TW #60 — Faces in the Crowd: fisherman (Zinc)
zinc interviews fisherman, "who I hadn't heard of before", and closes with the column's charter: "The scene is full of faces, and unless we are as famous as [enter famous person here], we can get lost in the crowd. FITC is every musicians' chance to get his/her 15 minutes of fame ... there was a time when even Basehead was a nobody!" Zinc signs as "SE/Thought" and notes that "TraxTips #2" was still in the works while catspaw "seems to be picking up the slack".
Key claims#
- Matt Overington, 18, an Australian who had lived in Thailand for four years and was about to return to Australia for university; the "Thai tracking scene" was him and one other Australian, Cand-ice of Moonblade — "there is nobody to really talk to about tracking".
- Started about 1993 after getting a Sound Blaster and an Internet account; a friend in Australia was an Amiga tracker. Tools in order: ModEdit ("didn't EVERYONE start on modedit"), then scream-tracker-3, now impulse-tracker.
- Joined MindTap (run by Subliminal) a couple of weeks before; the group had been Subliminal's AMP ("Atomic Music Productions" — "really cheesy") and was renamed when he joined; musicdisks planned; his taste "guitar/piano/orchestral", a mellow guitar debut tune nearly finished for ftp.cdrom.com.
- On big groups: kosmic and "the late epinicion" had "a lot of respect from all the trackers in the scene"; basehead and maelcum "are famous"; a young group's problem is "trying to get famous(ish)".
- On the scene's growth: #trax "still has a 'bar-like' atmosphere, and it is really friendly"; untalented trackers "pumping out the tunes" cannot be stopped without censorship — "the skilled musicians will prevail. The unskilled ones will either improve or cease to track"; faster net access will allow bigger modules until "a standard will eventually be reached". Zinc: "the GUS PnP has a hardware limit of 8megs!"; Gravis's headquarters were "very close to where I live"; Zinc owned "just an ACE" (gravis-ultrasound).
- The trackers as fruit: FastTracker a watermelon, "hard to use (eat)"; ScreamTracker an apple, "kind of boring, but everyone loves it deep down"; impulse-tracker "a new hybrid of a pear and an apple - so new to the market, it is taking everyone by surprise".
- Approves of NAID's free-for-all compo — "it allows the tracker to shine in their own way with no limitations" (compos).
Practical takeaways#
- The mid-1996 beginner's path was ModEdit → ST3 → IT, and IT was still "new to the market".
- Module size in 1996 was bounded by card memory and modem speed; 8 MB on a GUS PnP is the ceiling quoted (see gravis-ultrasound).
Notable quotes#
- "All you really need is a computer and a net account (with access to irc :)" — fisherman, on why the scene reaches Thailand.
Relevance#
A small-scene view of the 1996 tracker world and the stated purpose of the "Faces in the Crowd" series; dated data points on GUS PnP memory and IT's reception.
Pages touched#
fisherman, zinc, impulse-tracker, scream-tracker-3, gravis-ultrasound, kosmic, epinicion, compos, traxweekly.