Retrogaming Planet / EmuWiki — Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2011)

The interview in which chris-huelsbeck describes his actual C64 workflow — two machines, soundmonitor then TFMX Editor, hex numbers shown as A-2/G#3 — and the idea behind tfmx's per-note script.

Key claims#

• Piano at 5 for two years ("I would rather play my own melodies"), some drum lessons; built a simple synth he called "Zarg" because real ones were too expensive; BASIC on an uncle's business computer; bought the C64 for its "real synthesizer sound chip" (nearly an Atari 800 instead; his grandmother topped up the money).
• First game music: Planet of War, for a programmer friend who "was not good with sound and music".
• The 64er contest at 16: "After Planet of War I was already improving my machine language music player and when I read about the contest, I was determined to get at least noticed by sending in a cool music piece. I never expected to win, but of course I was very happy about my prize and it helped to start my career." (shades)
• rainbow-arts at 18 gave him "a lot of freedom and a decent salary" and time "to develop cool programming tricks to get more and more out of the C64 sound chip, like the digitized drums and samples for example" (chip-samples).
• great-giana-sisters: the in-game tune "was supposed to sound a little like Reggae, because the Rainbow Arts Boss was a fan of Bob Marley", the title music (not the menu music, which many take for the title) "a homage to True Blue from Madonna".
• Workflow: "I had 2 C64, one with the programming source code and another one for the actual music creation and playback. I used my own Music Editor, the so called Soundmonitor and later a follow up called TFMX Editor to input the music data, which was a lot of numbers in hexadecimal format. For the musical notes, I had a special representation that displayed the hex numbers in a more musical readable format (like 'A-2' or 'G#3' for example). Other programs that came later, like the Trackers on the Amiga used a similar format and they may have been inspired by my earlier tools." A friend helped build "a little hardware sampler for the C64" for the digitised drums, bass sounds and SFX of Jinks, Bad Cat, Antics, To Be On Top and Giana Sisters; Rainbow Arts sponsored his first keyboard, an Ensoniq ESQ-1, for composing and previewing melodies.
• TFMX (Amiga): "The basic concept of my music tool TFMX came directly from the C64 version, specially the way a single sound was generated. I had developed a simple but powerful script language, that was run for every note played. I often used this to play very short drum sounds with a fixed pitch just before a pitched bass sound for example and it would sound like 2 channels were used at the same time, because the human brain can't keep sounds apart that are played in very short succession." Later a software mixer folded 4 virtual channels into one hardware channel for 7 in total, with help from Jochen Hippel. Some Jim Power songs use only 40 KB — "they would have fit into a C64".
• After the Commodore era he kept porting his tools to each platform; MusyX for the N64 was licensed by Nintendo; the Star Wars games meant recreating an orchestra in 16–24 channels.
• Advice (2011): determination, personal connections, a clean website, and "a solid music education is also a big plus".

Notable quotes#

"…a simple but powerful script language, that was run for every note played."

"…it would sound like 2 channels were used at the same time, because the human brain can't keep sounds apart that are played in very short succession."

Relevance to the wiki#

First-hand description of the Soundmonitor/TFMX workflow and note display (for soundmonitor, tfmx, tracker), of the sampler (chip-samples) and of the drum-then-bass trick that the wiki files under channel-interleaving and wavetable-programming.

Pages touched#

chris-huelsbeck · soundmonitor · tfmx · shades · great-giana-sisters · rainbow-arts · chip-samples · channel-interleaving · tracker · 64er