Martin Galway

In-house C64 composer at Ocean Software (born 1966-01-03; at Ocean from 1984, under contract from February 1985), with a driver whose "personality" Newman contrasts with rob-hubbard's: Galway's routine focused on waveform manipulation, ring modulation and pulse-width-modulation, Hubbard's on percussion (sources: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip, s-remix64-galway-interview, s-sidmusic-galway-interviews). His own summary: "I tried to exploit different features of the SID chip first, and this helped paste over cracks in my composing abilities" — a "sound design bent, rather than a percussive, dance-able feel" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview). jeroen-tel: "the guy who really used the Commodore 64 SID chip as a synthesizer" (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel).

Background and career#

• Music on the school's BBC Micro from 1983; in March 1984 he sold a schoolfriend's BBC Pac-Man clone to Ocean in Manchester and played them his BBC tunes; David Collier: "what d'yer know about the Commodore 64?" Ocean loaned him an assembly-language development system and the "dreadful" source of their existing music program, which he used for the Daley Thompson's Decathlon loader; his own routine's "first real outing" was Kong Strikes Back (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews). "I'm just a normal guy who was in the right place at the right time back in 1984" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).
• By November 1986, aged 20, "more than 30 programs" in two years (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews). He left Ocean over pay, overwork and the offices, joined Sensible Software (Insects In Space was his last work there; the Touchstone game for Origin was scrapped with him as lead programmer), then Origin Systems — IBM PC and SNES (a driver in 1993 that only "ticked over"), NES and Game Boy games, Strike Commander and Wing Commander 2, audio direction and digital-audio research; unused Amiga music in 1990. In 2001 he was Audio Lead on Freelancer at Magic Anvil (sources: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews, s-remix64-galway-interview).
• "I ended up getting burned out and resigned, disillusioned" — but "I liked the feeling that I had never exploited every possible thing about the SID" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).

Driver and tools#

• "No, there never was an editor to make it 'easy'! It was always assembler source files" — first "a really cheesy almost-BASIC Assembler", then Ocean's Zeus 64 by Crystal, then Ocean's own system on a C128D using all 128 K, then an Atari ST system nearly finished when he left; in 1986 he entered music on one C128D and played it on another, and tried ideas on a Seiko DS202/DS310 and a Yamaha CX5M (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews). See sid-player-routine and tracking-workflow.
• "When I have an idea for a song, I enter every single note into the computer. This can take pretty long, if you consider a twelve minute song with three voices"; Short Circuit's cover of "Who's Johnny?" took "4 weeks to program in with all those slides and copies of what the record does" (sources: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews, s-remix64-galway-interview).
• In games "the music gets the smallest piece of the cake"; "If I would write a music that uses 60KB and the whole CPU time, that would sound damn good" (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews).

Techniques#

• Pulse-width sweeps: first used on helikopter-jagd (worked on in 1984 as "Cyclone", a cover of the Neverending Story B-side) — "The sound blew everyone away"; "I didn't develop pulse-width modulation until the next project … On Roland's Ratrace I guess you could say I was still mastering the C64" (sources: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews, s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip).
• Samples through the volume register (chip-samples, sid): "I saw some utilities from the USA and picked them apart. Never would I claim to have invented that technique, I just got it published first … just that they were wiggling the volume register, so I tried to make up my own drum sample sounds in realtime — which is the flatulence stuff that shipped in 'Arkanoid'." After release he got real drum samples and made a private version; "Things were better once I got to 'Game Over'" (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews); Newman's version: "my program synthesized the drums as a series of farts and burps" (source: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip). In 2001: "I wished I'd had access to some sampler equipment, and indeed a little (or any) knowledge of sampling theory" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).
• Full sound on three voices: "make sure all 3 channels were getting used … fast arpeggios, and chorusing/echoes" (chord-arpeggio, fake-echo; source: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip); the Rastan Saga conversion was the hardest to fit into three channels (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews).
• Long form and programmed variation (arrangement): Parallax is 11 minutes with an intro two-thirds of its length; the Times of Lore title took "20 days just to do the guitar solos" and "has a random number generator which selects different guitar solos" over an 11-minute loop; Insects In Space opens with a "buzzing bees" effect that needed "the kind of tricks I was able to do (being a programmer)"; Rambo's title opening was his attempt "to create sounds that hadn't been heard before" (sources: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews, s-remix64-galway-interview).
• What he lacked: percussion — "I wouldn't have minded having a go with his [Hubbard's] software and doing music in my style with his percussion. Perhaps we should have swapped drivers for a game" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview); the Arkanoid title "needed better drums of course" (same source).

