Matt Gray

British C64 composer (born May 1970 in Kent), in-house at system-3 for last-ninja-2, dominator, Tusker and Vendetta, freelance for codemasters, Thalamus, Incentive (driller), hewson, Silverbird and Dalali; he wrote his own driver, the matt-gray-player, from late 1986 and is the only C64 composer in this wiki who published its source (sources: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-vgmpf-matt-gray, s-matt-gray-dominator-source).

Career#

• ZX81 and Spectrum, then a C64 in 1985 "once I'd heard the SID chip and, specifically at that time, Ghostbusters"; hooked by rob-hubbard (One Man & His Droid, Phantom of the Asteroids) and martin-galway's Ocean loaders — "His Rambo loader is my favourite C64 tune of all time" (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• Compunet demos got him noticed ("If it hadn't been for Compunet, I would probably have never left first base"); at first he used soundmonitor and "the Ariston driver", sometimes re-optimised by game programmers "with declined quality", until the Darling brothers of Codemasters "convinced me to write my own player. Back then, there was little chance of doing games music without that skill" (sources: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-vgmpf-matt-gray).
• 1987: Mean Streak (Dalali; the programmers rewrote his player and dropped "all the modulation and pitch end routines"), Yogi Bear, Quedex (Thalamus; loader written in Soundmonitor), driller (Incentive, four weeks around the Great Storm), Fruit Machine Simulator (Codemasters), Hunter's Moon (Thalamus), Pogo Stick Olympics; November 1987 the Bangkok Knights loader in a week for Mark Cale, standing in for the departing Hubbard → an exclusive system-3 contract (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• 1988: last-ninja-2 (mid-January to early April), dominator, Tusker; 1989: Vendetta (his last for System 3, "I think the Maniacs of Noise had rolled into town by then!"), Maze Mania (Hewson), KGB Superspy, Motocross, Treasure Island Dizzy, BMX Simulator II (Codemasters); 1990: Deliverance: Stormlord II, "my last ever SID track"; then NES work for Codemasters in a driver by Gavin Raeburn (sources: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-vgmpf-matt-gray).
• Left for dance music and the record industry; in 2014 a Kickstarter, Reformation, remade about 20 tracks plus the whole Last Ninja 2 soundtrack and, as a stretch goal, "six brand new pure-SID tunes based on imagined fictional sequels" composed in the old Dominator driver, whose source he released under Creative Commons on 2014-11-26 (sources: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-matt-gray-dominator-source).

Working methods#

• "A little Casio MT-45 keyboard … to work out chords and melodies with very basic sounds", then the data typed into the assembler on a C64 with a portable TV (sources: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-vgmpf-matt-gray).
• The player "adopt[s] a sequencer approach. Rather than program every note played in sequence, it used a series of smaller sequences" (orderlist); its modulation routines "gave it my 'sound'" — a vibrato that is "a simple up-and-down pitch change" with delay, speed and depth, deeper on low notes and shallower on high ones (vibrato); a bank of sounds carried from project to project, with new drum routines added each time (instrument-design) (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• Tricks he names: in-game tunes written so that a sound effect "didn't destroy the music too much"; KGB Superspy's "rhythm elements without using a whole channel" (channel-interleaving); a cricket sound after Hubbard's Flash Gordon for Tusker; "a rhythm in 12ths with a heavy swing" and "arpeggio chords" in Treasure Island Dizzy (chord-arpeggio, shuffle-funktempo) (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• Timescales: a few days for budget games, four weeks for Driller, 14–16 weeks for Last Ninja 2 (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• Own favourites: Driller and the two Central Park tunes; proudest of the whole Last Ninja 2 soundtrack; by 1990 "slightly bored with three channels" (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).

