Catspaw (Brandon Bannerman)

Seattle tracker and traxweekly writer (Catspaw / Rat; Rat City BBS; catspaw@eskimo.com) whose two-part "The Finishing Touches" (#58–59, May 1996) is the scene's clearest text on song initialisation and looping, effect memory, frames, volume-slide arithmetic and retrigs (source: s-tw058-the-finishing-touches); Greg Heo sends readers to it for frames and tempo (source: s-tw074-intro-to-musical-theory). The TOC also lists his "Real Music" (#53), not yet ingested.

Background (source: s-tw057-interview-catspaw)#

• Member of Rat, a Seattle art group of poets and trackers founded in 1993 by his friend Dude (Miran); often partners with Dude; released Sorrow's Redemption. Started on ModEdit 2.0 around 1993 without knowing "which notes were which"; had just moved to impulse-tracker in May 1996.
• Writes rock and indie styles, was moving toward orchestral music (Holst, Beethoven, film scores, alongside Megadeth and Iron Maiden). Names his lack of training as his biggest limitation — "it's hard to come up with melodies … when you just learned a few months ago what a key or time signature was" — and envies necros, basehead, Aahz and leviathan.
• Argued that a new format must ship with a player and suggested a command-line play switch to Pulse (jeffrey-lim); found FT2 and IT over-featured for 80 % of trackers.
• Relaxed about tapes and copies of his music ("I've never understood how people can put a price tag on art"); toyed with "shareware music" on cassette. Expected a child in October 1996 and doubted he would stay in the scene.
• In the #70 realism argument: "if you're measuring the worth of a tracked song by how 'real' it sounds, I might suggest that you're on the wrong channel, with the wrong attitude" — "it's music" (source: s-tw070-realism-debate; see realism-in-tracked-music).
• zinc (May 1996): Catspaw "seems to be picking up the slack" on tracking tips while Zinc's "TraxTips #2" was still pending (source: s-tw060-interview-fisherman).

Related#

song-init-and-looping · volume-slides · retrigger · impulse-tracker · zinc · realism-in-tracked-music

Sources#

s-tw058-the-finishing-touches · s-tw074-intro-to-musical-theory · s-tw057-interview-catspaw · s-tw070-realism-debate · s-tw060-interview-fisherman