The SID as he saw it#

• The filter: his favourite feature and his "worst memory … I wish they were able to fix it"; he heard from an Ensoniq visitor to Origin ("Hal Charpentier", see below) that the team "had hardly any time to work on that part of the SID" and "never debugged" the esoteric features added "in the name of a long feature list for Jack Tramiel" (sources: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews, s-remix64-galway-interview; bob-yannes confirms the lack of time in s-sidmusic-yannes-interview). See filter-programming.
• The "school band effect": "Certain ADSR settings totally screw up and play too early — as I recalled it was with long attacks and long decays. The key-on/key-off circuitry had a problem, evidently … [I] simply had to stay away from certain ADSR settings" — the envelope bug that hard-restart now works around (adsr-envelope; source: s-remix64-galway-interview).
• His weaknesses, by his own account: tune length ("the biggest trait of all my tunes that I'd like to improve"), "lack of polyphony and lack of development time — most were pushed out the door as soon as they were typed in" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).
• "I will never do rearrangements of those tunes on other instruments, the SID is what they're meant to be heard on" (source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews); on others' remixes he was relaxed as long as they bring "creative influences of his own" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).

Works named in the sources#

Daley Thompson's Decathlon loader (1984, first), Kong Strikes Back (first own driver), Roland's Rat Race (1985), Hyper Sports, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Comic Bakery, Ping Pong, Miami Vice and Highlander (1986, a week each), Green Beret, helikopter-jagd / Cyclone (1986), Slap Fight (arcade copy in 5–6 K), Street Hawk (never released; on cassette only), Short Circuit, Arkanoid (samples), Game Over (1987), Wizball (his favourite suite), Parallax (11 minutes), Rastan Saga, Times of Lore, Insects In Space, the Ocean loader, the rejected Microprose Soccer loader; plus Spectrum work (Cobra, reused for Arkanoid's title) (sources: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip, s-remix64-galway-interview, s-sidmusic-galway-interviews). Hubbard's favourites among them: Rambo, Comic Bakery, Chariots of Fire from Hyper Sports (source: s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews); Tel's: Arkanoid (source: s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews). A 2020s enthusiast site credits him with "a cinematic sensibility", the "haunting Rambo loader" and the "driving Green Beret title screen", and attributes the volume-register "sample bug" to Ghostbusters and Arkanoid without naming who coded either (source: s-commodore-64-eu-sid-chip; secondary).

Firsts and fans#

• Arkanoid (February 1987) beat chris-huelsbeck's sampled drums to release: Hülsbeck had built a userport sampler in 1986 and added samples to Musicmaster as a "4th voice", but none of it came out before July 1987 — "They met in 2005 and had a laugh about this" (chip-samples; source: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck).
• matt-gray: "when I heard Martin Galway's loader tunes for Ocean, I started to get really interested in having a go myself. His Rambo loader is my favourite C64 tune of all time"; Galway's vibrato used "the correct algorithm", unlike Gray's own (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview). charles-deenen ("Rob + Martin") and Hülsbeck name him among their favourites (sources: s-charles-deenen-interviews, s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).

