Chris Hülsbeck

German composer (born 1968-03-02 in Kassel) who wrote his own C64 driver in 1985, won 64er's music competition with shades in 1986 and then gave the magazine soundmonitor, the editor with which the C64 tracker era begins; later the house composer of rainbow-arts (great-giana-sisters, Katakis, R-Type, Turrican) and the author of tfmx on C64 and Amiga (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-64er-soundmonitor-article).

Timeline#

• Before the C64: piano lessons at 5 for two years ("I would rather play my own melodies"), an electric organ at 11, drum lessons at 12, a home-built synth he called "Zarg", BASIC on an uncle's computer; bought the C64 in December 1984 for its "real synthesizer sound chip", with money from a paper round and his grandmother (sources: s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview, s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).
• 1985: starts the driver Musicmaster "in Profi-Ass 64 and composed in hex"; first game music Planet of War for a programmer friend (school friend Artur Wystub programmed his first two games) (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview).
• February 1986: hears of the 64'er contest and writes shades "from 8 PM to 4 AM", typing the Musicmaster data with the SMON monitor — "eine zeitraubende Arbeit"; first prize, 1500 DM. "I never expected to win, but of course I was very happy about my prize and it helped to start my career." (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-64er-soundmonitor-article, s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview)
• Summer 1986: writes soundmonitor as an editor for Musicmaster; sold to 64'er, published as "Listing des Monats" in issue 10/1986 (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-64er-soundmonitor-article).
• Spring 1986 – July 1987: builds a userport sampler with Peter Thierolf and adds "percussion, bass and vocal samples to Musicmaster as a 4th voice"; nothing of it is released until July 1987, so martin-galway's Arkanoid (February 1987) is first with sampled drums (chip-samples; source: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck).
• February/March 1987: after phoning the boss and playing a few songs, hired by rainbow-arts on the spot; quits school and moves to their offices; "a lot of freedom and a decent salary" and time for "the digitized drums and samples" (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview).
• July 1987: The Final Musicplayer, an optimised Musicmaster given only to Georg Brandt; great-giana-sisters (January 1988) is composed in Soundmonitor and converted to it (source: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx).
• Summer 1988: the 8580 plays samples too quietly → tfmx for the C64, "a script language in addition to the typical rigid instrument table" (source: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx).
• Late 1986 onward: Amiga 1000; TFMX on Amiga later in 1988; Turrican (1990), Turrican II (1991), Apidya (1992); 1990/91 A.U.D.I.O.S. and Kaiko; 1998 to Factor 5 in California (MusyX, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron); freelance again since 2009 (sources: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck, s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).

Working methods#

• Two C64s, "one with the programming source code and another one for the actual music creation and playback"; Soundmonitor, later TFMX Editor; data "a lot of numbers in hexadecimal format" with notes shown as A-2 or G#3 — "Other programs that came later, like the Trackers on the Amiga used a similar format and they may have been inspired by my earlier tools" (tracker; source: s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview).
• First keyboard an Ensoniq ESQ-1 sponsored by Rainbow Arts, for composing and previewing melodies (source: s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview).
• On the sid: "the pulse-with modulation is the holy grail of its power"; the filter "caused each machines filter to sound almost unpredictably different" (pulse-width-modulation, filter-programming; source: s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).
• The TFMX per-note script: "very short drum sounds with a fixed pitch just before a pitched bass sound … it would sound like 2 channels were used at the same time, because the human brain can't keep sounds apart that are played in very short succession" (channel-interleaving; source: s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview).
• "The basics of a good song remain the same: good melody, accompaniment and a strong and interesting arrangement." For games: concept, artwork, playing the game → "mood, speed and character" (arrangement; source: s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).
• His own view of the 1980s job: "70% of a programmer and only 30% of a musician"; no formal training (source: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck).

Influence#

• Soundmonitor was "the most popular Commodore 64 music editor in Europe of the late 1980s"; matt-gray calls it and Rockmonitor "godsends at the time", and the three founders of maniacs-of-noise had all arranged in it before writing their own driver (sources: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx, s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).
• Favourite composers: rob-hubbard, martin-galway, Ben Daglish, jeroen-tel; own C64 favourites R-Type title and Starball (source: s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).

How the scene saw him#

• SIDwave's memoir: "in late 1986, the scene is given the greatest gift of all … Somebody releases what is called a TRACKER … and this concept is so easy to learn, that now everybody can make music!" His music "sounds new and fresh! … pop/rock/chris"; the whole scene "jumps onto Soundmonitor". In mid-1987 he and Galway both added sampled drums — Galway's game shipped first, and the two methods differed (Galway real-time via $D418, Hülsbeck streaming sample data with the NMI) (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
• chordian (JCH): "He did create one of the first good music editors on the C64 … That is of course a remarkable feat. But I never really found most of his tunes on the C64 to be that interesting. There are exceptions, such as the early Shades that had an amazing mood, but I actually thought he was better on the Amiga" (source: s-chordian-sid-musicians). CSDb users on Soundmonitor: "massive impact on the scene", "This is the reason why I started composing music with computers" (source: s-csdb-soundmonitor-and-shades).
• His own shortest version (2011): "Later I won a music contest in a magazine and developed the first tracker-like music editor called 'Soundmonitor' … I taught myself assembly language, developed my own tools and even invented my own scripting system for sounds and music" (source: s-audiogang-huelsbeck-interview).
• Still a reference point for C64 composers two decades on: interviewed together for sidin #13 in 2010, tsm and freedom both put him on their short list of favourite authors, and Freedom's Dreamlights is "a cover of a tune by Chris Huelsbeck originally intented to be used in Turrican" (source: s-sidin13-tsm-freedom-interview).
• Reference trail: the contest was announced in 64'er 6/1986, p. 173; Wikipedia says he "co-created the TFMX … sound editor with programmer Peter Thierolf" (unverified which version) and lists the albums Shades (1991) and To Be On Top (1992) (source: s-wikipedia-chris-huelsbeck). The C64 TFMX editor never leaked; a 2006 thread has him wanting "to write proper documents for it" first (source: s-csdb-huelsbeck-tfmx-thread). SIDId files his players as Soundmonitor/MusicMaster_*, Huelsbeck_Digi_V1/V2, Chris_Huelsbeck and TFMX (source: s-sidid-player-list).

