The SID Homepage — Interviews with Martin Galway (Commodore Zone 6–7, Happy Computer 11/86)

Two interviews with martin-galway reprinted on the sid-homepage: a long commodore-zone one from the mid-1990s and a short Happy Computer one from November 1986, when he was twenty and at Ocean. Together they give the origin of his driver, how he found the volume-register sample trick, which tune carried his first pulse-width sweeps, the tools he used (assembler source, Zeus 64, a C128D system, an Atari ST), the length of his epics, and his verdict on the filter.

Key claims#

Commodore Zone (issues 6 and 7)

• Start: music on the school's BBC Micro from 1983; in March 1984 he did the audio for a schoolfriend's BBC Pac-Man clone, sold it to Ocean in Manchester, and played them his BBC tunes; David Collier: "there's no market for 't BBC 'round 'ere lad, what d'yer know about the Commodore 64?" Ocean loaned him "a complete CBM 64 assembly language development system" and the source of their existing music program — "it was dreadful!" — which he nonetheless used on the Daley Thompson's Decathlon loading music, his first product. His own routine "got its first real outing on Kong Strikes Back" (sid-player-routine).
• Hardest tunes: Rastan Saga (fitting the arcade music into three channels); "Who's Johnny?" (El DeBarge) for Short Circuit — "4 weeks to program in with all those slides and copies of what the record does"; the most complex original, the Times of Lore title: "20 days just to do the guitar solos! It has a random number generator which selects different guitar solos" over an 11-minute loop that nobody listened to the end of.
• Favourite: the whole Wizball suite (title too short, "had to get onto the next thing"); least: the Green Beret title, which ZZAP! called "Galway on 45". Games he would have liked: Commando, Outrun.
• Influences: Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream for arranging, Depeche Mode, Thomas Dolby, Cocteau Twins for melodic cues; guitarists Gilmour, Ry Cooder, Brian May. Favourite C64 musicians: rob-hubbard ("he works at EA too"), then Fred Gray.
• Samples (chip-samples, sid): "I saw some utilities from the USA and picked them apart. Never would I claim to have invented that technique, I just got it published first. In fact, I couldn't really figure out where they got the sample data, just that they were wiggling the volume register, so I tried to make up my own drum sample sounds in realtime — which is the flatulence stuff that shipped in 'Arkanoid'." Arkanoid's title tune reused his Spectrum Cobra tune a year later; "After the project was in the shops I gained access to some real drum samples, and I slid those into my own custom version of the tune. The one that's in the shops is kind of a collage of farts & burps … Things were better once I got to 'Game Over'."
• Pulse-width sweeps (pulse-width-modulation, helikopter-jagd): the Helikopter Jagd title is the B-side of Limahl's Neverending Story single (a Giorgio Moroder filler), chosen by programmer Tony Pomfret while Galway was still freelancing in 1984; "It was the first tune I did pulse-width sweeps on, but didn't get released 'til after a bunch of other games had come out … The sound blew everyone away."
• Slap Fight: about 5–6 K of memory, so he copied the arcade's simple sound exactly — "my most accurate conversion". Parallax: 11 minutes, "certainly my longest at the time"; the intro is two-thirds of the tune; he wanted to mirror "the gigantic visual proportions" of the parallax effect (arrangement). Highlander and Miami Vice (1986): about a week each, delivered without sound by an outside developer; the games "appeared to sell well just because of the music". Ping Pong: only jingles, done late one night (September 1987?). Insects In Space (his last with Sensible Software): the "buzzing bees" effect at the start needed "the kind of tricks I was able to do (being a programmer)"; the tune is short for lack of ideas, not memory.
• Tools (tracking-workflow): "No, there never was an editor to make it 'easy'! It was always assembler source files"; first "some kind of really cheesy almost-BASIC Assembler", then Ocean's Zeus 64 by Crystal, then Ocean's own C128D-based system using all 128 K, then an Atari ST system that was nearly finished when he quit — he bought one, and keeps a C128D, a C128/1541, an A1000 and a 1040STF "modified to run the Ocean development system".
• After the C64: IBM PC and SNES at Origin Systems; "a nice driver on the SNES in '93" that only "ticked over"; NES and Game Boy music; audio direction and digital-audio research in the early 1990s. Touchstone (Sensible Software for Origin, 1988–89, C64 → Amiga → PC) was scrapped with him as lead programmer.
• Unreleased: only Street Hawk (cancelled just before completion; TV-show music, so not reusable).
• Best and worst memories: his name on the ZZAP! cover; "Worst memory is that damn filter! I wish they were able to fix it." (filter-programming)
• "I will never do rearrangements of those tunes on other instruments, the SID is what they're meant to be heard on."
• Previously interviewed in Zzap, Commodore User and Happy Computer.

Happy Computer 11/86

• Aged 20, "more than 30 programs" in two years (Rambo, Hyper Sports, Miami Vice); started in 1984 at school in Manchester; Ocean gave him "a C64, a datasette, and an assembler"; contract as a programmer at Ocean in February 1985.
• Method: "When I have an idea for a song, I enter every single note into the computer. This can take pretty long, if you consider a twelve minute song with three voices. To try musical ideas, I use a Seiko DS202/DS310 and a Yamaha CX5M synthesizer"; at Ocean he entered music on one C128D and played it on another.
• The C64's potential was not exhausted: "If I would write a music that uses 60KB and the whole CPU time, that would sound damn good" — in games "the music gets the smallest piece of the cake" (sid-player-routine).
• Games named: Ping Pong, Miami Vice, Green Beret, Highlander, Comic Bakery, Roland's Rat Race, Cyclone, Street Hawk (never released).
• "Rob Hubbard is the only one I pay respect to. All other musicians are second class" — for lack of programming skill or arrangement experience. Listening: Top 40, Level 42, Thomas Dolby, Prefab Sprout, Stevie Wonder, The Art of Noise, Jarre, Vangelis; ambition to work on an arcade game; wary of magazines that print what was not said.

Practical takeaways#

• Sample playback on the 6581 was reverse-engineered from "wiggling the volume register" — and the first published use was synthesised drums, not sampled ones.
• The first PWM sweeps on a C64 game tune were a 1984 freelance job; PWM was a feature to be discovered, not a given (pulse-width-modulation).
• Long-form structure on three voices: an 11-minute tune whose intro is two-thirds of its length; a random generator choosing guitar solos (arrangement).
• A composer-programmer's toolchain: assembler source, two machines (edit on one, play on the other), a hardware synth to try ideas on.

Notable quotes#

"Never would I claim to have invented that technique, I just got it published first."

"It was the first tune I did pulse-width sweeps on … The sound blew everyone away."

"Worst memory is that damn filter! I wish they were able to fix it."

Relevance to the wiki#

The origin stories of two SID techniques (volume-register samples, pulse-width sweeps) from the composer who published them first, and the dated career facts for martin-galway; also the tools of a 1980s Ocean composer for sid-player-routine and tracking-workflow.

Pages touched#

martin-galway · rob-hubbard · helikopter-jagd · commodore-zone · sid-homepage · sid · pulse-width-modulation · chip-samples · filter-programming · sid-player-routine · tracking-workflow · arrangement