TW #40 — Interview with Zalt (Psibelius)

psibelius interviews zalt, a 16-year-old Stockholm tracker who came from Atari NoiseTracker to FastTracker 2 and placed 2nd in the Icing'95 multichannel compo — a European counterweight to the North American voices of #40, with concrete complaints about FT2's MOD export.

Key claims#

• Tobias Garder, 16, Stockholm; "zalt of groove.phenomena.mistery". Psibelius's introduction: 2nd place in the Icing'95 multichannel music competition "several months ago".
• Playing with trackers for two or three years, seriously for about a year and a half. Began as a coder; a friend coded better, "so I freaked out and sat down with NoiseTracker (ataritime =) and did like 1 pattern tunes for some months".
• Tools: "ft2, god i hate st3, since i come from the atari, i used the pro and noisetracker, so screamtracker was never in my thoughts, ft2 came like a blessing." The mouse interface does not bother him — he rarely uses it, but "I can't stand the thought of 20 billion macros to remember" (compare scream-tracker-3, protracker).
• Hardware: an IBM PS/2 — "all soundcards are really expensive" for it — with only a VGA monitor and a D/A converter, so he leeches few demos or diskmags; also an Atari, a C64 and a VIC-20; "I often go to friends' places with Gravis" (see gravis-ultrasound).
• Scenes compared: Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Finland) has "many, many great trackers" and many bad ones, and a much larger demoscene; the USA has "not-so-many but very unique guys like necros, basehead, levi" (leviathan).
• The Party 5: could not afford it, but entered the compos through a friend under "music together" — Psibelius did the same with ior at ASM'94.
• On the scene: the wave "stargazer (I think) started in asm94 with walkaway, with like presamples" was fun at first but "it's really boring now, it's not so much technique"; the standard of winning tunes has risen — "more like 'real' music now, not like the old amiga 4chn pops, which I miss too"; the scene is expanding.
• Realism: fine "if it sounds real, and isn't presampled" — better than "10 patterns with one note in them"; the Walkaway style "is dying now"; 1 MB wave files disguised as mods are "like listening to a .wav". Sampled guitar chords or fingerpicking are acceptable "but not too much, and if that isn't the main thing in the tune"; he dislikes "neato chordloops" married to "awkward bass, drums and leads" (see realism-in-tracked-music, sample-looping).
• Channels: multichannel is often misused — "if it sounds strange, then just put on some 10 chnls of echo"; "a good 4chn [is] much more quality than a good mchn, because it's much more difficult to make 4chns … it's so much easier to make good tunes with 28 channels than 4."
• FT2's MOD incompatibility: "you can't be sure that it will play okay in a amigacompomachine if you've made a 4chn" — FT2 saves things like 32-channel .MOD (Psibelius) and "doesn't really say what's wrong, you have to debug everything": a friend's chiptune used sixth-octave notes "which all became Bs in the 5th" and placed about last. Both wish for "regular standard Amiga Protracker available for the PC" (see mod-format, xm-format).
• Concern: the search for fame — people write "this technothingy" instead of laid-back fusion jazz "just so he can get fanmail".
• Greets axl, lepra, sika, marwin.

Practical takeaways#

• If a four-channel entry must play on an Amiga at the party, check the note range: FT2 gives no warning when a .MOD export clamps or changes notes outside the ProTracker range, and a broken playback means a last place (see mod-format, fasttracker-2).
• Four-channel writing as discipline: extra channels invite echo padding; fewer channels force better material (see chiptune, channel-interleaving).
• Sampled loops only as seasoning, never as the tune's substance.

Notable quotes#

• "It's so much easier to make good tunes with 28 channels than 4." — Zalt.
• "It's like listening to a .wav." — Zalt, on 1 MB "modules".

Relevance#

A Scandinavian tracker's dated (December 1995) statements on the "Walkaway" presample wave, on 4-channel versus multichannel quality and on FT2's MOD export — all usable on realism-in-tracked-music, fasttracker-2 and mod-format; a rare interview with a musician working without a sound card of his own.

Pages touched#

zalt, fasttracker-2, protracker, mod-format, realism-in-tracked-music, sample-looping, gravis-ultrasound, chiptune, compos, tracker-scene-history, psibelius.