Balrog (Samuel Cote)
Trance tracker from Quebec, an early Canadian member of kosmic who moved to ultrabeat in 1996; a fasttracker-2 user after Scream Tracker 2, ModEdit and X-Tracker. The main source is his January 1996 traxweekly interview by zinc (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog).
Facts#
- Samuel Cote, 18 in January 1996, first-year computer engineering at Laval University; ran the BBS Imagina. Bass and guitar for three years, dropped. Interested in tracking from 1991 through friends' Amiga demos (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog).
- Tools: "scream tracker v2.23 i think", then ModEdit 2.0, MMEDIT "back when ST3 was only a rumor"; ST 3.0 was "buggy as hell on my machine", so he used the X-Tracker that D-Lusion gave every Kosmic member until FT2 came out — FT2's envelopes were the draw. Wrote MODs and STMs first, XMs by 1996 (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog).
- Groups: a local group that "never went anywhere", then Kosmic — he believed he was its first Canadian; Maelcum kept him although he released little during a depressed year (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog). By April 1996 he had "recently joined" Ultrabeat (source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman), and the December 1996 mass interview lists him as "balrog (Ultrabeat)", where he called theory "a tool, just like a 303" (source: s-tw080-trax-mass-interview).
- 20-minute-chip-compo: 3rd in compo #2 (16 September 1995, 100 points) and joint 2nd with Zodiak in compo #6 (13 October 1995, 264) (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo).
- Style: near trance — fat pads, acid, beatless passages, groove; listens to Hardfloor, Eat Static, Koxbox, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Tangerine Dream and to Bach, Stravinsky, Orff, Mahler (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog).
- Opinions: would replace the gravis-ultrasound with a card with a programmable DSP, lots of memory and digital outputs; newbies should release less; tracker and soundcard arguments are futile; more cooperation "like what they did in FM". Modules have a future in games — better than General MIDI, much smaller than recorded audio (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog; see commercial-tracking).
- Goals for 1996: a job, gear, a release on vinyl or CD; later a PhD in VLSI design to build CPUs for synthesizer makers (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog).
Related#
kosmic · ultrabeat · fasttracker-2 · scream-tracker-3 · 20-minute-chip-compo · gravis-ultrasound · zinc · injekted
Sources#
s-tw042-interview-balrog · s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo · s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman · s-tw080-trax-mass-interview