TW #3 — Interview with Chuck Biscuits (Epeius)

Epeius's first assignment for TraxWeekly: an interview with Chuck Biscuits of the Australian demogroup Heretics (formerly iCE and the ANSI group DiE), contributor to the Australian musicdisk expOZe.

Key claims#

• 17, Brisbane university student; nick from the ex-drummer of Danzig. Writes mostly techno ("a freak for analogue synthesisers") plus laid-back guitar tracks and blues; about 60–70 tracks on disk, 15 released, some on Aminet (/mods/8chan).
• Tracker history: started on PC with Scream Tracker 2.25 — to make .mod files you tracked in ST 2.25, ran a converter that turned the ST2 volume byte into a ProTracker Cxx command, then fixed instrument names with an editor like MFED (which "would nuke any notes higher than C-4"). Gave up, came back for FastTracker 1 ("really easy to use, fast", 8 channels, good on a Sound Blaster 1.05), then moved to a Gravis Ultrasound where FastTracker was no option. Got scream-tracker-3 3.01b early from Psi and Gore on IRC and stayed there: ST3.20 and 3.21 were "mercilessly buggy (crashes galore)" on his GUS MAX (fine on an old v2.2 GUS), although their panning, fine vibrato and glissando control were welcome. Tried fasttracker-2 "but just cant get back into it, even with 16-bit samples and volume envelopes".
• Four years of high-school music classes, guitar in bands, trombone in regional brass bands.
• Admires basehead ("showing us all how trance/ambient can be done through trackers"), necros and Mellow-D (composition and riffs), Cybelius (guitar tracks from a tracker); says the best ProTracker modules are "really, really, good" but of limited appeal.

Practical takeaways#

• Texture: the small extra details that fill out a mix are what techno often lacks; playing in a brass band taught him to hear them.
• Set volume levels: "having everything at the same volume level can sound pretty tacky and amateurish".
• The Australian scene of 1995 was too small for compos; game soundtracks were the aspiration.

Notable quotes#

• "in new versions you were supposed to fix bugs and add features, not fuck features and add bugs" — on ST3 3.20/3.21.

Relevance#

A first-hand account of the 1993–95 PC tool chain (ST 2.25 → MOD conversion, FT1 on Sound Blaster, ST3 on GUS) and of ST3's version stability; two mixing rules of thumb.

Pages touched#

scream-tracker-3, fasttracker-2, basehead, necros, future-crew.