This was quite an early SID tune in the overall lifespan of the c64. The almost unique characteristic of the SID chip was the ability to switch wave types for each note within a channel. Triangle, Sine, Square and noise are available at any point. This allows it to sound like it has more than just 3 channels. The NES (which DID have a great soundchip) struggled to do the arpeggios and drones Galway loved to use. You should check out what the composer's LMan and Jammer achieve with a stock c64.
An epic c64 track, really nice to see someone who obviously didn't grow up on these tunes take a listen. Fantastic video, thank you so much brings back memories.
It often blows my mind just how far in any direction this community will take me. I'm so fortunate to have such a diverse group of people guiding me through music's wide history.
I've known of this track for thirty-five plus years so it's fascinating to hear a fresh take. I remember around this time (around 85-86) in the UK C64 scene that tracks were getting longer and more experimental. This is certainly one of the more "out-there" numbers Martin Galway ever produced, and in my opinion one of his least approachable, especially for someone unfamiliar with this genre. Really enjoyed your video. Thanks.
My god, I love this track. The game had this really trippy, seizure-inducing title screen while this song played and as a kid I would turn the lights out and just zone out to this track. But my favourite is his title screen from Green Beret (not the loader). I find his music, at its best, to be charges with emotion.
One thing to remember about Commodore C64 game music was that the music was driving the game, like Wally Beben's utterly EPIC Tetris score, or the seminal Monty on the Run by Rob Hubbard.
Martin was a genius. Check out the Rambo soundtrack as well, or the Arkanoid title track where the volume glitch was used to create sorta 4 Bit sample thus having 4 channels instead of just 3.
Some of my favourite C64 tunes are, and you can consider these suggestions or requests: "Auf Wiedersehen Monty" - Rob Hubbard & Ben Daglish - ruclips.net/video/G2uV440Jc8A/видео.html "Driller" - Matt Gray - ruclips.net/video/1UzJUCPkCjo/видео.html "The Last Ninja", especially "Mansion in-game" part - Matt Gray - a stereo mix ruclips.net/video/XrCK38adwsA/видео.html#t=50m9s "Tetris" - Wally Beben - 25 minutes! ruclips.net/video/Ny743c32gPg/видео.html "Wizball" - Martin Galway - ruclips.net/video/i5HvBapWKAE/видео.html "Master of Magic" - Rob Hubbard - ruclips.net/video/IOOttnv6qf4/видео.html
Cool, someone to actually make an analysis of a legendary SID track :D Just to add a few things: The SID chip is analogue (mostly) and it has 3 main waveforms: pulse\square; saw and triangle (no sine signal as someone mentioned earlier), noise BUT also combinations: triangle+saw, triangle+square (the weird signal you noticed in the oscilloscope), saw+square and tri+saw+squ. In addition, it has a filter (LowPass, BandPass, Highpass and combo of these). PLUS ring modulation (only with triangle waveform and its combos), sync modulation and both ring+sync, so this little chip was a BEAST back then :D This song was composed on (and for) the older SID 6581 which only had the tri+squ combo and the filter was good gritty.
Fantastic video. "I Can get behind this", at 09:33, has to be the best reaction I've heard from a composer of today listening to video game music. I joined Ocean as a musician after Martin Galway had left, and his work on Parallax was an inspiration and motivation.
Shortly after starting work at Ocean, I began my contemporary composition studies, and when I first encountered Steve Reich's works that employed the "Minimalist canon" device, I realised that Martin had been doing the same in his C64 music.
I think Parallax is the most striking use of minimalist canon in Martin's works. It reminds me of the first movement of Reich's Desert Music, after the introduction, where a rudimentary figure grows and spreads across the string section as a canon offset by one beat, then two, etc.
Great that you covered this song! The more you learn about the limitations of the SID chip by today's standards, and inversely, for its time its incredible capabilities, the more you will appreciate this song. Parallax is when many millions of us teenagers first realized that video game music could be real music that can affect your soul. We realized that day that the SID chip was an ingenious musical instrument, not a toy, and Galway was a master at squeezing polyphonic sounds out of those 3 rudimentary synthesizer channels.
The track is best thought of as "Philip Glass does chiptune metal". As others have written, this was an experimental piece. It's not really pushing the SID chip itself: most of the techniques used were pretty standard for the time, but he was looking to use them to create sonic textures. I'd recommend Wizball as a more typical example of his style, which is much more melodic. Another contemporary of Galway's is Tim Follin, who created some absolutely amazing tracks that sound quite different from Martin Galway's style. The interesting thing about the SID is that it's still very much in demand for use in MIDI controlled synthesisers to this day. You've almost certainly heard it in tracks before and never realised it. Its designer, Bob Yannes, went on to found Ensoniq.
If you're talking about Tim Follin, you have to talk about his miraculous work with the ZX Spectrum's beeper! He got *THAT* out of what is basically the PC speaker?!
