Artists & Community

Currently living in Brisbane, Australia and my days are spent working as an IT Manager and studying for my Masters in Business Administration. I temper my career and studies (read: keep myself sane) through my creative outlet in making music. I started writing music back around 1983 using a home computer.

I took a long break from music to pursue my career then later I got involved back in music when I had this crazy idea of mashing chiptunes with vocals and modern production techniques. I consider myself and my music to be an anarchic display of the pop-culture anti-hero by re-purposing defunct computer sound hardware to create a bridge between an underground electronic music culture and the mainstream music medium.

I was born in Brisbane, Australia but grew up on the Sunshine Coast at a time when 8 bit computers and consoles like the Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and Nintendo Entertainment System were the machines to have. Although the games were fun, I developed more of an interest in programming and the demoscene. The games on the Commodore 64 included music and sound effects by some expert musicians/programmers such as Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, David Whittaker and Fred Grey that pushed the C64 Sound Interface Device (SID) to its limits. I was in awe of these musicians and wrote my own machine code music player to attempt to sound like them. I was a programmer first and a musician second.

Being a demoscener, most of the short snippets of music I wrote on the C64 ended up in intro screens to cracked versions of games.

Being as enamoured with the style and sounds that uniquely identify the SID Chip music in Commodore 64 computer games as I am, I wondered what the SID sound synthesiser would sound like with some fewer limitations as were originally planned for it and although there are online archives that preserve the software and music from computing history’s past, I wanted to find some way to make the sounds of these old computers more accessible to a new audience in hope to draw them to the original classic machines, software, sounds and games.

My attempt to do this has been fusing 8 bit sounds with popular songs from the same (and newer) eras and with vocals – essentially a recreation of pop music with 80s computer sounds in the Bitpop genre.

I became a waveform user at version 8 because I wanted to start trying a different workflow and then when Waveform 9 introduced the missing piece of the puzzle for me in the Multi-Sampler, I transitioned to Waveform 9 exclusively. Since all my sounds (instruments) are sampled from an emulated Commodore 64 that runs my SID chip sound driver, it was the Multi-Sampler that I needed to make my 8bit Lo-Fi pop covers.

I’ve also been an exclusive Linux (currently Ubuntu) user for nearly 20 years and I needed a DAW that could run in an environment that I have come to rely upon for its reliability and freedom. My previous DAW was short of features such as time stretching and it required time consuming micro-level actions that were impinging on my creative expression.

There’s quite a few features in Waveform that I couldn’t bear to not have nowadays such as its nice project management, being able to alias clips and have changes be applied across all copied instances of the aliased clip is a great time saver. Time stretching was something I didn’t have and Waveform’s implementation of this feature is so nice to use.

Even navigation around the tracks and clips and transport controls fit really well with how I like to do music. Waveform feels like an artists brush to use rather than a paintball gun.

I’ve released over 100 bitpop covers across albums Bitpop 1-13 and I have albums 14 to 16 in production now. I was doing previously at least one song per week previously but I slowed to one song every two weeks while my studies have ramped up.

I’ve temporarily slowed but I have no intention in stopping by Bitpop series yet. I do have some original music and album themes in the pipeline so there’s plenty more Tracktioning for me to do.

Two things. The first is that I appreciate the active Tracktion community in forums and I like to listen to what people have done musically and what tips they provide.

Secondly, in the spirit of preserving the past, I want to share my favourite outdated joke: “Operator, I wish to make a long distance phone call; how far away from the telephone do I have to stand?”.