My Computer Chronicles — Jens-Christian Huus / JCH (2017)

Jens-Christian Huus — JCH of Vibrants, today the wiki's chordian — tells his whole computing life from 1983 to 2000: how a Danish postman with no musical education built the C64 music editor "that has since inspired many of its offspring today", the OldPlayer/NewPlayer lineage behind cheesecutter and (via laxity) sid-factory-ii, and why he credits others, not himself, for hard-restart. First-hand, dated, and full of names; the single best source the wiki has on the jch-editor.

Key claims#

Identity: JCH is Chordian

• Byline: "by Jens-Christian Huus (JCH)", "Originally published on chordian.net - January 2017".
• At Dexion's X-Mas Conference in Odense (December 1990) he presented a new tune called "Chordian" — "I was unsure about it at first, but it became both a hit as well as one of my personal favourites. In 2006, I even decided to use the name of it as my new handle on the internet." So the SID Factory II tutorial writer chordian and the JCH of the 1980s scene are the same person.

Before the players (1983–87)

• Born 1966 in Rungsted, Denmark. First computer a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (1983, Extended BASIC only — no machine code access); the first commodore-64 bought with his father on 1984-04-02 after the shop had sold out on the first visit. Learned assembler; made Gun Fight as an exercise; joined the cracking group New Men (formed 1986 by Lars and Claus of the Copenhagen disk-swapping circuit) making intros and a demo editor.
• His ear was opened by Super Pipeline's ADSR and then rob-hubbard, who "made the SID chip warp into space age almost single-handedly" — he bought cheap Mastertronic games just for the title music.
• Spring 1987: coded his first crude music player (OldPlayer) — heavy on CPU, waveform swapping "done programmatically instead of using a flexible table". Composed on the new Amiga 500 in Aegis Sonix (his first tunes ever, no musical training), then transferred note by note on paper to the C64 via BASIC input programs; a Christmas medley took over 5 hours to write down and another 3–4 to type in.
• 1987 context: "almost everyone was using a public domain editor called soundmonitor", but "there was also an enormous prestige in using one's own player. At that time, I was among just two or three people in Denmark that could do this" (the other named: johannes-bjerregaard, "another one with a C64 music player in 1987"). Group-hopping: New Men → Galaxy (late 1987) → 2000 A.D. (February 1988) → INXS → Jewels (April 1988) → Wizax (June) → Dominators (August 1988) → Channel 42's new C64 division (1989, with Kim and Scorpio).

The Laxity episode (1988)

• Early 1988 he got a disk of laxity's tunes in Laxity's own player — "used almost no CPU time and sounded bloody great … suddenly I was passed on the inside by this rich kid in his fancy sports car. I was instantly jealous."
• He ran a reverse-engineering tool on Laxity's player, relabelled the source, and composed about six tunes in it by typing hex into the assembler listing (Laxity himself composed "by typing in hexadecimal numbers into a monitor"). At the Dexion Meeting in Nykøbing Sjælland (beginning of July 1988) Laxity told him "it wasn't a good idea that I was using his player" — "he actually did the scene a great favor."
• future-composer "had just been released at the party"; JCH made exactly one tune in it and rejected it: "Voices were not compared directly and it had always been one of my dreams that a music editor should be able to do that." Both SoundMonitor and Future Composer sounds became "trite" — the mark of groups "that didn't have access to unique music in special players".

NewPlayer and the editor (1988–91)

• Same month (July 1988) he restarted from scratch: NewPlayer, going "from a prototype version with mere bleeps to one with pulsating, arpeggio and drums using a table of waveforms, all within a sensible use of CPU time" (sid-player-routine, instrument-tables).
• The editor idea predates Amiga SoundTracker: he wanted "tracks to follow each other so that multiple voices could be compared easily", and disliked how SoundTracker's voices were "fused together in the same pattern" — his voices should follow each other while having independent sequences of any size (tracker, orderlist). This is the stacked track view cheesecutter later preserved. Ideas were sketched on register slips during his postman rounds.
• Design decisions, stated explicitly: a "consistent green look"; everything on one screen — instruments and help tables in the lower half, "another half pane popping up on a hotkey", so editing a table never leaves the notes ("out of the zone" avoidance); three voices side by side with individual flexible-size sequences.
• Version 1: November 1988, with the corner cut of "infinitely long voices". Version 2: December 1988, voice parts recoded to the flexible sequences — "a massive leap from composing directly in an assembler listing". First official tune "Revolutionary" as 1989 arrived.
• 1989 tool family: a packer ("concatenated note steps into fewer bytes with duration indicators"), a player version swapper, a relocator, and later the Delux Driver (plays packed tunes, notes lighting up an on-screen keyboard).
• Version 3: coding began December 1990 on EASS, a hardware cross-assembler by Henning Andersen (Einstein of Upfront) — source edited on the Amiga 500, compiled and dumped into C64 RAM (before that he used turbo-assembler, whose memory footprint had become the bottleneck). New in v3: follow-play ("the channels scrolling to the music"), support for quick players, tune and work clocks, a global volume, faster UI, and a "superfluous poly-play feature" (chords on the C64 keyboard). Final v3.04 (also running on SX-64 and C128) done August 1991.