First off thank you for being open minded enough to listen all the way thru and critique it open minded as well. Yes this is definitely one of Martin's more experimental tracks and kind of a unique track for the time period as well. Most C64 game music tracks were much more interested in melody/harmony and more similar to western 'classic' style. This track is very out there and typically people either love it or hate it. I find that to be the case with a lot of even modern electronic music. While the song was used as the theme song for the C64 game Parallax I think it really was more just Martin showing off to his fellow SID track composers. "Look what crazy sounds and effects I've pulled off'". So compositionally, yea it's kinda lacking there. Here is a much more typical C64 game song as well as the original track it was trying to imitate. ruclips.net/video/Hm5Hjsm5NZ4/видео.html&ab_channel=Overlord1024 was a cover of ruclips.net/video/Hm5Hjsm5NZ4/видео.html&ab_channel=Overlord1024 which was recorded by Larry Fast on 'real' synthesizers of that era. Pretty impressive cover considering the limited channels etc of the C64. To answer a couple of your questions. The C64 as you said had just 3 channels. Each channel could play either a sine wave, sawtooth/triangle wave, square wave, or white noise. There was also what was called a 'ring modulation filter' that could be applied between two channels to further alter the sound. By rapidly switching between these 4 waveforms, altering pitch etc the SID was capable of producing a decent variety of timbres. With this particular track Martin was, as you said, mainly focusing on using the interaction BETWEEN the channels to create syncopated and slowly phasing in and out rhythms rather than creating actual melody lines played on any one channel. BTW, the guy who designed the SID chip for the C64 went on to start the company that made the Ensoniq synthesizer line. www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Bob_Yannes Crazy thing is, the creation of music, graphics and 'demos' is still very alive and well on all of those ancient computers. To this day there are still large multi day fests/competitions over in Europe where enthusiasts are writing stuff on C64s, Atari 800s, Z80 Spectrums and just about any computing platform you can think of. They share the music tracks, art and demos they've created at www.pouet.net/ Thanks for taking the time to listen and comment on Parallax. It was fun to see the reaction of a 'non-computer geek'. :) I was kind of expected that 'hmmm sort of frowny face' during the feedback phasing ending couple of minutes. It's kind of like a train wreck. Your brain is going "I'm not sure I really ''like' this..... but I can't stop listening". Not everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it since the first time I heard it back in 1986.
Thanks so much for this excellent feedback. There's so much great info here that helps put this work into better focus and gives me a larger appreciation for what Martin accomplished here. It's neat to hear that this craft is still alive and well. I love to hear that older art forms and knowledge is still being practiced in a large enough community to need festivals for it. And just to clarify, while I'm mostly a music nerd I also have a degree in Computer Science, coded some games, built computer towers, etc. So def a bit of a "computer geek" 😄
Feel like I have to correct this and other comments in that the SID chip cannot produce sine waves. The four waveforms are sawtooth, triangle, square and white noise. Getting even deeper, the chip is a combination of digital and analog circuits, with the digital portion being even simpler. Technically each of the 3 voices is a counter and some logic gates. So each voice is fundamentally based on a sawtooth only (or a pseudo random number generator for the noise type). The logic allows you to create the other waveforms by eg. flipping the sign (top bit) of the counter for triangle or comparing against an adjustable threshold value, outputting on or off for square. Ring modulation is a logical combination of two channels acting like a multiplication of the counters. Each of the logical operations is gated in the chip and there was nothing stopping you turning each waveform function at the same time. I believe that is what causes the weird wave shape (have seen that output before when turning on wave and square at the same time I think).
By the way, some examples of different waveforms appear in my favourite SID tune, Last Ninja Wilderness: ruclips.net/video/1OjPpVrc3gM/видео.html The first sound is ring modulation and the weird waveform shows up a bit later (the ring modulation is turned off with the original triangle and square waves squashed into a single channel playing both waveforms at the same time).
@@CriticalReactions Since you mention a degree in Computer Science, though it might be worth pointing out that this and other tracks were not created in some sort of music software, it was hand written in 6502 assembly language! Literally programmed!
I loved this song as a child. I also listened to Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, and Vangelis and the other electronic artists of the 80s, so the structure of this piece did not feel strange to me. edit: I also loved my parents' copy of the soundtrack to Suspiria by Goblin. This might help to explain why I loved this as well.
I always thought this song sounded like something Philip Glass would've done if he wrote on the C64. This isn't really the first song I would've picked though.
The c64 is a wonder of the world for the time bob yannes went on to found ensoniq and develop the mirage synth, the c64 was all about limitations and rising above them some games had 4 channels due to a flaw allowing 4 bit pcm samples to be played skate or die, game over and tetris utillise it, it also has hardsync and ring modulation 4 wave forms pulse, triangle, sawtooth and noise
Ouph. Parallax. That's a rough one. A technically important step for music for C64 games, but not an easilly approachable one. Too see what magic could be done with the C64 I recommend tunes like any of the songs from Last Ninja 1 & 2 (loading screens or game levels), Commando, IK+, Nemesis the Warlock, R-Type, Rambo 2 Title Screen, Turrican 3, Arkanoid, Fist II, Legend of Kage, Saboteur 2, Mission Impossible, Deathscape, Krakout. But really, The Last Ninja 2 is a must listen. Trust me.
