Rockmonitor
The scene's unofficial extension of soundmonitor with a sampled drum track, made by The Dutch USA-Team in 1987: "Dutch USA-Team take Soundmonitor from Chris Hülsbeck … and adds a digi-drum routine to it, so you can edit a drum track to your music. 5 versions are made, and then some other group takes over, and makes it into 6 versions in the end. But it never goes polyphonic" (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid). VGMPF dates it to April 1987, "to Hülsbeck's chagrin at the time" (source: s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx).
Facts#
- Lineage: Rockmonitor II by Marco Swagerman & Oscar Giesen (1987), based on Soundmonitor 1.0 with a "Digital channel"; Digitronix by RAB (Ronald A. Brockmann)/The Lightning Duo built on it — dated 1987 by the tracker-history lineage (whose entry marks the exact date "undefined") but 1988 by SIDId; unresolved, kept as an attributed disagreement (sources: s-soundmonitor-lineage-wikis, s-sidid-player-list) — — "by using 4bit samples instead of eight and 'mixing' them on the NMI you had 2 channels of samples and 3 channels of SID" (source: s-soundmonitor-lineage-wikis). C64-Wiki.de: "similar keyboard control" to Soundmonitor plus samples; CSDb users confirm it was a modified Soundmonitor (sources: s-soundmonitor-lineage-wikis, s-csdb-soundmonitor-and-shades).
- The idea came via The Banana's IBM Music 17, which put Funky Drummer samples under a SID tune and mixed two drums at once; well-known Rockmonitor tunes by Cavi/Commando Frontier, Future Freak of Dexion and OPM's Rockmonitor 2 demo tune ("this is the Rockmonitor twooooo!") (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
- By late 1987 "most of the scene are stuck with Soundmonitor/Rockmonitor as their tool" (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid). matt-gray: "Soundmonitor and Rockmonitor, godsends at the time"; Tognon notes Gray used "RockMonitor 2/3 and MusicMaster" before his own player (sources: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview, s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller).
Hülsbeck's verdict (SIDin, 2004)#
- Asked whether he had shared or sold the Soundmonitor source, given that "Rockmonitor 2/3 by Dutch USA-Team is a modified version of your player": "No, the Rockmonitor was a hack / reverse engineered by those guys. Back then I was a bit mad about them, but not anymore..." (source: s-sidin05-huelsbeck-interview).
- dustbin (Stefano Palmonari) got his job at Simulmondo at 17 with "my first shitty-tune done in Rockmonitor", sent "more or less as a joke"; looking back from 2004 he calls Rockmonitor "an ancestral" of the Amiga
.mod(source: s-sidin07-dustbin-interview).
- Gray's order of editors, 2015: "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" (source: s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview).
Related#
soundmonitor · chip-samples · tracker-scene-history · chris-huelsbeck · matt-gray
Sources#
s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-soundmonitor-lineage-wikis · s-vgmpf-soundmonitor-tfmx · s-csdb-soundmonitor-and-shades · s-c64com-matt-gray-interview · s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller · s-sidin05-huelsbeck-interview · s-sidin07-dustbin-interview · s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview · s-sidid-player-list