SIDin interview (2004): his own count of the players#

• Asked by Stefano Tognon in late 2003 how much he had improved his editor, Hülsbeck numbered his C64 drivers himself: "The Soundmonitor was my first big software project and was based on my third music player (the first was pretty basic for a friends game, the second was for Shades). After that I made 2 revisions of the player, one was more memory and CPU efficient (TFM, for 'The Final Musicplayer' which funnily wasn't the final one at all ;), and the second one added my sample playback." He then "went actually back to non-sample SID sound because the later revisions of the C64 had problems with that and the games became so big and resource hungry" — hence tfmx, "The Final Musicsystem Extended", "able to do some very wild SID effects and good drums without samples" (source: s-sidin05-huelsbeck-interview). This puts two revisions between soundmonitor and TFMX and makes the sample build a separate step after TFM, where VGMPF's timeline above has the sampler work (1986–87) before The Final Musicplayer (July 1987).
• On rockmonitor: "No, the Rockmonitor was a hack / reverse engineered by those guys. Back then I was a bit mad about them, but not anymore..." He had saved "almost everything from my old C64 disks" to PC and CD-ROM and "thought about releasing some stuff incl. the sources" but not found the time to sort the disks; "a couple of unfinished pieces" may sit in the collection (source: s-sidin05-huelsbeck-interview).
• In 2004: in the US since February 1998, on the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series for Nintendo consoles; "not famous like a Hollywood star", "not rich as some people think". The real machine gives "the right atmosphere and the smoothest SID sound", emulators the convenience; on 6581 vs 8580, "the SID voices by themselves didn't sound that much different to me", the later boards only worse at samples (sid). Worst own SID "my ugly cover version of 'Being Boiled'", favourite Starball; best SIDs ever Cybernoid, Monty on the Run, One Man and His Droid, The Last V8, Wizball (cybernoid, monty-on-the-run); his game-music CD label was synsoniq.com (source: s-sidin05-huelsbeck-interview).

The Piano Collection (2014)#

sidin #14 (2015-01-25): "Chris Huelsbeck has launched another musical project onto Kickstarter at the end of 2014: The piano collection" (source: s-sidin-news-digest).

Two press visits (1987–88) and the IMR questionnaire (1996)#

• Happy Computer 3/87 ("Der Soundprofessor") visited him in Langen the month he joined rainbow-arts: two C64s and a floppy drive on the table, an Amiga in the corner "noch nicht zur Soundprogrammierung" used; his "selbstgeschriebener Soundmonitor" as the tool, shown on screen over To Be On Top; sounds chosen by the game's setting (medieval → baroque, present-day → disco, fantasy → mystic synth), "ganz wie im Kino"; and his checklist for writing a routine — assembler, interrupt, a hex note table addressed $00–$FF, PWM and filter extensions, mid-game sound switching, bars ("Takte") stored once and replayed in any order (sid-player-routine, arrangement) (source: s-happy-computer-soundprofessor).
• 64'er 2/88: "Programmierer, ich kann keine Noten lesen … Ich fange erst mit einer Baßlinie an, dann folgen die Begleitung und die Melodie" (tracking-workflow); songs reach the computer "ganz einfach durch meinen Sound-Monitor"; sampling explained for readers as microphone → tape → computer → "in Noten verarbeiten" (chip-samples); and the register-sweep tip — counting SID registers quickly up and down yields "Schwingungen …, die normalerweise nur mit zwei Tönen möglich wären" (pulse-width-modulation). To Be On Top — announced for May/June 1987 in Happy Computer, still "das erste Spiel von Chris Hülsbeck" in 2/88 — is a music adventure where the player is the artist, not the manager (sources: s-64er-rainbow-arts-feature, s-happy-computer-soundprofessor).
• IMR (1996): living in Langen; "I had no contact with the 'scene'"; proudest of the 64er win; the Bad Cat priority claim — "I think I was the first programmer who made sample sounds in musics with the SID chip", but the release slipped about three months, "So Martin Galway got the fame with 'Arkanoid'" (chip-samples, martin-galway); latest work then Ocean's Tunnel B1; on IRC as "Chippie" (source: s-imr-huelsbeck-interview).

Related#

soundmonitor · tfmx · shades · great-giana-sisters · rainbow-arts · 64er · sid-player-routine · chip-samples · tracker-scene-history · martin-galway · matt-gray

Sources#

s-64er-soundmonitor-article · s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck · s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx · s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview · s-emuwiki-huelsbeck-interview · s-c64com-matt-gray-interview · s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise · s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-audiogang-huelsbeck-interview · s-csdb-soundmonitor-and-shades · s-chordian-sid-musicians · s-wikipedia-chris-huelsbeck · s-csdb-huelsbeck-tfmx-thread · s-sidid-player-list · s-sidin05-huelsbeck-interview · s-sidin-news-digest · s-happy-computer-soundprofessor · s-64er-rainbow-arts-feature · s-imr-huelsbeck-interview · s-sidin13-tsm-freedom-interview