One thing I have to point out is that video game market crash of 1983 was pretty much limited to United States while in Japan there wasn't similar dip and Nintendo came out with Famicom during that time. There are many reasons for the crash in US and it did leave the market open for higher quality games to fill the market afterwards. There are some books on history of computer music in general (such as The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music) and music of video games more specifically (such as Game Sound from MIT Press). I'm looking for them myself as well. Galway was known in the era when music was made by programming the synthesizer directly and in mid-1980s first PCM-sound outputting chips came out for home computers. Amiga-computers with Paula chip was in particular key for birth of tracker-music (Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski). So "chiptunes" were replaced by tracker-music made with software like Protracker, OctaMED and so on. At the same era as Amiga there was Atari ST with MIDI-output, which became popular as a way to "conduct" other instruments producing sound instead of generating the sound on the computer itself. Finally, interesting to see another perspective! These chiptunes sometimes were made with purpose of showing off programming skills so they are not always suited for people who are listening to them as just "music" so to say.
Oh neat, I'll have to keep an eye out for Game Sound and that Oxford Handbook. Really interesting context there about how music was created on those older systems. As for your final note, I totally understand that. This is a neat song but not something I would really listen to in any context outside of this one. And yeah, the video game crash was wholly in the US. I didn't mention a region because there was only one large scale, widely known market crash between the Atari and NES. I will admit that I only recently learned it US bound though. Think it was the book Game Over where I learned that, which I read only a few years ago.
The SID has triangle, saw, square with pulse width modulation and sine waves. The SID also has a filter which isn't used too often but also oscillator sync which is quite musical and ring modulation which is probably what you were hearing at the end of the track. Ring mod can be used to do bell type sounds, oscillator sync can make a synth sound like it is talking if modulated right. This shows that the SID chip is a proper synth at heart, just a bit crude and cheap as it needed to be as it was for a home computer.
@@groovingood Well...to be pedantic you can approach a sine wave, but the low pass is only single pole so you'll still get harmonics from the triangle wave. So you can get nearly a sine if you put the resonance up to full and have the filter cutoff track the note , but not quite a sine.
I didn't know of this C64 music until now. I fell in love instantly hearing the Matt Gray version. Maybe it's generic. Maybe there is some skill there. I don't know, honestly, as a non-composer. But I do enjoy the fact that it takes 7 minutes of build up to get to the pay off. It isn't Going Home by Mark Knopfler, but it does pay off and I enjoy the ride getting there. I also appreciate how composers working from their bedrooms for games on minimal to no budget aimed at young children were able to challenge our minds beyond ear candy. This isn't an iconic game tune enjoyed by the Nintendo cult. It is more special than that.
One book is “The Little Book of Sound Chips” by Fusion Retro Books. It has a few pages explaining the different technologies and a catalogue of music with QR code youtube links for each.
By coincidence, I was looking for the remix of Allister Brimble (from the album "The Galway Works"), and I have just found out your channel. You should check other C64 works such as Jeroen Tel, Rob Hubbard, Charles Deenen. By the way, C64 uses no samples, you program all the tracks, which makes some of them very impressive.
You are dead on with the differences between this and what chip music is to most people (Japanese VGM music). It's true that C64 music is waaaaay more metal, experimental and prog and EDM inspired. The Japanese composers had the advantage that they had a classical education, and often a dedicated composer who worked it out on a keyboard synth (or even a piano) and a separate engineer to translate that into what the sounc chip could make. The C64 composers were a lot less musically schooled, but they programmed the chips themselves and composed FOR the chips. You know how much difference there can be between music for an instrument composed by someone who plays that instrument, and something which isn't... And they were younger, and often deeply in touch with various club music scenes that would become mainstream in the later 90s.
@ Critical Reactions you should do a video on The last ninja c64 levels The wastelands and palace gardens i think you will be impressed what three channels can do also skate or die uses the pcm flaw and has 4 channels you think parallax is good these are streets ahead its miles above anything the nes can do due to the nes not using oscilators and less waveforms
Also, the C64 had a better sound chip than the NES (though that might be my European nostalgia talking here, the C64 was *WAY* more popular over here than the NES) For an example, try acrouzet's cover of Daft Punk's Short Circuit which sounds pretty much identical to the original! Or their cover of Freestyler, which includes a shot at speech synthesis without using the 6581's volume bug, just one of the SID's voices! It's funny bit impressive!