From the other interviews (2014–2021)#

• Numbers: "about 40 SID tunes maybe 50 … late 86 until early 91"; most tracks "under 4k, often less"; Fruit Machine Simulator for £150 in an evening; Micro Machines (NES) for £300, uncredited, no royalty — "I left the games industry shortly after"; 13 tracks for Last Ninja 2 between January and May 1988 (sources: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview, s-rvg-matt-gray-interview, s-retrogamesmaster-matt-gray-interview).
• How the player came about: "I had to learn 6502 fast and the only way for me was by reading books and disassembling others code … I remember writing my code out with pen and paper, planning it before I even had an assembler"; filters avoided at first "because they often sounded very different on another machine"; edited and assembled with Ocean's Laser Genius; "everyone had their own player for a reason. A SID composer's player is like a brand of guitar" (sources: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview, s-rvg-matt-gray-interview).
• Technique in his words: the "note or chord plex" — "go very quickly between 2,3 or even 4 notes … And if you put a pulse width mod on it such as a sweep, the bubbling chord took on a life of it's own"; drums "by switching waveforms in a certain sequence. I think that was originally Rob Hubbard's idea"; "even putting a vibrato on a sound needed a mod routine"; the Bangkok Knights bass copied Sanxion's "fast bass line with a small hat on each note. That was all one channel" (sources: s-rvg-matt-gray-interview, s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview).
• Why it ended: Hewson's liquidation left Deliverance unpaid; "System 3 effectively dropped me in favour of Maniacs Of Noise, who by the way I thought were very good"; a shift job, then samplers and dance music; when System 3 re-released LN2 as Ninja Remix, Reyn Ouwehand rescored it because "there's no room for two music drivers, and Reyn couldn't work in Matt's driver" (sources: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview, s-remix64-ninja-remix).
• Habits: nights ("come 11.15 I'd be home ready to work often until 3 or 4am"); briefs of "some screenshots or maybe a storyboard"; "waiting for code compiles to hear the results"; borrowed melodies now and then (Tusker from Fulci's Zombie Flesheaters; a Yello cover cut from Vendetta); the NES port of his player for Treasure Island Dizzy (sources: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview, s-retrogamesmaster-matt-gray-interview, s-arcadeattack-matt-gray-interview).
• After: Motiv8 (Mission, Rockin' For Myself), Xenomania from 1996, a writing credit on Cher's Believe (1998); the Reformation albums 2015, 2018 and 2020 (sources: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview, s-arcadeattack-matt-gray-interview).
• Dissent: JCH finds his songs "downright boring. The sounds were absolutely not amazing"; Jammer agrees in the comments (source: s-chordian-sid-musicians). SIDId records a 1990 modification of his player by Andrew Rodger (source: s-sidid-player-list).

Rebuilt in JITT64 (2010)#

Tognon's example instruments for his jitt64 tracker include "Matt Gray's bass" — "there is a vibrato in pulse width" — and two "Matt Gray's snare drum" sounds of "fixed notes and noise waveform", the second "less hard"; the values were screenshots, but the descriptions match the matt-gray-player's pulse bounce and two-frame drum waveform (source: s-sidin13-jitt64-tracker).