The scene's Galway#

• SIDwave: joined Ocean in 1984 as a programmer and was asked to do sound "just because Martin's uncle, James, is a world famous flutenist"; Ocean gave him a MIDI setup on an Atari and "a converter who turned all his compositions of 3 voice midi, into raw data", and he coded routines to manipulate that data — "that's why Martin Galway's player is so large/extensive, with macro-language"; "In the process, Martin invented the chord, aka arpeggio … also known as wibble"; his 1987 sampled drums are "real-time, and does some poking and fiddling with very few numbers … using the SID volume register, D418" (chord-arpeggio, chip-samples; source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
• chordian: "The clean pulsating with the instantaneously triggered notes (a trademark of his)"; "a pioneer of programmed pulsating, years before anyone else … Load up the old game Rambo and play for a while until you get to the hiscore table … Note how it changes several times on the long notes" (pulse-width-modulation; source: s-chordian-sid-musicians).
• matt-gray on the Rambo loader: "Martin's lead lines were always so brilliantly composed and executed … Martin obviously sacrificed drums for more channels, but it didn't matter because he knew the power was in the melody, chords and sounds rather than the beat" (source: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview).
• jeroen-tel's one-line characterisation is a technique observation: "Martin Galway has been a very characteristic fellow by playing around with the 'octaves' all the time" (octave-bass) — and elsewhere he names Galway, with rob-hubbard and Ben Daglish, among the C64 composers who shaped him, praising his ability to hold "a single music theme over so many minutes of time without it getting boring" (sources: s-domination01-jeroen-tel-interview, s-gamesart-jeroen-tel-interview, s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel).
• matt-gray ranks him consistently second and only just: "It's Rob Hubbard but Martin Galway is a very close second", his dream collaboration being "Galway on the C64" (source: s-rvg-matt-gray-interview). Asked again in 2015 he splits the pair "in almost equal amount" and separates what each was best at — Galway's "lead melodies were so flawless", Hubbard "had a huge range of influence to draw from" — putting the Rambo loader and the Green Beret title among the best SIDs ever written (source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Tuned flat, like Gray's own tunes. While remaking his catalogue Gray found his note table gives A4 ≈ 424 Hz on PAL and adds: "Some of Galway's tracks were the same, Green Beret for instance was at 424hz" — two composers arriving at the same flat tuning, apparently from the same frequency listing in the c64-programmers-reference-guide (detune; source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• SIDId's Martin_Galway_Digi note quotes him: he figured out samples "by hacking into someone else's code … a drum synthesizer package called Digidrums … Never would I claim to have invented that technique, I just got it published first" (source: s-sidid-player-list).

The player, read from the code#

Two of his programs are reverse-engineered in the realdmx collection — the Rambo II loader (dmx87) and all of Arkanoid (Stefano Tognon, SIDin #4); the cheat sheet is on galway-player (sources: s-realdmx-galway-rambo-player, s-realdmx-galway-arkanoid-player). What they confirm:

• SIDwave's "macro-language" is a per-voice byte-code with subroutine calls, nested loops, transposed calls, pokes into the instrument and a hook to run 6502 code from the song — the Rambo loader's morse-code intro is such code, replacing the play vector while it keys voice 1. About 2.3 KB of code for the loader, 4.5 KB for Arkanoid, against about 1 KB for Hubbard's.
• "Programmed pulsating" and "the instantaneously triggered notes" (JCH): a two-stage pulse program (+20 for 20 frames, −20 for 20 frames around $0800) and a note start that writes $00 to the voice registers before the instrument's values.
• The "wibble": 4-note arpeggio stacks including the octave, one note per frame.
• The samples of Arkanoid are synthesized, not digitized: six routines writing a stepped 4-bit value to $D418 with delay tables for the pitch sweep, run in the foreground while the music IRQ (about 52 Hz, from a CIA timer; 104 Hz for jingles and effects) schedules them from a sample-pattern language — exactly his "wiggling the volume register … the flatulence stuff" (chip-samples).
• What Ocean did with the idea after he left: jonathan-dunn's ocean-music-driver (1988) is the third "macro-language" driver in the wiki beside this one — the same per-voice byte-code with subroutine calls and transposed calls, with comments in the song data that read like a lead sheet ("PLAY VERSE+CHORUS TWICE", "MIDDLE 8", "REPEAT TO FADE"). Galway's way of writing a tune as a program outlived his time at the company; the comparison is on sid-player-routine and arrangement (source: s-realdmx-ocean-dunn-hughes-driver).
• What the player lacks: a drum routine (drums are a −80-per-frame pitch adder with a short gate) — the reason for "Perhaps we should have swapped drivers for a game".