Chiptune is so fascinating to me, just the fact of how it's become even remotely popular. You basically have a situation in which very old technology was incredibly limited in the sounds it could make, but because music WAS made for it, and that music got experienced by people who loved playing the games they were used in, so many ended up loving the sound and are now turning that limitation into an actual aesthetically desirable thing. All that said, I haven't heard a ton of chiptune myself, but this was probably the best I've heard. It's fascinating to hear a track that sounds like something I could hear in modern classical (especially minimalism) that ALSO sounds like a soundtrack for a video game that came out before my time. It's fascinating that these two things can co-exist at all, much less that they sound so fascinating while doing it. I was surprised by how much I found myself loving not just the musical ideas--like I said, like a Minimalist Trio--but really appreciating the chiptune aesthetic and what it brought to it. Great stuff. Maybe the best new thing I've heard in all year, and I'm going to have to check out more of this guy's stuff.
I do believe this was really not the best song to start getting into SID music. Also the unknowns should have been cleared from the top: Martin Galway made SID music in the 80s as a teen. How wasn't that clear before even getting into this?? Also, the SID chip? What is up with the SID chip? It's a 3 voice synthesizer with basically a similar architecture to the Minimoog, fitted into a computer chip, with even Band pass and high pass resonance!!! It does SYNC and RING modulation !!! Damn..... And this song uses like 5% of the SID features stretched on almost 10 minutes... It's niche. If you want to hear the SID chip, there's so many better choices. I dunno, check out the Bionic Commando soundtrack from Tim Follin. I mean geez even the Yi Ar Kung Fu or the Terra Cresta, even Mickie from Martin Galway is waaaay more accessible than Parallax. Parallax is for the hardcore SID lovers, not for everyone. Tim Follin Ghouls N' Ghosts whole soundtrack ruclips.net/video/wz36JWHTk-A/видео.html
Also, the Game Boy has a wave channel (among the 4 ones) where you can do particular sounds if you are talented. Alberto Jose Gonzalez is a great example (Turok 2 on GBC, but also Tintin Prisoners of The Sun, The Smurfs... yeah, licensed games had great tunes at the time, especially the european ones).
Older game soundtracks is definitely a blindspot for me, musically. I know of the songs for the games I owned but can't say I've ever looked for soundtracks for games I didn't (like Turok 2 GBC). I'll give it a look.
I stopped listening at 19:45, this blew me away aged 15, one of the reasons I’m 27 years into a video game audio career. I bought Martin breakfast once at 2 am in Brighton, along with Richard Joseph, who’s no longer with us. I’ll watch the rest at a more suitable hour!
Martin was the greatest on the C=64. Not my very favourite song though. But still great. It is all about being limited. The hardware was so unpowerful.
I have listened to this over 100s of times and know exactly where there is an "emotional key transition" moment in this masterpiece ... Guess WHEN "Critical Reactions" INTERRUPTS ... super annoying ... I know he means well and wants to do his job ... but his intellectual inserts are not always well-timed sadly enough!
C64 was before NES, but to my ear, most NES music is quite irritating in comparison. Simple melodies that wear out their welcome and too shrill. Hopefully, I can get away with this heresy here.
certainly not to shit on the efforts of Martin Galway but I never enjoyed this piece. A great artist of the day but found this not to be one of his finest moments. I've listened to it a good 4 or 5 times now and it really isn't an especially great piece personally speaking other than being a somewhat interesting enough piece that is technically rather sound for the hardware. It sounds a bit harsh on the ears and musically while it has a couple of nice moments, Martin Galway was capable of vastly better I would say. I get that it's a long piece though in the same sense of say Delta in game and Driller which possibly informs people that it must be a great piece of art etc but I wouldn't say that of it. Rambo Title Tune or Green Beret is where he really shined I would also say that it's not always ideal to gauge something from a first listen only as while are brains are very good at understanding the music we are hearing, we don't necessarily know if we appreciate it yet or not
This was quite an early SID tune in the overall lifespan of the c64. The almost unique characteristic of the SID chip was the ability to switch wave types for each note within a channel. Triangle, Sine, Square and noise are available at any point. This allows it to sound like it has more than just 3 channels. The NES (which DID have a great soundchip) struggled to do the arpeggios and drones Galway loved to use.
You should check out what the composer's LMan and Jammer achieve with a stock c64.
You forgot sawtooth
An epic c64 track, really nice to see someone who obviously didn't grow up on these tunes take a listen. Fantastic video, thank you so much brings back memories.
I never thought I'd see old SID chip tunes on your channel. Thank you for checking these out, there are some true gems out there.
It often blows my mind just how far in any direction this community will take me. I'm so fortunate to have such a diverse group of people guiding me through music's wide history.
I've known of this track for thirty-five plus years so it's fascinating to hear a fresh take. I remember around this time (around 85-86) in the UK C64 scene that tracks were getting longer and more experimental. This is certainly one of the more "out-there" numbers Martin Galway ever produced, and in my opinion one of his least approachable, especially for someone unfamiliar with this genre. Really enjoyed your video. Thanks.
My god, I love this track. The game had this really trippy, seizure-inducing title screen while this song played and as a kid I would turn the lights out and just zone out to this track.
But my favourite is his title screen from Green Beret (not the loader). I find his music, at its best, to be charges with emotion.
One thing to remember about Commodore C64 game music was that the music was driving the game, like Wally Beben's utterly EPIC Tetris score, or the seminal Monty on the Run by Rob Hubbard.
