Friday, November 11, 2016

C64 music vs. GoatTracker

We live in a world where it's possible to compose Commodore 64 music basically on any platform. I'm not sure how popular SID music is compared to the Gameboy chiptunes. It would require some research to find it out so let me skip this part and jump straight into music editors and leave research for another day.

Back in the good ol' days I 'composed' music with Future Composer and various versions of Demo Music Creator. Since then, I've used and still use SID Wizard which is a great tool and it's up to todays standards in composing C64 music.

Those were the days, when I started to play with those editors without any knowledge about the SID chip and without any documentation given to the tools. Now it's not even unusual to create a C64 music on PC, either with loading a native music editor into VICE or similar emulators. Or just simply using a tool that was made for composing SID music on the PC/Mac and saving it in C64 format.

One of these tools is Goat Tracker. Widely used and loved together with CheeseCutter, now it's quite simple to make some noise without having a real breadbox.

The main reason of today's post with this introduction is to mention those music editors AND show you a great example of using Goat Tracker by my good friend, NecroPolo. He's got some serious guitar playing skills and talent in making the SID bleed - in the meaning of creating unusual sounds and using the SID as it was his beloved guitar. And distortion. Because metal, that's why.

His passion is to release videos of his C64 tunes from time to time, let me share the latest one here:


Now this is how Goat Tracker does look and sound like - good old tracker interface with SID registers for tweaking the sound and all with hexadecimal numbers of course. I recommend to subscribe to his channel as well.

I, hereby save and publish this post with recommending to check NP's other videos and have a listen to his music: https://www.youtube.com/user/NecroPolo8580/videos

Enjoy.

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