMaster of Darkness (Aim Higher; a Demonews reviewer) restarts "Faces In The Crowd" with a series on his local Toronto scene; the first guest is pariah of the dance-music group V.S.L (founded by vicious ), logged under …
TW #43–#45 — the Demonews ratings argument (Light, Trixter / Hornet) summaryLight of kosmic (an artist, "not a musician") watched two friends fall out on #trax over "the cdrom ratings" and wrote that the five-star system in Demonews and the 00index files makes lesser trackers give up; trixter …
TW #44 — Impulse Tracker Trivia (Random) summaryA coder's musing on a sentence in the impulse-tracker documentation about sound-card autodetection.
TW #44 — Interview with Acidfrog (Radiance / Spice) summaryzinc interviews acidfrog , his Radiance co-founder and main influence: a DJ and radio presenter from the 604 area code (British Columbia) who tracks jungle in fasttracker-2 on a 386 with a GUS MAX and a sampling rig …
TW #46 — Serial Composition (shawnm / NOISE) summaryA short introduction to twelve-tone technique plus a 1994 music-history essay on Anton Webern, offered to the scene as "just another compositional technique to take into account". The author is shawnm , the Shawn of …
TW #5 — Interview with TheHacker (Popcorn) summaryPopcorn's first appearance in traxweekly ("I've been with TraxWeekly since the first issue, but this will be the first … something involving me appears"): thehacker of kosmic asked to be interviewed by IRC message, and …
TW #5 — What it's like to be a PC Musician (Necros) summarynecros on "fame" in the tracker scene, signed "Andy, aka. Necros / FM" (asega@ic.sunysb.edu).
TW #50 — Aesthetics of Composition and Music Groups (Spyder / NOISE) summaryAn opinion piece from #trax conversations about music groups and "the philosophy about composition practices", written after one year of tracking.
TW #50 — Interview with VadimVS (NOISE) summaryA short interview, cut off when zinc ran out of time, with vadimvs , a Russian scream-tracker-3 user who had just joined N.O.I.S.E. — one of the few voices from Russia in the archive, tracking on borrowed hardware with …
TW #51 — How to listen to tracked music (mrdata) summaryA joke article ("prepare yourself well, they may be costly") whose incidental facts are the useful part: which players people used in March 1996 and what a listener did with them.
TW #52 — Interview with Daedalus (Neophyte / Epinicion) summaryzinc interviews daedalus , a 28-year-old theatre student and Tangerine Dream devotee who came to tracking through ModEdit and scream-tracker-3 after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; conducted "very very late at night" in …
TW #52 — Interview with Ganja Man (LoK) summaryzinc interviews ganja-man , a 15-year-old from the UK who founded LoK to give Britain a music group and to spread jungle; four months later he would write the "Potted Tracking History" ( s-tw064-potted-tracking-history …
TW #54 — Interview with Injekted & Subhuman (Ultrabeat) summaryCerulean talks to the two founders of ultrabeat , injekted and subhuman , just after the group's first release Lucid : a music-only, five-member "tribe" for ravers and techno heads, structurally modelled on the …
TW #54 — Interview with Quantam Porcupine summaryzinc interviews quantam-porcupine (properly "Quantum Porcupine", as he points out at the end), a 17-year-old pianist-turned-tracker who came from Music Construction Set on the C64 through Whacker Tracker to …
TW #54 — Interview with Saxy (XX) summaryKal Zakath (jtown; Inferno and traxweekly ) interviews saxy , a saxophonist two months into tracking and a member of XX, "the scene's only all-female musicgroup", after her first tune Symphony in her Mind . His preface …
TW #54 — Interview with Scirocco summaryzinc interviews scirocco , a groupless fasttracker-2 user at 4 a.m. in Manhattan on his first real night in #trax — a self-taught "lurker on the sidelines" with a five-star XM on ftp.cdrom.com and advice about quality …
TW #55 — Interview with Clef (Catch 22, ex-Epinicion) summaryzinc interviews clef , a 17-year-old Australian pianist, coder and chiptune specialist — twice a 20-minute-chip-compo winner, author of the menu chips on the epinicion disks, winner of the 16k music compo at OZ'96 — who …
TW #55–56 — Panning (GBlues) / Panning? Hello? (Trixter) summaryThe correct mental model of tracker panning (a balance, not a switch) for stereo-panning ; the "opposite-side echo" survives as a stereo fake-echo idea.