Users of the editor

• ~February 1989 the startup The Electronic Generation planned Golddigger (a Boulder Dash clone): Klaus Grøngaard, Link of Cheyens, "became the first person to use my editor. At that point my NewPlayer version was 5." The company "imploded"; the music was made anyway, and Link's composing improved immediately on switching from Future Composer. Link and JCH founded Vibrants.
• He was protective — no public release, each personal copy stamped with an individual code, "I kept strict note of the users" — about half a dozen users by spring 1989, "the most noteworthy … Link, Scorpio and scarzix". Version 2 was eventually leaked, "but at that point it was kind of all right. It was old hat by then."
• Drax (Thomas, 13, from Arden) got the editor at the 2000 A.D. party in Esbjerg (end of June 1989) and "produced tunes like an assembly line … almost a thousand C64 tunes" through the early 1990s; his friend Torben (Metal) also received it (their music group: Unitech Designs). Edwin van Santen of 20CC watched Drax and JCH in the editor at the Randers party (December 1989) and mused that 20CC ought to make their own.
• September 1990: laxity joined Vibrants — "Laxity later even created a new player version for my C64 editor and admitted that it was well thought out" (the line that leads to NewPlayer 21 and, via Laxity's SID Factory, to sid-factory-ii).

Hard restart and the test bit — who invented what

• "It was Jesper [JO of Amok] who first made me aware of the technique known as hard-restart. It had previously been used by Rob Hubbard and also Laxity had figured it out." His description: the SID's ADSR retriggers unreliably, so the technique puts "zero values in the registers during the last two frames of the lifetime of a note" — slightly staccato, "but the ADSR would be rock solid", short attacks now clicking. (JCH thus does not claim the invention that SIDwave's memoir attributes to him — see s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid.)
• johannes-bjerregaard, while visiting JCH, "discovered how to use a test bit in the SID chip to reset the random numbers used internally by the noise waveform", making noise "more predictable … slightly more metallic" — the oscillator-reset trick still used in sid-factory-ii instruments. Bjerregaard's player stuck at 13 rasterlines despite his 12-line goal: "Well - I guess there are limits to everything."
• His triangle of peers: "Jesper was probably the technically most adept player coder. I had an awesome music editor. And Johannes was by far the best C64 composer."

Multispeed and samples

• August 1989: a tune processed twice per frame as an experiment — to his knowledge only Antony Crowther (Zig Zag) had tried it; he found 2× not worth the CPU and that multi-called arpeggios "never … truly sound like individual channels. They just got uglier." He later coded quick players optimised for multiple calls per frame (note data processed only on the first call) but rarely used them himself; MSK (Morten) "loved the sound" (multispeed).
• June 1991: digital samples via the $D418 volume-click trick and NMI (chip-samples); Korg M1 sounds recorded with an SFX sound sampler cartridge; first digi tune "Better Late than Never" (1991-06-23), only four in total — the editor was only "hacked" for the digi voice, "too hairy to be used by anyone else but me". His last C64 tune, "Shift", composed first on the Korg M1, ends in a surprise digital track.

