SIDin #7 — Dustbin (Stefano Palmonari) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2005)

An interview with dustbin, the Italian composer who wrote game music for Simulmondo in the early 1990s on C64, Amiga, PC and Game Boy without formal musical training — on learning the SID from taped Hubbard and Tel tunes, on what makes composing for the SID hard (three channels, hex, no tick-level control), on the arpeggio as "the best feature invented", and with a drum recipe ripped from a Glenn Rune Gallefoss tune.

Key claims#

• Person: Stefano Palmonari, 31 in December 2004, "known in the scene as Dustbin", born in Ferrara; started "composing computer music at 15 without any specific musical knowledge: just a lot of Rob Hubbard's tunes recorded on a tape … And tons of Jeroen Tel's tunes played 24:7" — "I learned some tricks just listening"; a member of F4CG in Ferrara gave him editors such as future-composer. In 2004 he sang in a Queen tribute band, married with a two-year-old daughter; his first C64 came at 13.
• Italian game business: he names the talented Italian musicians Ivan Del Duca (modules), Paolo Galimberti, Gianluca Gaiba and Nicola Tomljanovic, and the coders Galimberti and Andrea Pompili; "the main problem were the Software Houses themselves… They wanted talented people but they didn't wanted to pay them". At 17 he finished "my first shitty-tune done in Rockmonitor", sent it to Simulmondo "more or less as a joke", and was hired (rockmonitor).
• Platforms: "we can consider Rockmonitor, on the glorious C64, as an ancestral of" the Amiga .mod; "The SID chip alows you to manage just 3 channels and you have to practice a lot on it to gain a balance between technique, ful control of the tracks and musical skil!"; for the Game Boy (Rayman) he wrote "3-tracks midi files" tested in a proprietary player, composed on a Roland; on the C64 "we have to think in hex and write something like SND.01 / DUR.0c / C-5 / SND.02 / C-4 / DUR.18 / F#4" and then handle "the arpeggio table, filter table, wave table" — every C64 editor "works keeping in mind the amount of memory, not a user friendly interface", whereas PC trackers give "ful control of every single note, at tick resolution" (tracker, game-boy). Game Boy trackers: Musicbox ("a commercial product … very difficult to use due to the hardware used: a real GB"), so compose in a PC tracker with audio emulation "like Paragon 5 Tracker". He finds Renoise "a fantastic editor/tracker" and hopes for "a realtime sid-emulation plug-in/VST".
• How a non-musician writes SID music: "I think the best feature invented is the arpeggio… You can use it 'chopped' for funky tunes" (chord-arpeggio); no workstation or soundcard "gives you that typical WARM lead sound… Maybe just a minimoog! The SID chip is unique, and every SID chip is unique (someone said 'filters' ?)". A snare "ripped from zakazazam by Glenn Rune Gallefoss": wavetable 81 41 40 80 80, arptable CE AE AC CA DE — "This data works fine with Sadotracker" (wavetable-programming). His rules: three channels "(+1, when available)"; balance technique against the channels; "Learn to use PERFECTLY one or two editors… don't waste your time trying to learn al the editors around"; "Listen to the best .sid around and try to remake it with your ears only" — as he did from tapes recorded off the TV.
• Little Sara Sisters 2: he wrote "some jingles" for Tognon's game LSS2 — "very exciting to type the good old commands in the pattern editor".
• Editors, 2004: Cybertracker and Odintracker are "user friendly and it's fantastic to see they've been developed in this years"; his preference "for some nostalgic reasons, but technical also" is Sadotracker — "the essential features are fuly present and I don't have to remember a lot of keys" (tracker-scene-history).
• Standard questions: keeps his last real C64 ("99% emulated" but "the SID chip is critical to emulate … emulating filters, for example, requires a lot of CPU and it doesn't work fine"); rediscovered Gyruss and cybernoid ("the first Tel's tune I've listened to") through emulation; 6581 "without doubts"; worst own tune the Big Game Fishing title, best Basket Play Off; heroes rob-hubbard ("who invented the profession"), jeroen-tel ("he was already musician at age 0" — "my music hero") and martin-galway; best SIDs: sanxion's tape-loader music, Cybernoid's title and Wizball's soundtrack ("the best game ever made on the C64").

Practical takeaways#

• A two-table drum written down: waveform 81 41 40 80 80 (noise, gated pulse, pulse off, noise, noise) with a pitch row CE AE AC CA DE — the noise/tone/noise shape every SID snare shares, here in Sadotracker's table format.
• Learn one editor completely, and copy the classics by ear — the study method behind a non-musician's professional SID work.

Notable quotes#

"I think the best feature invented is the arpeggio… You can use it 'chopped' for funky tunes."

"Learn to use PERFECTLY one or two editors… don't waste your time trying to learn al the editors around."

Relevance to the wiki#

Creates dustbin; a working composer's view of rockmonitor and future-composer as entry tools, of chord-arpeggio as the SID's defining feature, a sourced table drum for wavetable-programming and a 2004 snapshot of native editors (Sadotracker, Cybertracker, Odintracker) for tracker-scene-history; a link between Italian game music and modules.

To verify#

• (unverified) Which of the names in the snare recipe are Sadotracker's own column semantics (whether CE AE … are absolute notes, relative offsets or something else) is not explained.
• (unverified) Little Sara Sisters 2 is described only as Tognon's game ("Thanks to you, the coder"); release details are not given.

Pages touched#

dustbin · rockmonitor · future-composer · chord-arpeggio · wavetable-programming · tracker-scene-history · sanxion · cybernoid · jeroen-tel · modules · sidin