Martin was a genius. Check out the Rambo soundtrack as well, or the Arkanoid title track where the volume glitch was used to create sorta 4 Bit sample thus having 4 channels instead of just 3.
Some of my favourite C64 tunes are, and you can consider these suggestions or requests:
"Auf Wiedersehen Monty" - Rob Hubbard & Ben Daglish - ruclips.net/video/G2uV440Jc8A/видео.html
"Driller" - Matt Gray - ruclips.net/video/1UzJUCPkCjo/видео.html
"The Last Ninja", especially "Mansion in-game" part - Matt Gray - a stereo mix ruclips.net/video/XrCK38adwsA/видео.html#t=50m9s
"Tetris" - Wally Beben - 25 minutes! ruclips.net/video/Ny743c32gPg/видео.html
"Wizball" - Martin Galway - ruclips.net/video/i5HvBapWKAE/видео.html
"Master of Magic" - Rob Hubbard - ruclips.net/video/IOOttnv6qf4/видео.html
That ending is actually insane, when you consider the time when this was actually composed and the technical limitations of the hardware available.
Cool, someone to actually make an analysis of a legendary SID track :D Just to add a few things:
The SID chip is analogue (mostly) and it has 3 main waveforms: pulse\square; saw and triangle (no sine signal as someone mentioned earlier), noise BUT also combinations: triangle+saw, triangle+square (the weird signal you noticed in the oscilloscope), saw+square and tri+saw+squ. In addition, it has a filter (LowPass, BandPass, Highpass and combo of these). PLUS ring modulation (only with triangle waveform and its combos), sync modulation and both ring+sync, so this little chip was a BEAST back then :D
This song was composed on (and for) the older SID 6581 which only had the tri+squ combo and the filter was good gritty.
sid is digital only the filter part is analogue, you only have 1 filter and you can select wich channel(s) to apply it.
my mom and dad heard beeps, I heard guitar-solos when i first experienced Martin Galways music :)
Fantastic video. "I Can get behind this", at 09:33, has to be the best reaction I've heard from a composer of today listening to video game music. I joined Ocean as a musician after Martin Galway had left, and his work on Parallax was an inspiration and motivation.
Shortly after starting work at Ocean, I began my contemporary composition studies, and when I first encountered Steve Reich's works that employed the "Minimalist canon" device, I realised that Martin had been doing the same in his C64 music.
I think Parallax is the most striking use of minimalist canon in Martin's works. It reminds me of the first movement of Reich's Desert Music, after the introduction, where a rudimentary figure grows and spreads across the string section as a canon offset by one beat, then two, etc.
This is one of the best things I have discovered in your channel. I enjoyed every second of that song. That was so cool, seriously jejeje.
Great that you covered this song! The more you learn about the limitations of the SID chip by today's standards, and inversely, for its time its incredible capabilities, the more you will appreciate this song. Parallax is when many millions of us teenagers first realized that video game music could be real music that can affect your soul. We realized that day that the SID chip was an ingenious musical instrument, not a toy, and Galway was a master at squeezing polyphonic sounds out of those 3 rudimentary synthesizer channels.
The Parallax theme made the hairs on my arms stand up when I first heard it in the mid 80s.
The track is best thought of as "Philip Glass does chiptune metal". As others have written, this was an experimental piece. It's not really pushing the SID chip itself: most of the techniques used were pretty standard for the time, but he was looking to use them to create sonic textures.
I'd recommend Wizball as a more typical example of his style, which is much more melodic.
Another contemporary of Galway's is Tim Follin, who created some absolutely amazing tracks that sound quite different from Martin Galway's style.
The interesting thing about the SID is that it's still very much in demand for use in MIDI controlled synthesisers to this day. You've almost certainly heard it in tracks before and never realised it. Its designer, Bob Yannes, went on to found Ensoniq.
If you're talking about Tim Follin, you have to talk about his miraculous work with the ZX Spectrum's beeper!
He got *THAT* out of what is basically the PC speaker?!
First off thank you for being open minded enough to listen all the way thru and critique it open minded as well. Yes this is definitely one of Martin's more experimental tracks and kind of a unique track for the time period as well. Most C64 game music tracks were much more interested in melody/harmony and more similar to western 'classic' style. This track is very out there and typically people either love it or hate it. I find that to be the case with a lot of even modern electronic music. While the song was used as the theme song for the C64 game Parallax I think it really was more just Martin showing off to his fellow SID track composers. "Look what crazy sounds and effects I've pulled off'". So compositionally, yea it's kinda lacking there. Here is a much more typical C64 game song as well as the original track it was trying to imitate. ruclips.net/video/Hm5Hjsm5NZ4/видео.html&ab_channel=Overlord1024 was a cover of ruclips.net/video/Hm5Hjsm5NZ4/видео.html&ab_channel=Overlord1024 which was recorded by Larry Fast on 'real' synthesizers of that era. Pretty impressive cover considering the limited channels etc of the C64.
