Dustbin (Stefano Palmonari)
Italian game composer from Ferrara (31 years old in December 2004) who taught himself the SID at 15 from taped Rob Hubbard and Jeroen Tel tunes, got hired by Simulmondo at 17 on the strength of a first rockmonitor tune "sent … more or less as a joke", and went on to write for C64, Amiga, PC and Game Boy (Rayman, as 3-track MIDI files) in the 1990s; in 2004 he returned to the C64 with jingles for Stefano Tognon's Little Sara Sisters 2 (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
Facts#
- Start: "just a lot of Rob Hubbard's tunes recorded on a tape … And tons of Jeroen Tel's tunes played 24:7"; editors (future-composer among them) from an F4CG member in Ferrara; first C64 at 13 (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
- Own works he names: the Big Game Fishing title (his worst) and Basket Play Off (his best); the LSS2 jingles (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
- On the SID: three channels "(+1, when available)" that demand "a balance between technique, ful control of the tracks and musical skil"; C64 editors mean thinking in hex (
SND.01 / DUR.0c / C-5 …) plus arpeggio, filter and wave tables, "keeping in mind the amount of memory, not a user friendly interface" — PC trackers give tick-level control; "I found quite easy to compose on the Amiga/PC but tremendously difficult to compose with the C64" (tracker; source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview). - Sound: the arpeggio is "the best feature invented … You can use it 'chopped' for funky tunes" (chord-arpeggio); the SID's "WARM lead sound" he compares only to a Minimoog; "every SID chip is unique (someone said 'filters' ?)". His shared snare, ripped from Glenn Rune Gallefoss's zakazazam for Sadotracker:
wavetable 81 41 40 80 80,arptable CE AE AC CA DE(wavetable-programming; source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview). - Advice: "Learn to use PERFECTLY one or two editors"; remake the best SIDs by ear (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
- Editors: Rockmonitor as "an ancestral" of the Amiga
.mod; Cybertracker and Odintracker "user friendly"; his preference Sadotracker ("the essential features are fuly present and I don't have to remember a lot of keys"); on the Game Boy, Musicbox is hard to use on real hardware, so a PC tracker with emulation "like Paragon 5 Tracker"; on PC, Renoise, for which he wishes a SID VST (game-boy, tracker-scene-history; source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview). - Taste: keeps his last real C64 (emulating the filters "doesn't work fine"); 6581 "without doubts"; heroes rob-hubbard ("who invented the profession"), jeroen-tel ("my music hero"), martin-galway; best SIDs: sanxion's tape loader, cybernoid's title ("the first Tel's tune I've listened to"), Wizball; other Italian talents he names: Ivan Del Duca (modules), Paolo Galimberti, Gianluca Gaiba, Nicola Tomljanovic, Andrea Pompili (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
- Off the computer (2004): singer in a Queen tribute band, married, a daughter (source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
Related#
rockmonitor · future-composer · modules · chord-arpeggio · wavetable-programming · sidin · jeroen-tel · rob-hubbard · sanxion · cybernoid