SIDin #15 interview (2015): tuning, filters, samples#

• Tuning: Tognon found that his note table puts A4 at 424 Hz on PAL. "That was just an accident. I was sure I got the frequencies from the back of the C64 Reference manual. I only realized this once I started to remake them. So I've had to tune them up by 30%. Some of Galway's tracks were the same, Green Beret for instance was at 424hz." For Reformation he converts the SID sounds to samples and retunes with the fine-tune, since "sound shifter or melodyne introduces some horrible frequencies to SID sounds" (detune, c64-programmers-reference-guide; source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Player: the recoding of his first tracks by others "forced me to learn 6502 and code my own personal player. It took about 4-6 months to do that and then I refined it over the next 18 months"; "created from scratch", Hubbard's drum-table idea borrowed, a vibrato "very different to his and Martin Galway's"; "my routine didn't take much memory or raster time, no more than any of my rivals anyway" (source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Filters and the ADSR bug: no filter code until after Dominator — "I only started using them post Dominator on Vendetta … I was well aware of the filter inconsistencies"; the ADSR bug: "I was aware of it, but just kind of lived with it" (filter-programming, adsr-envelope; source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Samples: the Serpent Demo was "my first attempt at using samples and unfortunately the levels on the drums are too loud … It was 4 bit sampling using just 16 values"; the engine is on matt-gray-player (chip-samples; sources: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview, s-sidin15-serpent-demo-player).
• Tools: "I started on Electro Sound and then moved on to Soundmonitor and Rockmonitor which were both excellent. But to get your own sound you need to write your own routines I feel"; today's trackers "would have been mana from heaven to me back in the day" (rockmonitor; source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Reformation in numbers: "75K and more than 1300 backers", every stretch goal reached; the Sanxion loader remake done "in just a few days"; the driver competition drew few entries — "so many other players and trackers out there now that it didn't appeal to enough people in the end" (sanxion, dominator; source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Pop years, dated: a DJ with white-label dance tracks 1990–93; Motiv 8; Xenomania from 1996 (Dannii Minogue's All I Wanna Do entered at 4; Cher's Believe; Girls Aloud's Christmas number 1 Sound of the Underground), on and off for 18 years, left in 2014; in 2015 "already working on several games tracks" (source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Lists: worst own tunes Mean Streak or Yogi Bear, best a Central Park track of last-ninja-2 ("in the zone" tracks); Hubbard and Galway "in almost equal amount"; best SIDs the Sanxion loader, One Man & His Droid, Phantom of the Asteroids, WAR, Knucklebusters, the Rambo loader, Green Beret, Wizball, Parallax; "from a bedroom wannabe to a recognized C64 SID games musician within 18 months" (source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
• Hunter's Moon (Thalamus, 1987): Tognon credits him with the music and Martin Walker with the code, graphics and the sound-effects engine, which he reverse-engineers (hunters-moon; source: s-sidin14-hunters-moon).

His player, opened up (SIDin #14, 2015)#

• What the Reformation driver competition put in public hands: Gray's own dom6-public.asm, plus Tognon's line-by-line commented edition and an empty_public.asm template — 32 empty instruments, 166 empty patterns, 32 drum tables, 16 plex tables — written so that "a musician with no programming knowledge" can type a tune into his player. Build it with 64tass, load a.out in vice; entries had to stay in 64tass format to be accepted by Gray (matt-gray-player, dominator; source: s-sidin14-dominator-player).
• On a real 6581, twenty years on: testing a catweasel card in 2005 Tognon rated his Tusker about 75 % faithful to a C64 ("0:20-0:24: Distortion", "1:35-1:44 Arpeggio is perfect, but the long sound is distorted") and recalled that a patched sidplay2 had flagged Gray tunes as running "near the ADSR bug is some points" — consistent with Gray's own "I was aware of it, but just kind of lived with it", and with tunes that "did not make high use of filter" (adsr-envelope, hard-restart; source: s-sidin09-catweasel-6581).
• The tune he calls his favourite C64 track of all time, martin-galway's Rambo loader, is now readable as code in this wiki — its macro-language player is documented on galway-player (source: s-realdmx-galway-rambo-player).

The 2014 return, as SIDin reported it#

sidin #2 (2002) had asked "Matt! Where are you?"; #14 (2015-01-25) answered: "Matt Gray is again in the scene!! This was the dream of all sid fans, but now it is true" — the news item: "With a come back to the scene after more that 20 years, in end of 2014 Matt Gray realize a Kickstarter projects full of remixes and new sids" (Reformation), and the issue analysed "the Matt Gray editor he has released for his Reformation project" (matt-gray-player). Earlier, HVSC 5.5 (2003-12-19) had listed him among the classic composers with newly found tunes (source: s-sidin-news-digest).

Related#

matt-gray-player · driller · last-ninja-2 · dominator · system-3 · codemasters · hewson · soundmonitor · sidin · sid-player-routine · rob-hubbard · martin-galway

Sources#

s-c64com-matt-gray-interview · s-vgmpf-matt-gray · s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller · s-matt-gray-dominator-source · s-realdmx-sid-players · s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview · s-rvg-matt-gray-interview · s-retrogamesmaster-matt-gray-interview · s-arcadeattack-matt-gray-interview · s-remix64-ninja-remix · s-chordian-sid-musicians · s-sidid-player-list · s-sidin13-jitt64-tracker · s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview · s-sidin15-serpent-demo-player · s-sidin14-hunters-moon · s-sidin-news-digest · s-sidin14-dominator-player · s-sidin09-catweasel-6581 · s-realdmx-galway-rambo-player