To answer a couple of your questions. The C64 as you said had just 3 channels. Each channel could play either a sine wave, sawtooth/triangle wave, square wave, or white noise. There was also what was called a 'ring modulation filter' that could be applied between two channels to further alter the sound. By rapidly switching between these 4 waveforms, altering pitch etc the SID was capable of producing a decent variety of timbres. With this particular track Martin was, as you said, mainly focusing on using the interaction BETWEEN the channels to create syncopated and slowly phasing in and out rhythms rather than creating actual melody lines played on any one channel. BTW, the guy who designed the SID chip for the C64 went on to start the company that made the Ensoniq synthesizer line. www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Bob_Yannes
Crazy thing is, the creation of music, graphics and 'demos' is still very alive and well on all of those ancient computers. To this day there are still large multi day fests/competitions over in Europe where enthusiasts are writing stuff on C64s, Atari 800s, Z80 Spectrums and just about any computing platform you can think of. They share the music tracks, art and demos they've created at www.pouet.net/
Thanks for taking the time to listen and comment on Parallax. It was fun to see the reaction of a 'non-computer geek'. :) I was kind of expected that 'hmmm sort of frowny face' during the feedback phasing ending couple of minutes. It's kind of like a train wreck. Your brain is going "I'm not sure I really ''like' this..... but I can't stop listening". Not everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it since the first time I heard it back in 1986.
Thanks so much for this excellent feedback. There's so much great info here that helps put this work into better focus and gives me a larger appreciation for what Martin accomplished here.
It's neat to hear that this craft is still alive and well. I love to hear that older art forms and knowledge is still being practiced in a large enough community to need festivals for it.
And just to clarify, while I'm mostly a music nerd I also have a degree in Computer Science, coded some games, built computer towers, etc. So def a bit of a "computer geek" 😄
Feel like I have to correct this and other comments in that the SID chip cannot produce sine waves. The four waveforms are sawtooth, triangle, square and white noise. Getting even deeper, the chip is a combination of digital and analog circuits, with the digital portion being even simpler. Technically each of the 3 voices is a counter and some logic gates. So each voice is fundamentally based on a sawtooth only (or a pseudo random number generator for the noise type). The logic allows you to create the other waveforms by eg. flipping the sign (top bit) of the counter for triangle or comparing against an adjustable threshold value, outputting on or off for square. Ring modulation is a logical combination of two channels acting like a multiplication of the counters. Each of the logical operations is gated in the chip and there was nothing stopping you turning each waveform function at the same time. I believe that is what causes the weird wave shape (have seen that output before when turning on wave and square at the same time I think).
By the way, some examples of different waveforms appear in my favourite SID tune, Last Ninja Wilderness: ruclips.net/video/1OjPpVrc3gM/видео.html The first sound is ring modulation and the weird waveform shows up a bit later (the ring modulation is turned off with the original triangle and square waves squashed into a single channel playing both waveforms at the same time).
Oh and some of the waveform shape comes from ADSR envelopes as well.
@@CriticalReactions Since you mention a degree in Computer Science, though it might be worth pointing out that this and other tracks were not created in some sort of music software, it was hand written in 6502 assembly language! Literally programmed!
Would you consider Tim Follin's work on the ZX Spectrum? Especially the Spectrum 48K such as his theme for Agent X and Agent X 2?
Remember, it is all done on a C64 sound chip from 1982 which has certain limitations (most do not even know what limitations they are)
I loved this song as a child. I also listened to Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, and Vangelis and the other electronic artists of the 80s, so the structure of this piece did not feel strange to me.
edit: I also loved my parents' copy of the soundtrack to Suspiria by Goblin. This might help to explain why I loved this as well.
I always thought this song sounded like something Philip Glass would've done if he wrote on the C64. This isn't really the first song I would've picked though.
The SID chip was actually unfinished,
The guys designing it had run out of time, as the C64 was went into production.
The c64 is a wonder of the world for the time bob yannes went on to found ensoniq and develop the mirage synth, the c64 was all about limitations and rising above them some games had 4 channels due to a flaw allowing 4 bit pcm samples to be played skate or die, game over and tetris utillise it, it also has hardsync and ring modulation 4 wave forms pulse, triangle, sawtooth and noise
Ouph. Parallax. That's a rough one. A technically important step for music for C64 games, but not an easilly approachable one. Too see what magic could be done with the C64 I recommend tunes like any of the songs from Last Ninja 1 & 2 (loading screens or game levels), Commando, IK+, Nemesis the Warlock, R-Type, Rambo 2 Title Screen, Turrican 3, Arkanoid, Fist II, Legend of Kage, Saboteur 2, Mission Impossible, Deathscape, Krakout. But really, The Last Ninja 2 is a must listen. Trust me.
One thing I have to point out is that video game market crash of 1983 was pretty much limited to United States while in Japan there wasn't similar dip and Nintendo came out with Famicom during that time. There are many reasons for the crash in US and it did leave the market open for higher quality games to fill the market afterwards.