TW #57 — Interview with Catspaw (Zinc) summaryzinc 's "conversational style" interview with catspaw of Rat, at quarter to one in the morning, Seattle time.
TW #58–59 — The Finishing Touches (Catspaw) summarycatspaw 's two-part guide to "the finer technical points of writing module-based music", in ST3/IT notation ( | C#5 16 48 H83 | = note, sample, volume, effect). Greg Heo later pointed readers here for frames and tempo.
TW #59 — Tracking Hints (Vivid) summaryTechnical tricks "using Protracker commands" from Vivid of kosmic .
TW #6 — The NAID Music Compo: Opinion Interviews (Psibelius) summarypsibelius , signing as "TraxWeekly Columnist", collects two views of the music competition at NAID 1995 (the North American International Demo competition): island-of-reil of epinicion , who attended, and mosaic of …
TW #60 — Faces in the Crowd: fisherman (Zinc) summaryzinc interviews fisherman, "who I hadn't heard of before", and closes with the column's charter: "The scene is full of faces, and unless we are as famous as [enter famous person here], we can get lost in the crowd. FITC …
TW #60 — Interview with Rage (Kal Zakath and Kleitus) summaryKal Zakath (jtown) and Kleitus interview rage of Jade and Night55, the Finn who took 2nd place in the Assembly '95 multichannel music competition with "Guild of Sounds" — an IRC capture "with a bit of editing for the …
TW #62 — Interview with Vegas (Kal Zakath and Kleitus) summaryKal Zakath (jtown) and Kleitus interview vegas of Mystique, an IRC capture from "several weeks" before NAID '96; the preface adds that his NAID entry "The Path Taken" was selected by the jury and finished 15th, and that …
TW #63 — Interview with Ryan (Kleitus) summaryKleitus (Seth Katzman) interviews Ryan of Grey — a 4,600-word IRC log, edited by Ryan himself, that is mostly jokes; Kleitus disclaims "the lameness that follows". This Ryan is Ryan Sprott of Grey, not Ryan Cramer …
TW #64 — Potted Tracking History (Ganja Man) summaryA scener's oral history by ganja-man of lok , written in an afternoon; useful as the scene's own account of where trackers and "chip tunes" came from, not as a checked chronology.
TW #65–#66 — Tracking as an Olympic Sport, parts I–II (Blackwolf) summaryWritten from Atlanta during the 1996 Games: a mock letter to the organising committee proposing tracking as an exhibition sport, and a mock refusal. The joke describes, quite precisely, the compo format the scene took …
TW #66 — Interview with Liam the Lemming (Kal Zakath) summaryKal Zakath interviews liam-the-lemming , "a very accomplished musician and one of the most popular #trax personalities", in an IRC log with the interviewer's own remarks cut and "some rearrangement ... for clarity".
TW #66 — Sound Recording (Cowboy) summaryAn engineering student's (NDSU, mechanical engineering with EE and CS; built his own speakers and sub) answer to "what is the best method of recording" for a tracker: the signal chain from source to sample, measured …
TW #67 — Interview with U4IA (Mage) summaryMage (Glen Dwayne Warner) interviewed u4ia by e-mail over "a month and a half or so" — "a well-known Amiga musician" whose name, the preface says, is "known throughout the internet by trackers everywhere, despite his …
TW #7 — Interview with Ryan Cramer (Popcorn) summaryPopcorn, now signing "TraxWeekly Co-Editor", interviews ryan-cramer of Iguana and renaissance , "one of my favorite composers", a week later than planned. The extract file inbox/tw-extracts/tw007-5-interviews.txt holds …
TW #7 — The Importance of Music Theory (Future Assassin) summaryA personal essay by an 18-year-old tracker who plays by ear and never had a lesson — the earliest traxweekly piece in the theory-versus-ear argument that flared up again in #37–#40 ( s-tw039-chord-theory-debate ).
