Jase (Jason Chong)

Australian tracker of the demo groups Oxygen and Enigma who won Music Contest 3 in 1995 with an XM, beating necros; the main source is clef's TraxWeekly interview of August 1995 (source: s-tw022-interview-jase; Clef's own interview is s-tw055-interview-clef). the-zapper named him among his favourite trackers a month later (source: s-tw027-interview-zapper).

Facts#

• 20 in August 1995, in the fourth year of a Bachelor of Science and Engineering (e-mail at uwa.edu.au). Nearly 15 years of classical music: violin for about 13 years, piano, electric guitar for five; a Guns N' Roses / Metallica / Satriani phase, then US House (source: s-tw022-interview-jase).
• Started tracking in November 1993 after hearing future-crew's Unreal, moving from MIDI composing to FastTracker "with some awful samples from my SY35" and Aminet mods. Favourites: skaven's Ice Frontier, purple-motion's Starshine, Big Jim's symphonic demo music; Necros for realism (source: s-tw022-interview-jase).
• MC3: aimed for the top 5 and for "an XM in the top 5", to answer those who dismissed fasttracker-2 untried, and to show XM's benefits — "eg in envelopes" — over S3M; wrote the winning tune in the last two weeks during exams (source: s-tw022-interview-jase; see xm-format, instrument-envelopes, compos).
• Workflow: ideas on keyboard, piano, guitar or by singing → a structure for the main sections in his head → samples that fit the idea → tracking → revisions. Advice: get the idea and feel first, do not build the whole tune on sample noodling, and "listen to it like it's the first time you've heard it or it's someone else's piece" (source: s-tw022-interview-jase; see tracking-workflow).
• Releases on hornet as j-*.zip and jjj-*.zip; a few tunes shipped with Mod4Win. Credits Firelight with helping him from the start; the Australian scene of 1995 (Firelight, CB, Jedi, oz95) was "growing fast" (source: s-tw022-interview-jase).
• master-of-darkness (October 1995): "Look at what Skaven and Jase did for Assembly and Mc3 respectively! Nothing that you would expect, came from outta nowhere" — his example of the elite "warping the norm" (source: s-tw030-interview-ender).

Related#

clef · fasttracker-2 · xm-format · instrument-envelopes · tracking-workflow · compos · necros · skaven · purple-motion · big-jim · master-of-darkness

Sources#

s-tw022-interview-jase · s-tw027-interview-zapper · s-tw030-interview-ender · s-tw055-interview-clef