There are some books on history of computer music in general (such as The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music) and music of video games more specifically (such as Game Sound from MIT Press). I'm looking for them myself as well.
Galway was known in the era when music was made by programming the synthesizer directly and in mid-1980s first PCM-sound outputting chips came out for home computers. Amiga-computers with Paula chip was in particular key for birth of tracker-music (Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski). So "chiptunes" were replaced by tracker-music made with software like Protracker, OctaMED and so on. At the same era as Amiga there was Atari ST with MIDI-output, which became popular as a way to "conduct" other instruments producing sound instead of generating the sound on the computer itself.
Finally, interesting to see another perspective! These chiptunes sometimes were made with purpose of showing off programming skills so they are not always suited for people who are listening to them as just "music" so to say.
Oh neat, I'll have to keep an eye out for Game Sound and that Oxford Handbook. Really interesting context there about how music was created on those older systems. As for your final note, I totally understand that. This is a neat song but not something I would really listen to in any context outside of this one.
And yeah, the video game crash was wholly in the US. I didn't mention a region because there was only one large scale, widely known market crash between the Atari and NES. I will admit that I only recently learned it US bound though. Think it was the book Game Over where I learned that, which I read only a few years ago.
The SID has triangle, saw, square with pulse width modulation and sine waves. The SID also has a filter which isn't used too often but also oscillator sync which is quite musical and ring modulation which is probably what you were hearing at the end of the track. Ring mod can be used to do bell type sounds, oscillator sync can make a synth sound like it is talking if modulated right. This shows that the SID chip is a proper synth at heart, just a bit crude and cheap as it needed to be as it was for a home computer.
The SID doesn't have sine waves.
don't forget the noise generator and filters
and the sid can switch between different waveforms in all channels
@@fromwithinukIt's possible to create a sine using triangle + low pass, this is possible with pulses too, but only on higher notes
@@groovingood Well...to be pedantic you can approach a sine wave, but the low pass is only single pole so you'll still get harmonics from the triangle wave. So you can get nearly a sine if you put the resonance up to full and have the filter cutoff track the note , but not quite a sine.
I didn't know of this C64 music until now. I fell in love instantly hearing the Matt Gray version. Maybe it's generic. Maybe there is some skill there. I don't know, honestly, as a non-composer. But I do enjoy the fact that it takes 7 minutes of build up to get to the pay off. It isn't Going Home by Mark Knopfler, but it does pay off and I enjoy the ride getting there. I also appreciate how composers working from their bedrooms for games on minimal to no budget aimed at young children were able to challenge our minds beyond ear candy. This isn't an iconic game tune enjoyed by the Nintendo cult. It is more special than that.
The final minute is a simulation of an electrical motor stalling and stopping.
One book is “The Little Book of Sound Chips” by Fusion Retro Books. It has a few pages explaining the different technologies and a catalogue of music with QR code youtube links for each.
Martin Galway was THE 6581 godfather.
By coincidence, I was looking for the remix of Allister Brimble (from the album "The Galway Works"), and I have just found out your channel. You should check other C64 works such as Jeroen Tel, Rob Hubbard, Charles Deenen.
By the way, C64 uses no samples, you program all the tracks, which makes some of them very impressive.
This is one of those C64 tunes that brings me back 36 years. What I was doing, how I felt, everything comes back! A true Galway masterpiece.
How about checking out "A Final Hyperbase" by Firefox and Tip, theme to Phenomenas "Enigma" Demo on Amiga?
You are dead on with the differences between this and what chip music is to most people (Japanese VGM music). It's true that C64 music is waaaaay more metal, experimental and prog and EDM inspired. The Japanese composers had the advantage that they had a classical education, and often a dedicated composer who worked it out on a keyboard synth (or even a piano) and a separate engineer to translate that into what the sounc chip could make. The C64 composers were a lot less musically schooled, but they programmed the chips themselves and composed FOR the chips. You know how much difference there can be between music for an instrument composed by someone who plays that instrument, and something which isn't... And they were younger, and often deeply in touch with various club music scenes that would become mainstream in the later 90s.
Jazz was also a huge influence on Japanese composers. It’s all over their work.
@ Critical Reactions you should do a video on The last ninja c64 levels The wastelands and palace gardens i think you will be impressed what three channels can do also skate or die uses the pcm flaw and has 4 channels you think parallax is good these are streets ahead its miles above anything the nes can do due to the nes not using oscilators and less waveforms
Also, the C64 had a better sound chip than the NES (though that might be my European nostalgia talking here, the C64 was *WAY* more popular over here than the NES)
For an example, try acrouzet's cover of Daft Punk's Short Circuit which sounds pretty much identical to the original!
Or their cover of Freestyler, which includes a shot at speech synthesis without using the 6581's volume bug, just one of the SID's voices! It's funny bit impressive!
No, it was better. The SID can do many things the NES audio chip simply could not. It just had a more channels. That’s it.
@@inphanta the NES sound chip had more voices, but the SID could do more with the voices it had!
