SIDin #9 — Nata (Stephan Parth) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2006)

Tognon's interview with nata, "a very young and active Italian composer" who started SID music in 2003 and composes in goattracker — a portrait of the mid-2000s cross-composing scener: GoatTracker 2.2 with reSID interpolation, an MMC64 to test on the real machine, an 8580 preference and a list of favourite scene composers.

Key claims#

• Who: 22 in January 2006, living "in a small village called Naturns in Italy"; no job at the time, trained in advertising but "fed up with everything that has to do with that". First computer seen: his brother's C64 in 1989 (Nata was 6), soon sold; later his own C64-II, a 1541-II and a green monitor.
• Why SID: "I simply had to recognize that I don't get happy me with today's commercial music. I have always liked raw synthesizer sounds, but until 2003 there was no way to start composing." Learning the chip was "rather hard … since I had no idea how the SID chip works. But now it's pretty easy and I'm always surprised what is possible to squeeze out from it."
• Hardware: an MMC64 — "This way I easily can test my music, play games and listen to the HVSC. Unfortunately the BIOS has no save/load routines and only a simple Sidplayer." (commodore-64, hvsc)
• Editor: "At the moment I compose with GoatTracker 2.2 (Yes it's cross-composing) since it offers nearly everything I need. Cadaver was very generous and implemented a lot of features that I requested" (lasse-oorni). On the objection that it does not run on a real C64: "the truth is there is hardly any difference. You just have to use 8580 emulation and reSID interpolation turned on. Even them most people don't know that some of the today's best composers like Hein, Jammer and Randal use GT." He had tried C64-native editors — "Voicetracker, DMC, JCH…" — "but they were simply too hard for me – first choice was GoatTracker." (tracker)
• Projects: a first music collection of about 8 tunes ("own songs, remixes and some covers") to be released by his group Samar Productions; "a nice Stereo-SID tune (Yes, 6 SID channels!!!)" made in summer 2005 and still unreleased; a tune for the HVSC crew's 10th anniversary; one for the diskmag Attitude; more "1:1 covers of some SIDs I like" with filters fixed for the 8580.
• Emulator vs real: "There isn't much difference between an emulator and a real machine. I quite often use Vice (CCS64 SID emulation is too inaccurate)" — VICE also runs IDE64-fixed games from the desktop, simulates a REU and switches SID models; games with friends on "the real thing" (vice).
• 6581 vs 8580: "I prefer the 8580. It's a heavily improved SID, but unfortunately the most old game tunes sounds very bad on it. There are some tunes (Ghouls 'n' Ghosts – subtune 6, The Last Ninja – subtune 9 and some more) around, which use some odd filter settings that aren't audible on a new SID. On the other hand the 8580 has very nice waveform combinations and filters that are accurate." (sid, filter-programming)
• Own tunes: everything in c64music\VARIOUS\M-R\Nata\Early_Tunes is "really worse (except maybe 'Nata is Back'. It's a bit experimental)"; favourites Stargate ("done in GoatTracker 2.0 Beta … quite a simple structure but is finest trance-techno … THE FIRST song that has been released with the improved GT system") and Sentimentale Tc-Mix (based on Sentimentale and Sentimentale 8580; "The techno part starts at 00.33 min.").
• Favourite composers: game composers chris-huelsbeck, Tim Follin, martin-galway, jeroen-tel, rob-hubbard — "But I like music of scene musicians much more": Cane, DOS, Jeff, Jammer, Randall, Hein Holt, Reed, _V_, Welle: Erdball / Honey. Favourite SIDs (no order): Aurora (PseudoGrafx), Dancesque (TBB), Draxish (Taki), Smilygirl (Chubrock), Yes Comment (Tomas Danko), Psy Six (_V_), Timmy-Boy (Tim von Straaten), Nicht schlecht (Stephan Schmid), Dutch Breeze: Soft and Wet (reyn-ouwehand), Selfemade.exe.amj (AMJ), Shades (chris-huelsbeck), Foatee (Jammer), Higher State of SID (Cyberbrain), Reanim8ed (The Syndrom), Phronk (Nebula), Gliding (Kristian Røstøen); Cane's Brainball-Game is his top favourite but "isn't in the HVSC (and probably it never will be), since it bugs after some minutes". "The probably BEST SIDs": Guerrilla War (jonathan-dunn), Wizball (Galway), The Last Ninja (Ben Daglish & Anthony Lees), Aerobics (Bill Mauchly), Rainbow Islands (Jason Page), R-Type (Hülsbeck & Ramiro Vaca), IK+ (Hubbard).
• Wishes: "GoatTracker 64 [The C64 version of GT]", writing music for a C64 Zelda or Bomberman, his own C64 music group, "SID music forever ;-)". Contact given as natac64 [sid] web.de; "my first interview!".

Practical takeaways#

• The 2006 recipe for composing on a PC without sounding wrong on hardware: GoatTracker with 8580 emulation and reSID interpolation on, then test on a real C64 — an MMC64 makes the round trip cheap (goattracker, tracking-workflow).
• Old 6581 tunes with extreme filter settings can go inaudible on an 8580 (his examples: Ghouls 'n' Ghosts subtune 6, The Last Ninja subtune 9); when covering them for an 8580, re-fit the filter (filter-programming, sid).
• His listening list is a ready-made study set of mid-2000s scene SIDs.

Notable quotes#

"You just have to use 8580 emulation and reSID interpolation turned on."

"SID music gives me everything what I need for my life – it's simply the BEST MUSIC around the world."

Relevance to the wiki#

Creates nata; adds a working composer's GoatTracker settings and an 8580 verdict with named examples to goattracker, sid and vice; MMC64 as test hardware for commodore-64; a second SIDin voice (after s-sidin08-eeben-interview) on emulators versus real machines.

Pages touched#

nata · goattracker · sid · vice · commodore-64 · hvsc · lasse-oorni · filter-programming · sidin