BW: How central to your world is the SID chip? Is it really that legendary?

CM: Yeah it’s massive! I think for any chip artist it’s the main attraction. The thing with the SID chip is it has areas that were undocumented and left untapped – until people started messing around with them. Also, the thing that set it apart from a lot of the competition is that it had filters. Plus it had a resonant filter so you could get two channels to interplay and do some really amazing stuff. You’d get these crazy complex-sounding instruments that you couldn’t get on other machines. The filters also have a certain quality to them. Of course they’re extremely lo-fi, but to be able to program filters when other machines could only give you a square wave and a bit of noise was pretty revolutionary for the era. There are two revisions of the SID chip as well – the 6581 and the 8580. The thing is you can play something on one and take it to the other and it will sound completely different. One was a very rounded yet harsh sound, while the other produced a smoother, finer, brighter sound. The filters worked in completely different ways as well. You could take a track from one machine to another, and where one would be playing a filter, the other would almost go to silence. Then, between the Commodores there were different revisions of electronics – different suppliers of capacitors and what-not. All that leads to a slightly different sound with each revision.

BW: What’s the ultimate Commodore 64 for the music you’re creating?

CM: Well it depends on what you’re writing. I’ve found that playing with the Gameboys for example, you can write a track on it and then flip it across to another revision of the same device and things just aren’t quite the same. It’s quite bizarre how much personality different machines have. Even something like the Commodore Amiga; there’s the Amiga 500, and then the Amiga 1200 which is sample-based, and they’ve each got totally different qualities – from revision to revision.

BW: There’s no Atari ST or STE here I notice. There’s no need for those?

CM: I don’t want to mention the Commodore/Atari war.

BW: There’s a war?

CM: Well, we quietly smile about it now, and to Atari’s credit they’ve got some really good editing software for their YM chip in those machines. What you’ve got to remember is that the Atari was designed to act as a sequencer at the centre of a studio. So on top of the cost of the computer, you’d need your DX7, your Dr. Rhythms, a mixer etc. Then before you knew it you’d spent 20 grand on equipment to make anything happen. So as far as I’m concerned the musical capabilities of the C64 far outweighed the Atari. The Atari became a central hub in MIDI studios thanks to its built-in MIDI ports but as a standalone machine it actually has a kind of cool synthesiser in the YM series chip. It’s a Yamaha chip and it has a really great sound, and you can do quite a lot with it, it’s just not quite as inspiring as the SID chips.

But then there’s the Atari 2600 games machine. They actually have a great sound to them. The cool thing about the Atari 2600 is you can get yourself an EPROM programmer and program your own chips. You rewrite an EPROM, take your 2600 cartridge and modify a few components, put the EPROM into the cartridge and the 2600 will read the EPROM and load your new code straight into the machine. This stuff is cheap and available on eBay, whereas only 10 years ago it was all pretty expensive.

POWERED BY THE GRID

BW: I have to say I’m totally bemused as to how you write music on these things. How do you go about composing? What do you sequence with for instance?

CM: There is a ton of software for each platform but most use tracker-based software. There’s no real ‘sequencing’ capabilities as such. A tracker interface is a cross between a MIDI event list and a spreadsheet, so there’s a row for every tick, and the columns contain the note and a selected effect. An ‘effect’ is anything from a pitch bend, to some kind of modulation, through to arpeggiated chords. The commands vary between software programs, but once you get the hang of tracking, jumping platforms is easy. Tracking is a surprisingly efficient way of writing music because the parts within a chip, usually four or less, are only a quick key-press away. With most tracking software you’ll get every note, every instrument and every controller displayed on the one screen, which can make things much more intuitive than you’d initially imagine.

BW: But obviously there are some limitations to consider?

CM: Absolutely. That’s where the fun begins. The main limitation, apart from the incredibly hobbled polyphony, is that you can only trigger one effect command at a time. So if you want to modulate the pitch of a note, and bend it at the same time, you have to set it bending on one note, then add a modulation to continue what you’d initially envisaged on the following note. Some effects also cancel each other out or only work on certain oscillators, which at first can be quite confusing. You eventually figure it out by trial and error. I mean, whoever reads documentation before using software anyway?! Some platforms allow command programming which can simultaneously trigger multiple effects, like a macro, which for making snares and kick drums is very handy.

BW: Actually making your snares and kick drums from scratch? How do you go about doing that?

CM: All your sounds have to be built from scratch from within the confines of the chip. If you’re making a kick, for example, you’d start with a squared sine wave, quickly diving from a high frequency to a low frequency, add a volume slide toward the end, then maybe add a low-pass filter towards the end just to round it off a little. If it needs to be thicker, you can assign another oscillator and layer it up, although on a C64 that would be two-thirds of your polyphony gone, so it’s not advisable. Snares are similar because the noise generator is ‘pitchable’ on most platforms – you can flick between multiple noise settings really quickly to simulate the snare, and maybe add a quick sine-wave dive at the start to simulate the skin of the snare. Instrument programming can make or beak a tune, and you often end up going down a massive rabbit-hole trying to get new sounds together. But limited parameters mean you can only do so much tweaking, which again is part of the fun writing chip music.

BW: Dealing with the polyphony restrictions obviously becomes quite a challenge then.

CM: Completely. Although every artist finds his or her own methods for dealing with polyphony, it’s probably the most defining aspect of an artist’s sound. But it’s amazing what can be achieved with three notes when you start flipping between instruments and waveforms for each and every note. You’d think it would get boring after a while, but pushing the technical envelope becomes a pretty satisfying personal challenge in itself.