TW #70–73 — the realism debate (#trax log, Behemoth, GBlues, Alan Robinson, Raphael, Sturm, brn, It-Alien, Purple Haze, Necros) summaryA #trax argument about a tracked saxophone, printed as TraxWeekly's second survey question ("is 'realism' something viable for tracked music?", replies to Psibelius), followed by three issues of answers; Behemoth's …
TW #72 — Composing Whole Modules (Sir Nick / Deck Blasters) summaryA tracker of six years (Scream Tracker 2.25, several scream-tracker-3 versions, then impulse-tracker ) argues that editing music "in blocks of only few bars" makes tracked tunes monotonous.
TW #74 — Motherboard Sampling (Spieg) summaryA found-sound trick: an onboard SB16 Vibra picks up the computer's own electrical noise; with the input gain cranked, keystrokes, mouse movement and program loads each produce distinct noises ("the mouse would always …
TW #74–86 — Introduction to Musical Theory, vols 1–5 (Greg Heo) summaryA beginner's theory course written for trackers by greg-heo , who admits "I'm not an experienced tracker" but had a music teacher's vocabulary. Every example is given in tracker terms.
TW #75 — IT Percussion Tips (Zinc) summaryzinc 's techno-oriented advice for Impulse Tracker 2.06 ("most of them will probably be useful with earlier versions, and even in other trackers").
TW #76 — Realism in MODs (Behemoth) summaryA reply to a #70 argument (Necros, in_tense and others) about "realism" in tracked music. Behemoth samples his own instruments from a Korg X5 rather than reusing "three or four Purple Motion samples"; reproducing a …
TW #77 — General Tracking Tips (Generic Blues) summaryTen tips for a beginning tracker.
TW #77–81 — A Chip Off the Block / Chiptune Seminar, parts 1–4 (The Modsquad) summaryA four-part, mostly satirical "seminar" on making chiptunes by the-modsquad ; the editor noted he was "not that enthused". Parts 3 and 4 are almost entirely nonsense (paper boats, Elvis, nail collections, "encryption"); …
TW #8 — Interview with Blaze Runner (Populus) summaryPopulus 's "last minute" live interview with blaze-runner , music coordinator of PURE, about "subjects that don't get around much": copyright registration and going commercial, plus an AWE32 workflow in a GUS-dominated …
TW #80 — #trax Mass Interview (Zinc) summaryzinc interviewed "every non-idler in #trax at once", collecting answers by private message so nobody saw the others'. Mostly banter; a few questions produce usable scene data.
TW #81–89 — Impulse Tracker Tip of the Week #1–8 (Pinion) and More Impulse Tracker Tips (Pulse) summarypinion 's series, started because "Impulse Tracker has too many features that are not utilized to their full potential", with a correction and extra tips from IT's author jeffrey-lim (Pulse).
TW #84 — Perfect Samples: The Piano (Sklathill) summaryA do-it-yourself guide to sampling a piano (and, by extension, any sustained instrument).
TW #86 — Hexadecimal 101 (chinaski) summaryA newcomer's explanation of hex for trackers: base 16 with digits 0–9 and A–F, a 0 prefix or h suffix marks a hex value, and a two-digit value is the second digit × 16 plus the first ( 02Eh = 2×16 + 14 = 46 — the …
TW #86 — Wrecking Samples with Impulse Tracker (Graham the Happy Scum) summaryThree tricks in IT's sample window (F3): smoothing — Alt-E (resize with interpolation) to length +1, then −1, damps high frequencies; a crude noise gate — Alt-A to unsign, Alt-M amplify to ~103–104 %, Alt-A again, which …
TW #87 — Interview with Perisoft (Pizza Head) summaryPizza Head's first interview for TraxWeekly, an unformatted IRC log that psibelius printed uncorrected; the subject is perisoft , interviewed before in #11 (May 1995) and known in the wiki from necros 's 1995 reply to …
TW #87–#97 — Music Theory: A Modern Approach (The Modsquad, seven parts) summaryThis is satire , the sequel to the chiptune "seminar" of #77–#81 ( s-tw077-chip-off-the-block ): fake gear lists ("$450 TB-202", a Speak & Spell), "musical DNA", Elvis, juggling raves, a prison inmate given …
TW #9 — Interview with Maelcum (k8to) summaryk8to interviews maelcum , founder of the kosmic Free Music Foundation — "a little more 'maelcum' oriented as opposed to 'trax' oriented".
