J’ai publié ce toot, qui mérite d’être conservé ici je trouve car je n’en suis pas mécontent ma foi, dont acte.

En cette fin d’année je relis « Cyrano
de Bergerac » d’un trait, et comme à chaque fois
je me mets à penser combien ce texte est beau,
et combien j’aimerai parler ainsi, ma foi.

Sortir des 12 pieds comme d’autres un stylo ;
ne même pas penser, parler et puis yalla!
Retomber sur ses pieds en changeant juste un mot,
et ainsi continuer, construire pas à pas
des phrases alambiquées venues du ciboulot
qui seraient destinées à être lues (ou pas),
et amélioreraient par ce méli-mélo
l’apport net de beauté dans ce monde aux abois.

Peut-être qu’il est vrai que ça fait intello,
que c’est pour pavaner, lever le petit doigt ;
je pense que l’on sait tous compter les yeux clos
et composer du beau, même juste une fois.

Et bien donc s’il vous plaît, enlevez-moi d’un doute :
pourriez-vous m’envoyer en réponse à ce toot
vos propres mots (ou laids, ou beaux, ou hésitants)
comme si vous étiez un héro de Rostand ?

Ca ne va rien prouver, c’est pour faire plaisir,
afin de partager ce bien joli loisir.

J’imagine que nous faisons tous attention aux motifs de nos vies, ces répétitions que l’on se croit seul-e-s à voir/entendre, jusqu’à se demander si elles ont un sens.

Ok, donc ça c’était l’intro bidon (et sans LLM), passons au coeur du sujet : les chansons qui ont eu plus de succès une fois qu’elles ont été remixées — et moi de me demander si les artistes en sont tristes, ou satisfaits¹… et surtout, donc, si un motif se détache parmi ces remix.

Voici quelques exemples entendus ces dernières années.
Il y en a bien sûr moult autres, mais c’est mon blog, oh.

Asaf Avidan & the Mojos
« Reckoning Song »

Reckoning Song est une chanson folk touchante créée par l’artiste Asaf Avidan et son groupe The Mojos. La tessiture de voix d’Avidan est très particulière : rauque, aiguë, comme arrachée à la gorge — un de mes collègues de l’époque PrestaShop, cherchant à décrire son chant, m’avait dit qu’il chante « comme une vieille femme ».
Le single et l’album se vendent bien dans leur Israël natale, et correctement en Europe. Ils sortent deux autres albums, puis le groupe se sépare en 2011, Avidan se lançant en solo.

Le DJ allemand Wankelmut s’empare du titre (et change le titre, devenant « One Day » pour tout le monde), l’accélère, rajoute une section rythmique (basse + batterie), quelques effets sur la voix… et c’est le succès dans toute l’Europe, en étant numéro 1 des ventes dans de nombreux pays.

Phoebe Killdeer & The Short Straws
« The Fade Out Line »

The Fade Out Line est une chanson bluesy envoûtantes créée par l’amie Phoebe Killdeer, avec un riff parfait apporté par la guitare du français Cédric Le Roux, et un texte coécrit avec Craig Walker².
Ce morceau est la pièce maîtresse du second album du groupe Phoebe Killdeer & The Short Straws, intitulé Innerquake, et en tout objectivité je vous le recommande si vous aimez le blues-punk sombre et enfumé.

Le DJ français The Avener s’empare du titre (et change le titre, devenant « Fade Out Lines » pour tout le monde), l’accélère, rajoute une section rythmique (basse + batterie), quelques effets sur la voix… et c’est le succès dans toute l’Europe, en étant numéro 1 des ventes³ dans certains pays.

Je disais quoi déjà à propos des motifs ?

Lilly Wood & the Prick
« Prayer In C »

Prayer in C est une complainte langoureuse du duo français Lilly Wood & the Prick, portée par la voix râpeuse de Nili Hadida et la guitare claire de Benjamin Cotto — et une flûte.

Le DJ allemand Robin Schulz s’empare du titre (et ne change pas le titre, ouf), l’accélère, rajoute une section rythmique (basse + batterie), quelques effets sur la voix… et c’est le succès dans toute l’Europe, en étant numéro 1 des ventes dans de nombreux pays.

Je… Euh… Motifs !

