Zalt (Tobias Garder)

aliases Zalt, Tobias Garder, zalt / groove.phenomena.mistery
created 2026-08-30 · updated 2026-08-30

Sixteen-year-old Stockholm tracker ("zalt of groove.phenomena.mistery"), 2nd in the Icing'95 multichannel music compo, who came from Atari NoiseTracker to FastTracker 2; interviewed by psibelius in traxweekly #40 (December 1995). The single source for this page is that interview (source: s-tw040-interview-zalt).

Facts#

  • Started as a coder; switched to one-pattern tunes in NoiseTracker on the Atari; tracking seriously for about a year and a half by December 1995. Also owns an Atari, a C64 and a VIC-20; his IBM PS/2 had no sound card ("only a VGA monitor and D/A converter"), so he used friends' Gravis cards.
  • FT2 user who "hates" ST3 — Pro/NoiseTracker habits made FT2 "a blessing"; likes having the mouse but rarely uses it.
  • Positions: a good four-channel tune is worth more than a good multichannel one ("so much easier to make good tunes with 28 channels than 4"); multichannel is misused for "10 chnls of echo"; presampled "Walkaway"-style music (Stargazer, ASM'94) had become boring; 1 MB modules are "like listening to a .wav"; sampled guitar chords are acceptable only as a minor ingredient (see realism-in-tracked-music, chiptune).
  • Warned that FT2's .MOD export cannot be trusted on an Amiga compo machine — a friend's chiptune with sixth-octave notes "all became Bs in the 5th" and placed last; wished for a real Amiga protracker on the PC (see mod-format).
  • Could not afford The Party 5 but entered its compos jointly with a friend.

fasttracker-2 · protracker · mod-format · realism-in-tracked-music · chiptune · compos · psibelius

Sources#

s-tw040-interview-zalt

source file wiki/entities/zalt.md · graph