TW #50 — Interview with VadimVS (NOISE)
A short interview, cut off when zinc ran out of time, with vadimvs, a Russian scream-tracker-3 user who had just joined N.O.I.S.E. — one of the few voices from Russia in the archive, tracking on borrowed hardware with ripped samples.
Key claims#
- Vadim Shustov, 22, of Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk), Russia; joined N.O.I.S.E. "a couple a weeks ago" (February 1996).
- Music: some heavy, some pop, disco — "i'd never track techno/rave/etc". Listens to Metallica, Camouflage, Grover Washington, Jeff Beck, Red Flag, Joe Dassin, Yello ("Yellow"). No music lessons.
- Plans a hard'n'heavy music pack, Master Of Ceremony; one tune from it, "You're My Guest" (
vs_guest.zip), was on cdrom.com. - Tracker: "basically, it st3, of course. sometimes i use ft2 and itracker". On the tracker wars: in future only trackers with 16-bit samples and multiple instruments will survive; "st3 was at the beginning, but now… i also think that st3 will live a couple of years".
- Ratings: "a good idea … it's honour".
- The scene's biggest problem is ripping — samples and ideas. Ripping a song out of a demo to listen to later is "not so bad"; ripping the idea of a tune is "horrible". Yet "most of samples i've use is ripped from other modules. i have no money to bye a good hardware to make my own samples".
- Equipment, none of it his own: Pentium 75, 16 MB RAM, 540 MB IDE disk, Sound Blaster 16, S3 PCI graphics.
- Files:
vs_*on cdrom.com; everything atftp.bmsu.simbirsk.su:/pub/demos/music/vs_stuff. Greets N.O.I.S.E., thanks FC "for giving the Scream Tracker to the world", and Russian sceners Komis, Dr.Fa, dake, bwm, Ares, Aleks Kuzmin.
Practical takeaways#
- The 1996 consensus in one line: the trackers that survive are the ones with 16-bit samples and instruments (FT2, IT).
- Ripping samples was, for a tracker without hardware, the only way in; ripping ideas was the real offence.
Notable quotes#
- "It not so bad to rip a song from demo to listen it later, but it's horrible to rip idea of the tune." — VadimVS.
Relevance#
A data point for sample-ripping (economic necessity vs plagiarism), for the ST3 → FT2/IT transition of 1996 and for the reach of the scene into Russia; a second NOISE member after shawnm.
Pages touched#
vadimvs, noise-group, scream-tracker-3, fasttracker-2, impulse-tracker, sample-ripping, hornet, tracker-scene-history, future-crew.