Remix64 — An Interview with Martin Galway (Neil Carr, 2001)

Neil Carr's e-mail interview with martin-galway for the remix community site Remix64, dated 2001-03-28, when Galway was Audio Lead on Freelancer at Microsoft's Magic Anvil studio. Mostly about taste, remixes and career, but it contains his own list of what he liked and disliked about the sid — the filter, the "school band effect" of certain ADSR settings, and the feeling of never having exhausted the chip — and his verdict on his Arkanoid samples. Newman's "I wouldn't have minded having a go with his software and doing music in my style with his percussion" quote (s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip) comes from this interview.

Key claims#

• Profile box: real name Martin Galway, born 1966-01-03, British. Carr's intro cites Chris Abbott's line that Galway "could make the SID chip sing" and names Parallax, Wizball and "the famous Ocean loader".
• Composers he liked: rob-hubbard and Fred Gray. Tunes by others: Thing On A Spring, Monty On The Run and commando — the latter "not a sonically true copy of the original, but a completely different funky arrangement which I thought was a very efficient way to solve the problem and get bang for the buck"; jeroen-tel's Cybernoid 2 theme; Fred Gray's Bounces; in hindsight the Tai Pan pieces by "Peter" at Ocean. The tunes he would have liked to write "are usually Rob's!!!" — really he wanted Hubbard's program "to get all that percussion"; he imagines swapping drivers for a game, or both drivers on one tune "heavily pounding the poor ol' SID chip".
• His own tunes: no single favourite; the Wizball title "has a great sound but doesn't last long enough" — length is "the biggest trait of all my tunes that I'd like to improve"; the Arkanoid title "needed better drums of course but had a great heavy quality"; Short Circuit "probably my most accurate pop cover. It took 4 weeks to put in the data"; the unreleased Street Hawk title (an adaptation of Tangerine Dream's TV theme; the game was cancelled) "has quite a few nice sonic textures, as the various types of SID sounds are exploited together". Other unreleased music: the rejected Microprose Soccer loader, a cover of ELP's Fanfare for the Common Man — "a cover of a cover". Street Hawk survives only on a cassette; the code sits inside his Atari ST development system and "should become a proper recording and a .SID file at some point".
• Style: "I wasn't trying to be different from the rest, because frankly, I was one of the earliest composers! I tried to exploit different features of the SID chip first, and this helped paste over cracks in my composing abilities." He preferred "a sound design bent, rather than a percussive, dance-able feel" because he "always liked analogue synthesisers"; asked to describe it: "I allowed the SID to show how beautiful, flowing and smooth its tones could be". He wanted "to create sounds that hadn't been heard before. For example the very beginning of the title screen music on Rambo: First Blood Part Two." Covers and originals were "about equal in preference"; on originals he often "ran out of juice quite quickly" (Wizball title, Insects In Space title). The weaknesses of most tunes: "lack of polyphony and lack of development time … Most were pushed out the door as soon as they were typed in".
• Likes/dislikes of the SID (the technical core of the interview):
  1. "The filter of course." He once met "Hal Charpentier" (visiting Origin on behalf of Ensoniq), who recalled that the sound chip was bob-yannes's work, that "they had hardly any time to work on that part of the SID", and that the team thought they were adding "such esoteric capabilities — in the name of a long feature list for Jack Tramiel — that no-one would ever use all those things to the fullest, so they never debugged them. (Well as we know now, BOY were they wrong)".
  2. "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 called it the school band effect and simply had to stay away from certain ADSR settings, which was a drag sometimes on original works." (adsr-envelope, hard-restart)
  3. "I liked the feeling that I had never exploited every possible thing about the SID. I'd just have to keep going and improving. As it happened, I ended up getting burned out and resigned, disillusioned."
• Samples (Arkanoid): they "added a lot"; "I wished I'd had access to some sampler equipment, and indeed a little (or any) knowledge of sampling theory … As it was, my samples sounded like farts and burps." (chip-samples, sid)
• Career: left Ocean over pay, overwork and the offices ("no A/C"); then Sensible Software, then Origin; Amiga music in 1990 that never shipped; PC work on Strike Commander and Wing Commander 2; Game Boy, NES and SNES games at Origin. In 2001: Audio Lead on the PC game Freelancer at Magic Anvil — "instead of creating all the audio, I merely tell other creative individuals what to do". Modern game music is "too obsessed with being like a film"; "Catchy tunes will prevail." Tools he names in 2001: Gigasampler, iMuse, DirectMusic, EA's Pathfinder; the bottleneck is that studio heads "low-ball the amount of programming time … given to sound and music".
• On remixes: fine with remakes and expansions ("Jogeir did a couple like that"); Instant Remedy's Comic Bakery and Wizball – Catellite Lives were on repeat; a good cover "should showcase his selected elements from the original music in such a way as to allow his contribution and skills to be obvious. If he simply does a copy, there is not that much creativity, or point!" He was uneasy that copyright holders "are not being consulted" for free MP3 arrangements. Plans for new music: "more like film music … Less plinky-plonky, blippy-bloppy-catchy."
• "I'm just a normal guy who was in the right place at the right time back in 1984."

Practical takeaways#

• A composer's-ear description of the SID envelope bug: notes that "play too early" with long attack/decay values — the reason old drivers avoided certain ADSR combinations and modern ones use hard-restart.
• Galway's sound-design-first approach — exploit one chip feature per project (pulse-width-modulation, ring modulation, samples) and let it carry the tune — is a workable strategy for anyone with more synthesis interest than composing confidence.
• His self-criticism is a checklist: tune length, drums, time to revise before release.

Notable quotes#

"I tried to exploit different features of the SID chip first, and this helped paste over cracks in my composing abilities."

"Certain ADSR settings totally screw up and play too early … I called it the school band effect."

"As it was, my samples sounded like farts and burps."

Relevance to the wiki#

Primary testimony from one of the two composers whose drivers Newman treats as the template of SID music; adds the filter, the envelope bug and samples from the composer's side, plus dates, works and career facts for martin-galway.

Pages touched#

martin-galway · rob-hubbard · bob-yannes · commando · jeroen-tel · sid · adsr-envelope · hard-restart · filter-programming · chip-samples · pulse-width-modulation · chiptune