Elektron Musical Instruments

From: Andreas Varga 
To: <hvsc@onelist.com>
Sent: Friday, December 03, 1999 3:45 PM
Subject: [SID] SID happening (long!)...


From: Andreas Varga <sid@...>

Hi!!

Last night I was at that SID music happening that I mentioned a few weeks 
ago...
I'll try to sum up what happened there.

The event was held in a small factory hall (about 20x30m) at the riverside
of the Danube in Linz.
We had a kick-ass sound system to use. A 1200W speaker system and a big
fat amp (you know those found in discos)...
I had a little Tascam 6 track mixer to hook up all my sound sources:
- the G3 Mac audio out
- a real C64 with 6581R4
- a CD player
- the SIDStation audio output

The SIDStation was connected to a MIDI master keyboard and I could also
switch the MIDI out of the Mac to the SIDStation via a patchbay.

Except for the SIDStation which I brought myself, all the other equipment
(including the C64) was already there and could be used. The organizers
use the whole building as a studio/creative media workplace, so all kinds
of media and audio equipment was already there. A full audio studio, and a
video editing station, among other neat things...
(so we didn't have any problems to find cables)

Apart from my central table with all my equipment and the mixer, we also
had two more tables with a C64+floppy and a C128D system, were people
could get their hands wet on C64 games and demos...

We also had a pretty good video beamer which took the C64 video signal and
projected it onto a big (atleast 6x4m) silver screen, so the audience
could easily watch what I did on the C64 at my table...

At 7pm the first guest arrived and to keep them happy until the actual
event started, I popped in the Back In Time CD I brought with me, and they
obviously enjoyed that...

Now that crowd was rather strange. Mostly people that either had a real
C64 once, and others that were just into that retro kind of thing.

A 8pm the room was filled and people already grabbed themselves a
drink, so we could finally start with the action.

I was introduced and then began to give a talk on C64 basics, SID music
history and demo scene things. I never did this before, but I guess I
pretty quickly got a hang of what I should tell people to keep them
interested, and I surely had a laugh or two, by telling funny incidents
and STIL trivia.
I basically explained SID music chronologically, by starting to demo
early music from 1983 (I picked Frantic Freddie), which cleary illustrated
how SID music started with basic waveforms and only poor understanding of
how to make the SID perform.
I then went on troughout the 80ies by introducing Rob Hubbard and Martin
Galway. Here too, I just picked random tunes that popped into my mind at
the moment. I just browsed through my playlist and picked Last V8 and
Helikopter Jagd to show Hubbards/Galways early work. I continued to
explain how the quickly evolving game productions at that time allowed
them to improve their sound quallity, by playing Nemesis the Warlock and
Wizball (title theme).
People seemed to enjoy that.
After that I started to introduce the scene by beginning with the Maniacs
of Noise as composers that started in the scene. I played Cybernoid (via
SIDStation) and that really sounded kick-ass! ;)
I then started to explain what demos are and how they evolved. I didn't
want to bore the people with 20min mega demos, so I only showed two
examples: Think Twice/The Judges as an early example of a simple demo that
introduced new VIC effects, and Dawnfall/Oxyron to show how the demo scene
has evolved until 1996. (I found out that Dawnfall is an ideal demo for
such a presentation because it's not too long and and doesn't get boring
in the middle, has no loading times and of course because the music is
awesome)
After this I was asked how hard it is to get a sound out of the SID, so I
quickly demonstrated how to setup and gate a single sound by pokeing the
registers in BASIC. People told me later that this was very informative.
It also gave me a place to describe how composing of SID music works
technically (editors, etc...)
After that intermezzo I continued to talk about SID music in the 90ies,
and about demo parties/competitions.
I needed a shocker tune, so I chose Melt You Brain by Odi (I didn't want
to be that guy near the speaker... :)
I already talked quite a while at that point, so I began to end my talk by
mentioning where SID music stands right now. I clearly mentioned what HVSC
is all about and what SIDPLAY tries to achieve and made sure that
everybody saw the HVSC url on the big screen... :)
I then spent some time to explain what this SIDStation thingy is, and that
people can later experiment on it (with the MIDI keyboard attached)

After the talk I continued to DJ throughout the evening by playing all
kinds of SID music and showing demos in between (I made sure people don't
miss classics like Dutch Breeze or Tower Power, as they work great on a
big screen)...
In the meantime I was always flooded with questions about this and that,
and had to continuously explain SIDStation menus and parameters to the
ones that were at the keyboard.
The SIDStation was a real magnet for most people and was very impressive.

At 1am most of the people had either left of were busy playing Jumpman
Junior or California Games... :)

At 1:30am we began to disassemble everything and clean up the room.
I was pretty tired, because I spent the whole day setting everything up.

But it was a very enjoyable experience and I wouldn't hesitate to do it
again. I was also very pleased to find that all the keyboard shortcuts and
fade-out options that I've added to SIDPLAY/MacOS really were worth it,
and it's suitable for a live performance... :)

Hey, and I even got money for this! :)

Cheers,
Andreas