TW #15 — Interview with Claim (Gator)

Gator's "Interview 'Wiff Claim": a 19-year-old coder-musician of defiance and Lithium who started tracking seriously the week fasttracker-2 came out. The first issue with a categorised contents list ("Interviews" as a section). Some joke questions are left out.

Key claims#

• 19, turning 20 on 3 August (1995); e-mail claim@ikaros.pei.edu; "still working on developing my style" — wants to do trance.
• Influences: karl-* ("I really like karl-*'s stuff"), basehead "on occasion", the first Laite releases ("they get old fast"), dac, and Cosmic of RR (Radical Rhythms).
• Path: tried writing songs on an Apple IIgs ("back in the day"; he liked FTA's demos and made musicdisks on the GS); on the PC "ModEdit and Kingmod … the oldies"; then scream-tracker-3, which "kinda blew" on his cheap Sound Blaster Pro clone — "I could choose either mono or stereo with swapping (which drove me crazy)"; then FT2 came out "and I started doing stuff right away". Tracking seriously "since like the first week ft2 came out".
• Thanks "the guys at triton responsible for FT2 … I know a lot of people hate it but I realise how hard they worked to try and put in all the features people always wanted".
• Groups: Defiance as a coder "sort of" — nothing released yet because "the group like totally changed and was reorganizing"; with Cerulean and Peri (perisoft, "sv boy") he intends "to bring it back to leetness"; Lithium, where Benzel is the main coder — one song delivered.
• Coding: BASIC from about age 10, much 65816 assembler (the IIgs), C on the PC, x86 assembler since January 1995; writes "100 % asm" except tools in C; plans intros, games, demos. Possible work for Progressive Media (arcade-style games, "not another 3d-buy-a-pentium-with-12megs game") and a 3DO company run by Jason Andersen (ex-Visual Concepts, ClayFighter).
• Made background tiles for the traxweekly web site with Fractint and DeluxePaint II Enhanced — "It made me happy though to contribute something to the scene".
• Scene: the "FC fixation" bugs him — "there are a lot of really rad groups working their butts off" while people still ask whether future-crew will make more demos; the demo scene "is going to go mainstream soon"; the music scene has "1205473109571 little groups", which is fine: trackers let everyone express themselves and "just give our songs out to everyone and anyone … can you imagine if real musicians did that".
• Greets: kosmic, Defiance, Lithium, Radical Rhythms, Mazurka, PURE, EMF, Complex, Triton; personally AMBER!, Karl-*, ae, CoN, Trif, _mozart, mrdata--.

Practical takeaways#

• Your tracker choice can be decided by your sound card: ST3's mono-or-swapped-stereo on an SB Pro clone drove him to FT2 (stereo-panning, s-tw012-advanced-tracking-tips for ST3's GUS-only panning).
• FT2's feature set in 1995 was polarising ("a lot of people hate it") — the reasons are on fasttracker-2.

Notable quotes#

• "I realise how hard they worked to try and put in all the features people always wanted." — Claim, on Triton and FT2
• "Can you imagine if real musicians did that.. NO! it's nice.. I mean you should want to share." — Claim

Relevance#

A first-week FT2 adopter's reasons, the SB Pro clone problem with ST3, Defiance's mid-1995 rebuild, and a June 1995 date for TraxWeekly's web site.

Pages touched#

claim, defiance, perisoft, fasttracker-2, scream-tracker-3, triton, future-crew, kosmic, basehead, tracker-scene-history, traxweekly.