Games, Vibrants, and the industry

• Vibrants was named in a phone call with Link before the PCW show in London (end of September 1989): "vibrato" + "Ants" → Vibrants ("There was never supposed to be a 'The' in front"). Drax was the third member; Deek (Richard, Scotland) and later Laxity, JO and Metal followed. Domain vibrants.dk bought 1998-03-27, site by MSK until 2006, then JCH; the server died March 2016.
• Selling music at trade shows failed ("Most of them dismissed me before I had a chance to do anything"); charles-deenen first rejected his tunes — "the English market not wanting the 'hit, snare' kind of music and that I should listen to what tim-follin had done" — then was impressed by the Push-It intro tune on the second disk; the one maniacs-of-noise overflow job was Chase HQ II / Special Criminal Investigation, where Link composed and JCH multiplexed two voices of SFX with two of music.
• Cancelled or unpaid: Tecnetium, Golddigger, Orcus (his most interesting work — a separate SFX player/editor, ring modulation imitating speech for "Get Ready" / "Game Over"), Brubaker (released without telling him). Johannes' advice: "Don't make music for private people, it usually goes nowhere." Danish work paid better: SilverRock's Super OsWald (fall 1989), Hugo (C64 and the PC version that started his AdLib career; paid in hardware — the Hugo job earned a 33 MHz 80386 PC), Guldkorn Ekspressen (1991), Harald Hårdtand (1992, Drax composing on C64, JCH converting to AdLib), and Brain Bug's Lollypop (Rainbow Arts; PC 1994, Amiga 1995 — see rainbow-arts). Su-Sweet (March 1991) was "probably the only time it really felt like a real job": deadline, release, payment.
• 1990, with Shade (Holland): a floppy-swapped SID collection "from games and demos", later dwarfed by hvsc; JCH briefly joined the HVSC internal mailing list around 2000 and admired its discipline.

PC epilogue (1991–99)

• AdLib player from November 1991: C64-style arpeggio tables, his own vibrato and modulation control ("it immediately distanced the player from almost anything that used AdLib on the PC"), a timer interrupt instead of raster sync, and his "register bypassing" invention — cache every OPL register write and skip unchanged values (opl-fm-instruments).
• EdLib, the DOS editor grown from the "Multi-Editor" prototype, used "the same sequence editing principle as on the C64", folding out only the selected one of nine channels; first version September 1993, public December 1994. Metal was the most persistent user; JO discovered "how useful it actually was to compose music in this manner instead of the assembler listing method".
• The PC scene was "a black hole" — no feedback, no reputation ("JCH? Drax? Who are those?"). fasttracker-2 from summer 1995 ("much of the same principle as my own music editors of the past, except the channels did not use separate sequences"): 28 tunes from "Memories" (July 1995) to the work tune "Sweet Kettle" (September 1998), 14 released. He stopped composing during 1999.

Practical takeaways#

• The jch-editor's three founding UI decisions — voices side by side with independent flexible sequences, every table on one screen behind a hotkey pane, follow-play — exist because a self-taught composer wanted to see harmony instead of knowing theory; this is the design DNA that cheesecutter and (by inheritance of "features and look") sid-factory-ii carry.
• A player's prestige economy: an own player meant original demo music and respect; a public editor (soundmonitor, future-composer) meant a "trite", recognizable sound. That pressure, not convenience, drove the 1987–89 wave of private players (tracker-scene-history).
• His hard-restart account is the wiki's clearest first-hand statement of both mechanism (zero the registers in the last two frames) and provenance (Hubbard used it, Laxity figured it out, JO of Amok taught JCH) (hard-restart).

Notable quotes#

"Voices were not compared directly and it had always been one of my dreams that a music editor should be able to do that."

"The hard restart technique solved the inaccuracy of the ADSR by putting zero values in the registers during the last two frames of the lifetime of a note."

"Having made a tool that other composers liked to use was a great feeling that I haven't topped with any other piece of software since."

"Jesper was probably the technically most adept player coder. I had an awesome music editor. And Johannes was by far the best C64 composer."

Relevance to the wiki#

Establishes that chordian = JCH of Vibrants (the tune "Chordian", December 1990 → handle, 2006), giving the person page its full biography. Primary source for a jch-editor tool page: version dates (v1 1988-11, v2 1988-12, v3 from 1990-12, v3.04 1991-08), design principles, tool family, the user list (Link first, at NewPlayer version 5; Scorpio, Scarzix, Drax, Metal), and the Laxity player-version handover that s-sidin-news-digest later documents as NewPlayer 21. Corrects/complicates the hard-restart origin story in s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid; confirms s-sidin14-scarzix-interview on the stacked view and early users; background for cheesecutter, sid-factory-ii, laxity, johannes-bjerregaard, goto80 (a later NewPlayer user), hvsc and tracker-scene-history.

Pages touched#

chordian · jch-editor · laxity · cheesecutter · sid-factory-ii · hard-restart · johannes-bjerregaard · rob-hubbard · soundmonitor · future-composer · scarzix · vibrato · multispeed · chip-samples · charles-deenen · tim-follin · maniacs-of-noise · hvsc · tracker-scene-history · tracker · orderlist · sid-player-routine · instrument-tables · turbo-assembler · fasttracker-2 · commodore-64 · sid · rainbow-arts · opl-fm-instruments · sound-effects