Chiptune is so fascinating to me, just the fact of how it's become even remotely popular. You basically have a situation in which very old technology was incredibly limited in the sounds it could make, but because music WAS made for it, and that music got experienced by people who loved playing the games they were used in, so many ended up loving the sound and are now turning that limitation into an actual aesthetically desirable thing. All that said, I haven't heard a ton of chiptune myself, but this was probably the best I've heard. It's fascinating to hear a track that sounds like something I could hear in modern classical (especially minimalism) that ALSO sounds like a soundtrack for a video game that came out before my time. It's fascinating that these two things can co-exist at all, much less that they sound so fascinating while doing it. I was surprised by how much I found myself loving not just the musical ideas--like I said, like a Minimalist Trio--but really appreciating the chiptune aesthetic and what it brought to it. Great stuff. Maybe the best new thing I've heard in all year, and I'm going to have to check out more of this guy's stuff.
All done in a few k. His Green Beret tune has a great reverb effect in it.
Now do Comic Bakery by Martin Galway
the idea that the C64 was only 3 tracks and then being able to take this out (3 stemmig in dutch ;p )
the guy looked so friendly on the thumbnail what happened XD
I do believe this was really not the best song to start getting into SID music. Also the unknowns should have been cleared from the top: Martin Galway made SID music in the 80s as a teen. How wasn't that clear before even getting into this?? Also, the SID chip? What is up with the SID chip? It's a 3 voice synthesizer with basically a similar architecture to the Minimoog, fitted into a computer chip, with even Band pass and high pass resonance!!! It does SYNC and RING modulation !!! Damn..... And this song uses like 5% of the SID features stretched on almost 10 minutes... It's niche. If you want to hear the SID chip, there's so many better choices. I dunno, check out the Bionic Commando soundtrack from Tim Follin. I mean geez even the Yi Ar Kung Fu or the Terra Cresta, even Mickie from Martin Galway is waaaay more accessible than Parallax. Parallax is for the hardcore SID lovers, not for everyone. Tim Follin Ghouls N' Ghosts whole soundtrack ruclips.net/video/wz36JWHTk-A/видео.html
Also, the Game Boy has a wave channel (among the 4 ones) where you can do particular sounds if you are talented. Alberto Jose Gonzalez is a great example (Turok 2 on GBC, but also Tintin Prisoners of The Sun, The Smurfs... yeah, licensed games had great tunes at the time, especially the european ones).
Older game soundtracks is definitely a blindspot for me, musically. I know of the songs for the games I owned but can't say I've ever looked for soundtracks for games I didn't (like Turok 2 GBC). I'll give it a look.
I stopped listening at 19:45, this blew me away aged 15, one of the reasons I’m 27 years into a video game audio career. I bought Martin breakfast once at 2 am in Brighton, along with Richard Joseph, who’s no longer with us. I’ll watch the rest at a more suitable hour!
Bought this game in the Oceans 6 star hits pack I think it was. When it came out somewhere around 1984.
Oh boy, you're only just getting started with the oscilloscope views lol
Very good Track, lot good remixes exist about this song, too.
You would maybe have to code the music in assembly language also? Another poster recommend auf weidersein monty that is a good c64 tune!
Galway is 'The Goat' ❤
Gabor Szabo - Galatea's Guitar
Gabor was one of Santana's majoir inspirations.
You should analyse Fred Gray's "Mutants" (also a legendary SID track from the 80s)😊
This is one of my favorites from his rival, Rob Hubbard ruclips.net/video/IOOttnv6qf4/видео.html
Spirituel
Martin is a god.
Martin was the greatest on the C=64. Not my very favourite song though. But still great. It is all about being limited. The hardware was so unpowerful.
I have listened to this over 100s of times and know exactly where there is an "emotional key transition" moment in this masterpiece ... Guess WHEN "Critical Reactions" INTERRUPTS ... super annoying ... I know he means well and wants to do his job ... but his intellectual inserts are not always well-timed sadly enough!
very far from my ordinary path... don't really know what to feel and think about it.
C64 was before NES, but to my ear, most NES music is quite irritating in comparison. Simple melodies that wear out their welcome and too shrill. Hopefully, I can get away with this heresy here.
Samey too.
certainly not to shit on the efforts of Martin Galway but I never enjoyed this piece. A great artist of the day but found this not to be one of his finest moments. I've listened to it a good 4 or 5 times now and it really isn't an especially great piece personally speaking other than being a somewhat interesting enough piece that is technically rather sound for the hardware. It sounds a bit harsh on the ears and musically while it has a couple of nice moments, Martin Galway was capable of vastly better I would say. I get that it's a long piece though in the same sense of say Delta in game and Driller which possibly informs people that it must be a great piece of art etc but I wouldn't say that of it. Rambo Title Tune or Green Beret is where he really shined
I would also say that it's not always ideal to gauge something from a first listen only as while are brains are very good at understanding the music we are hearing, we don't necessarily know if we appreciate it yet or not
looks like a zipper
your face says it all
green berret or rambo were better