TW #55 — Interview with Clef (Catch 22, ex-Epinicion)
zinc interviews clef, a 17-year-old Australian pianist, coder and chiptune specialist — twice a 20-minute-chip-compo winner, author of the menu chips on the epinicion disks, winner of the 16k music compo at OZ'96 — who went from ModEdit to scream-tracker-3 to impulse-tracker while refusing FT2's mouse.
Key claims#
- Phil Sweeney, 17, Australia; year 11 at school, fast-food job, "I also code a lot". Groups: Catch 22 ("little ozzie demo group") and a demo group still forming; "I used to be in Epinicion until it ended".
- Works in short bursts: songs are "never tracked in one sitting (except for little chip tunes.. and those 20mc's)"; melodies come in boring classes and are jotted as note names or as dots spaced up and down in schoolbooks; many songs or fragments are written on the piano. (Zinc: some people memorise melodies in tracker notation,
C-4 64.) - Training: organ with a teacher from about age 5, then piano — AMEB grade 7 — and a little drums. Listens to most music, techno and alternative included, "not gabber".
- Entry: a relative's home-built D/A converter and ModPlay, with Blood Money and Echoing among his first MODs; he built his own D/A, got a modem, made "crap" tunes in ModEdit, joined Epinicion and "did some good chip tunes"; psibelius and Ior encouraged him.
- Chiptunes: "you don't have to worry so much about samples", they are small, and "I like optimizing stuff like code, and the same with chip tunes". Entered the 20mc "a few times" and won twice; wrote all the menu chips for the Epinicion disks.
- Tools: "I started seriously writing MODs with Scream Tracker 3 as soon as it came out"; hated FT2's mouse interface and new keys; now Impulse Tracker — "just like ST3 but better… It also plays better on my SB16"; buying a GUS PnP when his father visits the US in April 1996, after which making his own samples becomes possible.
- Recent: OZ'96 in Sydney — "maybe not your average NAID but I met all these people"; won the 16k music compo (multichannel result unstated); 6th in Music Contest 3 rookie. Writing a Music Contest 4 tune with guitar sounds, an instrument he has never played. Tries not to write "boom-ttsss boom-ttsss music".
- Web
http://www.srl.rmit.edu.au/phil. Would plug an iceberg hole with "Heizann… for all those wonderful 20mc's"; Zinc once came last in a 20mc. - Predictions: MIDI takes over, or "AI Tracker"; people abandon chip tunes for "4096 channel songs"; worst case "Someone will make a Win95 tracker! erk!"
Practical takeaways#
- Chip tunes as an optimisation discipline; menu chips for musicdisks as the working chiptune genre of 1996.
- Capture melodies away from the computer in any notation, tracker rows included.
- IT as the ST3 user's upgrade path and its better Sound Blaster playback (see impulse-tracker).
Notable quotes#
- "I like optimizing stuff like code, and the same with chip tunes." — Clef.
- "The worst thing: Someone will make a Win95 tracker!" — Clef, April 1996.
Relevance#
A chiptune specialist of the 20mc era with a documented Australian party (OZ'96, a 16k compo), the ST3 → IT migration with its reasons, a dating clue for Epinicion's end (before April 1996), and workflow notes on capturing ideas away from the keyboard. Clef also interviewed jase in #22 (TOC).
Pages touched#
clef, chiptune, chip-samples, 20-minute-chip-compo, compos, epinicion, impulse-tracker, scream-tracker-3, fasttracker-2, gravis-ultrasound, tracking-workflow, psibelius, zinc.