TW #9 — Samples, Lameness, Preconceptions, and Fluffy Bunnies (Necros) summaryA reply to Perisoft's piece in #8: why necros , once a "siner-synth" purist, became "a loop junkie".
TW #90 — Interview with Cosmic/RR (Pizza Head) summaryPizza Head interviews cosmic of Radical Rhythms, "one of the reasons that I got me into tracking" — his songs "were all over the bbs's i called". A short IRC log.
TW #94 — Stereo Samples with Impulse Tracker (Zinc) summaryWhy and how zinc uses stereo samples instead of panned mono ones.
TW #96 — Studio Tracking Tips (Zinc) summaryzinc adapts Future Music's "50 Top Studio Tips" (issue 50) to tracking — some forty short rules on sampling, mixing, arrangement and habits.
TW #98 — Impulse Tracker Investment (Pulse) summaryjeffrey-lim on why he wrote and released impulse-tracker , and on being abused for asking US$30 for the stereo WAV writer.
TW #98 — Impulse Tracker MIDI (Airon) summaryAiron's guide to IT's MIDI output: what the tracker sends, which controllers matter, and how to write them as Zxx / SFx macros.
TW #99 — Why Tracking Is The Perfect Artform (anonymous) summaryAn enthusiast's "top reasons for tracking like crazy", with one concrete story about how compo feedback improved a song.
Tyler Barnes — Advanced LSDJ Tutorial: The Ghost Channel (video, 2013) summaryThe original tutorial, and still the only step-by-step for drawing the waves. Its companion thread is s-chipmusic-lsdj-ghost-channel . The transcript is machine-generated, so what follows is what is spoken ; values …
uCApps MIDIbox SID — Wavetable Sounds Tutorial #1 (Thorsten Klose) summaryThorsten Klose's tutorial for the MIDIbox SID (a DIY MIDI synthesizer built around real SID chips) shows how to take a drum sound out of a SID tune and rebuild it as a "wavetable" — in the C64 sense of the word: "a …
Vandalism News #63 — Interview with Matt Gray (Jazzcat, 2014) summaryThe longest matt-gray interview: how he learnt 6502 to build his player, what he thinks a player is, why System 3 let him go, the Sanxion trick behind his Bangkok Knights bass, and his 1990s pop career (Motiv8, …
VGMPF wiki: Chris Hülsbeck summaryThe most detailed dated timeline of chris-huelsbeck 's C64 years anywhere on the web — a fan wiki, so every date below is second-hand, but it cites the interviews it was built from (listed at the end of the raw page).
VGMPF wiki: Maniacs of Noise, Jeroen Tel, Charles Deenen (+ the C64-Wiki roster) summaryFan-wiki pages (secondary, but dated and footnoted to disk-mag interviews) that say plainly how maniacs-of-noise worked: one driver, written by charles-deenen , into which jeroen-tel and the others typed hex in Turbo …
VGMPF wiki: Matt Gray summaryA short fan-wiki page, useful for two facts about matt-gray 's tools before his own driver and for a dated game list.
VGMPF wiki: Soundmonitor, TFMX Editor (C64) and The Great Giana Sisters (C64) summaryThree VGMPF pages that together describe the editors chris-huelsbeck used on the C64 and what happened to the great-giana-sisters music between editor and game.
Walleij — A SID player routine (MIDI-driven player design, note tables, hard restart) summaryDesign notes, in pseudo-code, for a MIDI-controlled sid player, written on request from Michael Kleps (the "M.K." of the extended Soundtracker module signature and author of the QuadraSID VST). linus-walleij learned how …
Wikipedia (en): Chris Huelsbeck summaryTertiary, but with two things the wiki did not have: the citation trail (the 64'er contest was announced in issue 6/1986, p. 173) and a claim about who co-created TFMX.
Wikipedia — Goto80 (en) summaryThe English Wikipedia article on goto80 (revision of 2026-02-02), a tertiary/secondary source: every claim below is Wikipedia's, resting on the article's own citations (Discogs, goto80.com, Truechiptilldeath interviews, …