Trixter (Jim Leonard)

Of hornet (trixter@mcs.com). In traxweekly he wrote the two sharpest corrections in this wiki's set: that "a chord isn't a 'thing', it's any combination of notes" and every piece of music has them (#40, source: s-tw039-chord-theory-debate), and that a tracker pan position plays on both sides — P3 is ~80 % left and 20 % right, only full pans are one-sided, P0 + PF = mono (#56, source: s-tw055-panning-debate).

For hornet he answered the January 1996 ratings argument: the Demonews stars are "a service" and "completely subjective", fewer than 10 songs of thousands ever got five, and the raters are "other musicians and composers". He also corrected a gravis-ultrasound myth — extra channels cannot be pushed through the GF1 by uploading several streams ("not even a Pentium is that fast"), and the GUS MAX's 48 kHz part is a daughterboard that behaves like a plain stereo DAC — and insisted that techno is "practically governed by" theory, rhythm being taught in the first theory class (source: s-tw044-hornet-ratings; see rhythm-and-groove).

"4Channel Lives On" (#33, November 1995, a mail signed "Jim Leonard (Trixter / Hornet)") answered a correspondent who called Amiga MODs obsolete: "More channels does not necessarily mean better music. Less channels, however, does mean that you need more technical skill"; Nuke/Anarchy made better four-channel music than many 1995 PC musicians; the four-channel compos still held at Assembly and The Party "require more skill", and the 20-minute-chip-compo is the current fashion in "bare-metal" tracking (source: s-tw033-4channel-lives-on; see mod-format, channel-interleaving).

Related#

hornet · stereo-panning · diatonic-chords · rhythm-and-groove · gravis-ultrasound · mod-format · 20-minute-chip-compo · channel-interleaving

Sources#

s-tw039-chord-theory-debate · s-tw055-panning-debate · s-tw044-hornet-ratings · s-tw033-4channel-lives-on