SIDin #4 and C64Audio (2003)#

• Tognon's verdict on the arkanoid program after reverse-engineering it: the three per-voice copies of the interpreter look wasteful, "However, as all effects are coded into tables, this made the Galway engine very powerful"; writing a track "is like creating a music program using a high level language" — "very powerful if it is compiled by hand, but too complicated by an editor program", which fits Galway's "there never was an editor". The sample synthesis was, in Tognon's reading, obscured on purpose — a self-modifying mask on the $D418 operand, a sample-stream language whose opcodes are real 6510 opcodes, routines scattered through memory — so that "understand the sample routine at that time using the available tools was very difficult" (source: s-sidin04-galway-arkanoid).
• chris-abbott in June 2003: Galway "lent us his C128D and source disks" for a commercial project — "The Galway Project – The Perfect SID Collection", first on C64Audio's list of planned CDs; Abbott's favourites are Hypersports and Roland's Rat Race, he rates Galway and Hubbard above everyone because they "combined experience, hard work, technical genius and sheer musicality", and his own Galaforce 2 music lost out — "it was Martin Galway's soundtrack that made it into the game" (source: s-sidin04-abbott-interview).

• In sidin: richard-bayliss (2006) — "Martin Galway did amazing ambient tunes, like Insects in Space and Parallax … not to mention the title music for Miami Vice"; laxity (2007) puts Daley Thompson's Decathlon (Galway and David Dunn) among the best SIDs ever (sources: s-sidin10-bayliss-interview, s-sidin11-laxity-interview).

Hülsbeck's Bad Cat claim (1996)#

"I think I was the first programmer who made sample sounds in musics with the SID chip, but the first release 'Bad cat' from Rainbow Arts that featured 'my' trick was delayed about 3 month until the program was finished. So Martin Galway got the fame with 'Arkanoid' and his sample-like technique... but I don't want to be jealous of him... :)" — consistent with the dates already on chris-huelsbeck (Arkanoid out February 1987, Hülsbeck's sampler work unreleased until July 1987) (chip-samples; source: s-imr-huelsbeck-interview).

To verify#

• (unverified) The Ensoniq visitor Galway names "Hal Charpentier" is usually written Al Charpentier, the 6502 and VIC-II designer; the wiki keeps Galway's spelling.

Related#

rob-hubbard · jeroen-tel · sid · pulse-width-modulation · ring-modulation-and-sync · chip-samples · hard-restart · filter-programming · helikopter-jagd · commodore-zone

Sources#

s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip · s-remix64-galway-interview · s-sidmusic-galway-interviews · s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews · s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel · s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews · s-sidmusic-yannes-interview · s-commodore-64-eu-sid-chip · s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck · s-c64com-matt-gray-interview · s-charles-deenen-interviews · s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview · s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-chordian-sid-musicians · s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview · s-sidid-player-list · s-realdmx-galway-rambo-player · s-realdmx-galway-arkanoid-player · s-sidin04-galway-arkanoid · s-sidin04-abbott-interview · s-sidin10-bayliss-interview · s-sidin11-laxity-interview · s-imr-huelsbeck-interview · s-domination01-jeroen-tel-interview · s-gamesart-jeroen-tel-interview · s-rvg-matt-gray-interview · s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview · s-realdmx-ocean-dunn-hughes-driver