Chordian (Jens-Christian Huus / JCH)

Jens-Christian Huus — JCH of Vibrants, author of the jch-editor and the NewPlayer family, and today the writer of chordian.net, DeepSID, and the sid-factory-ii tutorial series. The identity is his own statement: "My alter ego on the Commodore 64 was JCH of Vibrants. I was a coder and a composer" — and the handle comes from his tune Chordian (Dexion X-Mas Conference, December 1990): "In 2006, I even decided to use the name of it as my new handle on the internet" (sources: s-chordian-player-editor-notes, s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

Biography (his 2017 memoir)#

• Born 1966 in Rungsted, Denmark; a postman with no musical education; first C64 bought 1984-04-02. Ear opened by Super Pipeline and rob-hubbard ("made the SID chip warp into space age almost single-handedly"). Groups: New Men → Galaxy → 2000 A.D. → INXS → Jewels → Wizax → Dominators (August
  1. → Channel 42 → Vibrants, which he founded with Link of Cheyens (named in a phone call before the September 1989 PCW show: "vibrato" + "Ants"; "There was never supposed to be a 'The' in front") (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).
• OldPlayer (1987, tunes transferred from Amiga Aegis Sonix on paper), NewPlayer (from July 1988) and the editor (v1 1988-11 → v3.04 1991-08) — the whole story on jch-editor (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes).
• His triangle of peers: "Jesper [JO of Amok] was probably the technically most adept player coder. I had an awesome music editor. And Johannes was by far the best C64 composer" (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).
• Game work: Super OsWald, Hugo (C64 + the PC version that started his AdLib career), Su-Sweet, Guldkorn Ekspressen, the maniacs-of-noise overflow job Chase HQ II (Link composing, JCH multiplexing SFX); charles-deenen first rejected his tunes ("listen to what tim-follin had done") and was then impressed by Push-It. PC years: his AdLib player (register bypassing, C64-style arpeggio tables), the DOS editor EdLib (public December 1994), 28 fasttracker-2 tunes 1995–98; he stopped composing during 1999 (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes; opl-fm-instruments).

Chordian today#

Writer of the blog chordian.net and author of the four-part 2022 tutorial series Composing in SID Factory II, whose fourth part (instruments: ADSR, hard restart, waveforms, the wave table, a snare recipe) is ingested as s-chordian-sf2-instruments. He writes from experience with the sid-factory-ii editor ("Personally, I usually always keep my wave table lines gated on, at least until the looping part") and refers to Vincenzo's two SID Factory II video tutorials on YouTube (StrayBoom) for more (source: s-chordian-sf2-instruments).

His SID-editor comparison page (chordian.net/c64editors.htm) is recommended on Lemon64 as "a comprehensive overview/comparison of SID trackers (including the CPU time in rasterlines that each player requires)" (wizball6502, 2020; source: s-lemon64-learning-sid-sound-design); see sid-player-routine.

JCH in the 1980s scene#

• His own 2018 essay on the game composers — Hubbard "on a lonely mountain top", Galway "a pioneer of programmed pulsating", Follin's harmonica (which he copied), Tel's "delicious and polished instruments", and Hülsbeck, Gray, Whittaker, Walker, Dunn and Cooksey as "overrated" — with the criterion that "the whole package" of tune, instruments and player counts (source: s-chordian-sid-musicians).
• SIDwave: "1989 saw the light of day, JCH coming to top quality, Drax don't exist without JCH editor, Dane, many more … In the '90s many used JCH's editor, he was the gift to '90s, what Hülsbeck was to '80s. JCH is the inventor of what we call a hard-restart" (hard-restart; source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid). SIDId lists JCH_OldPlayer, JCH_NewPlayer in versions V1–V20 (Dane's 2011 "JCH-editor 3.1 + NP22-25"), JCH_Protracker and JCH_DigiPlayer (source: s-sidid-player-list).
• JCH himself disclaims the hard-restart invention: "It was Jesper [JO of Amok] who first made me aware of the technique … It had previously been used by Rob Hubbard and also Laxity had figured it out"; his editor implemented it in NewPlayer 17.G1, which may be how SIDwave's attribution arose — the wiki keeps both statements (sources: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles, s-chordian-player-editor-notes; the contradiction is also stated on hard-restart).
• Editor v1 and v2 are dated November/December 1988 in his memoir; SIDwave's "1989" dates the first outside users (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

JCH's players as a case study, and a 2003 user#

• Tognon's 2003 demonstration of finding a player without its source used JCH's NewPlayer: SIDedit disassemblies of Hoppin and Brown Ice (two slightly different v1 builds), Cavern (v2) and 2Cvee (v3) laid side by side in a spreadsheet, the code common to both v1 tunes but absent from v2 and v3 becoming the v1 signature — 32 instructions ($12BC–$1302 in Hoppin) that split a Y-indexed table's bytes into nibbles and store them in X-indexed per-voice tables, ending CMP #$10 / BNE; "What the selected code in the pattern means for the player we are not able to say" (source: s-sidin03-pattern-searching-1; player-identification). The Lostack database names one version JCH 02/NEWPLAYER V17.G1 (source: s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2).
• stephan-schmid, HVSC crew, returned to composing in February 2003 "with the JCH editor. It's not quite easy to use, but I'm sure you'll hear more SID music from me soon" (source: s-sidin03-schmid-interview).

• jan-harries (2004): "JCH and SDI (SID Duzz It, from SHAPE) are the best ones I've seen, and I now only use SDI"; JCH is also on his list of favourite composers (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).

A user of the editor: Scarzix (1989–90, 2013)#

• scarzix received JCH's editor as "the magic disk" by mail through Martin Lassen (Stranger) for the CombatZone project, then spent "HOURS of discussions on phone about his new players and its features" and posted tunes back for "new players and other worktunes"; the percentage of the game fee he had promised JCH became payable only in 2014, the publisher having paid one Amiga 500 per developer. JCH later invited him to the PC and Edlib, which he declined (source: s-sidin14-scarzix-interview).
• What he says JCH invented: the stacked track-sequencer that "shows/scrolls the next pattern in below or above it" — the reason he chose cheesecutter, a PC editor that opens JCH-editor work files and runs NewPlayer (its 2.x generation diverging from it), over goattracker when he returned in 2013 (source: s-sidin14-scarzix-interview).

NewPlayer 21 and SID Factory (2006–07)#

• sidin #10 (2006) reported JCH New Player 21.g4 Final (January 2006) as "the player coded by laxity to use with JCH" — a vibrato overflow that "made the note go out of tune" and an initialisation bug fixed — and 21.g5 Final (May 2006), which fixed a periodic retrigger in live-play mode and "Implemented stop ($fe in pattern list)"; GoatTracker 2.68 later tweaked its SID write order "to resemble JCH NewPlayer 21" (source: s-sidin-news-digest).
• SID Factory 0.05 (alpha 1) (2007) "has inherited a lot of features and look from the JCH editor" while being "programmed from scratch" — the ancestor of sid-factory-ii (source: s-sidin-news-digest).

Related#

jch-editor · sid-factory-ii · laxity · johannes-bjerregaard · scarzix · cheesecutter · hard-restart · wavetable-programming · sid-player-routine · tracker-scene-history

Sources#

s-chordian-sf2-instruments · s-lemon64-learning-sid-sound-design · s-chordian-sid-musicians · s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-sidid-player-list · s-sidin03-pattern-searching-1 · s-sidin03-schmid-interview · s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2 · s-sidin06-harries-interview · s-sidin14-scarzix-interview · s-sidin-news-digest · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles · s-chordian-player-editor-notes