SIDin #1 — Luca Carrafiello (Luca/FIRE) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2002)

The first interview of sidin: Stefano Tognon asks the Italian Plus/4 scener and SID composer luca-carrafiello how someone without a SID chip came to write SID music — through converted Plus/4 editors, a SIDcard and a Plus/4 port of SIDwinder — and what he listens for in a tune. Tognon's framing: Soulfixer "is stellar - I buy a C64C recently only for listen this tune in the real 8580 chip!", and Central_Park_Loader_Y2K is "one of the Matt Gray LN2 cover very innovative".

Key claims#

• Who: "Luca Carrafiello, aka Luca of Fantastic Italian Research Enterprise (FIRE) crew", 29 in 2002, a physical-chemistry graduate starting a Ph.D. at the University of Florence; from Salerno, living beside Florence. Hobbies: Commodore, Game Boy Advance games, books, "relaxing music (Mike Oldfield, ISAN, Franco Battiato, Einsturzende Neubauten, Enya, Deep Forest, Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens...)", cycling round Florence.
• The Plus/4 route: at 14 his parents bought him a Commodore Plus/4 ("I loved its design and its Basic seemed very user-friendly") — "But after few weeks frustration started: no hardware sprites, and, most of all, no SID!" In Italy the only C16 software came as tape packs of six hacked games with "a little newspaper"; an advertisement in one led him into the Plus/4 scene "in its best moment, at the beginning of 90s: lotta crews, lotta stuff, lotta parties" and indirectly into the C64 scene. He drew logos, pictures and character sets, "but I dreamt about composing SID tunes!"
• SID without a SID: the Plus/4 has a "poor 2-voiced squarewave/noise sound"; since the end of the 1980s people converted SID data to it, one channel alternating two SID voices (the "frq converter"), and two years later "the wave converter, which plays SID files with correct waveform, volume and SR". He composed his first SIDs "on a converted version of the Future Composer V2.1" (future-composer); those tunes are in hvsc "but many of them sound really bad, 'coz on the Plus/4 I wasn't able to emulate filters, correct AD, sync, ring...".
• SIDcard and SIDwinder: "a sort of plug-and-play SID chip that allows the Plus/4 to run SID sounds"; he bought one in 1999 from its original producer and composed on "an improved FC's SIDversion"; then Levente Harsfalvi (TLC/Coroners) converted "the Taki's SIDwinder V01.23" to the Plus/4 for the SIDcard — "probably, only in that moment I'd really understood the real SID operation way, and so I had to learn again how to compose SIDs."
• Not a coder, and single-speed on purpose: "I put some LDA, STA and PLP somewhere and my Plus/4 diskmagazine popped up" — which is why "my musics are never multispeed ones: I have to use them abitually for the diskmag and can't manage a multispeed tune" (multispeed). He runs the Plus/4 LogoCompo (third edition in 2002).
• Emulators: "The real machine remains the real machine: the best emulator ever should emulates the real one at 0.999%, but never at 100%"; early emulators earned the "shitty pc clones" reputation but are "becoming something really closer"; Plus/4 digi emulation had just arrived in Minus4 V2.5 and YAPE V0.41. "Emulators are a therapy for the scene, but not the panacea."
• Worst and best: Tubular Bells II Shake took a month, runs about 13:30, and "if you listen to it on a SID, real or emulated, it plays very bad, 'cause I badly tried to use the three default filtereffects offered by the old Future Composer"; since 1999 he has "experimented very much the SID functions, just like a SID-rookie"; Soulfixer, second in the SidWine online compo, is "the very first music that made me proud", finished in a hurry with "many ideas … truncated"; "The worst? All the others, 'coz I'm learning yet alot!"
• Favourite composers: his yardstick is "a musical composition enjoyable regardless to the instruments' quality, the use of filters and other crap"; Dave Whittaker, Jeroen Tel, Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Drax, Gray — and "surprising melodies like 'Zynaps prerelease' by Nigel Grieve, 'Equinox' by Nick Jones, or 'Death or Glory' and 'Counterforce' by Jay Derrett: the cute music you don't expect!"
• Best SIDs: multispeed tunes are "a sort of 'subcategory', like digis" and deserve their own compo "instead of mixing them with 'normal' singlespeed tunes (how racist!)" — Strangers in the Flight (Drax), Gopho (Goto80) and GRG in Cyberspace (Glenn Gallefoss) "are stunning!"; the ones that took his heart: Galway's Wizball first, then last-ninja-2, Moppe's Shadow of the Beast, Tel's Cybernoid, MozicArt's Luminous, Zardax's Eldorado Part1.
• Webography: the LoneNews archive (plus4.emucamp.com/lone.htm), the Plus/4 shoot-'em-up project xeo3.com, the Plus/4 archive ftp://c64.rulez.org/pub/plus4, and HVSC's homepage of the time.

Practical takeaways#

• Judge a SID with the sound stripped away: a tune that survives poor instruments is a good composition — the same test lasse-oorni applies in the next issue ("not the technicality … but rather the melodies and the atmosphere", s-sidin02-cadaver-interview).
• Composing on a conversion or a bad emulation teaches notes, not the chip: filters, attack/decay, sync and ring modulation were all wrong until he had real hardware — test on a real sid or a good emulation (vice).
• Single-speed is a constraint of the host: a tune for a diskmag or demo has to fit whatever interrupt budget the host leaves (multispeed, sid-player-routine).

Notable quotes#

"Emulators are a therapy for the scene, but not the panacea."

"probably, only in that moment I'd really understood the real SID operation way, and so I had to learn again how to compose SIDs."

Relevance to the wiki#

Creates luca-carrafiello; documents a Plus/4 conversion of future-composer and a Plus/4 port of SIDwinder; gives the 2002 argument for treating multispeed as a compo category; adds a listener's view of last-ninja-2 and david-whittaker; a witness that not every hvsc tune was composed on a C64.

Pages touched#

luca-carrafiello · future-composer · multispeed · hvsc · last-ninja-2 · david-whittaker · tracker-scene-history · sidin

To verify#

• (unverified) The interview is OCR'd from a two-column page; names such as "Geroen Tel" and "Johnathan Coe" are the OCR's or the magazine's spellings, corrected silently above only where the person is unambiguous.