Isabelle Pierre
« Le Temps Est Bon »

Le Temps Est Bon est une balade insouciante chantée par l’artiste québécoise Isabelle Pierre et écrite par Stéphane Venne. Venue directement du post-Summer of Love américain canadien⁴, l’original est aujourd’hui une chouette chanson de début de soirée.

Le DJ franç… non, ce serait trop simple
Chanson québécoise sur le thème du trouple, elle a été « retrouvée » en 2010 pour le film de Xavier Dolan (québécois également), « Les Amours imaginaires »… lui-même sur le thème du trouple⁵.

Deux ans plus tard, le DJ malouin⁶ Degiheugi⁷ propose un remix créatif, reconstruisant notamment le fredonnement de l’intro, en faisant de la chanson un tube des dancefloors.
Et ça cartonne pendant ses concerts, et sur les radios ! Degiheugi l’ajoute donc à son album Dancing Chords And Fireflies, sorti en 2012.

Sauf que.

Sauf qu’il n’a pas les droits pour en faire un usage commercial. Et les p’tits gars de Bon Entendeur, eux, ont fait les démarches pour les avoir, ces droits⁸. En effet, depuis janvier 2014, presque tous les mois, le duo sort des mixtapes avec une personnalité en « thème » principal⁹ et c’est sur la Summer Mixtape de 2017, illustrée avec Omar Sy, que le public découvre Le Temps Est Bon, présentée comme « leur » chanson¹⁰.

Leur remix est moins créatif que celui de Degiheugi côté sampling, mais propose une jolie réorchestration du titre, sorte de « mise à jour » de la chanson qui fonctionne moins pour le dancefloor et plus pour l’apéro.

Et la maison de disque de Bon Entendeur s’assure de garantir les droits de diffusion : la version « Remaster » de Dancing Chords & Fireflies, sortie en 2021, ne contient plus le remix, et l’EP « Le temps est bon – Remix » est tout simplement supprimé des catalogues.

Degiheugi est un peu dég’¹¹ :

Tout comme le single sorti en 2012, cet EP fut retiré de la vente lors de la sortie d’un remix d’un collectif de DJ et le rachat des droits du sample original par Sony, et une belle chasse au sorcière pour effacer toute trace de ce titre, et ainsi faire oublier qu’ils avaient bien piqué cette belle idée…

Site officiel de Degiheugi (archive)

On trouve en ligne des références à ce « pompage », soit sarcastiques (archive), soit plus factuelles (archive sans les vidéos). À chacun-e de choisir son camp…

A priori pas de succès international ni même français cette fois, mais le titre reste près de 60 semaines dans le Top 200 français, avec une pointe à la 58e place pendant l’été 2019.
Et Bon Entendeur, comme de bien entendu¹², de faire la tournée des festivals pendant les étés suivants — et de revendre les droits pour des publicités TV.

Matt Simons
« Catch & Release »

Revenons à l’apaisement…

Catch & Release est une chanson méditative de l’américain Matt Simons, sur le fait de prendre du recul sur les déboires de la vie, et trouver « son » endroit, là où l’on peut être soi, en paix. Le refrain nous parle de laisser vivre les moments qui nous touchent au quotidien, à la manière de la pêche sportive¹³.
Accompagné d’une rythmique chaloupée¹⁴, on se croirait déjà sur un bateau, voguant vers une île isolée¹⁵…

Bon, vous connaissez la musique¹⁶: DJ qui passe par là, accélération, boum-tsi-boum, paf succès.
Cette fois, c’est le duo de DJ néerlandais Deepend qui s’empare du titre (et ne change pas le titre, dingue), l’accélère, change la section rythmique, met quelques effets… et c’est le succès dans toute l’Europe, en étant numéro 1 des ventes dans de nombreux pays.

Deepend’s remix of Matt Simons’ « Catch & Release » song has become the second most played song on Dutch radio in 2016.

Page Wikipédia de Deepend.

Bien.

Pour la bonne bouche, j’ajoute une reprise, qui précède d’ailleurs le succès international du remix de Deepend : en 2015, Julien « Voicycle » Muller, « evercycling gypsy troubadour » allemand installé à La Rochelle¹⁷ reprend la chanson de Matt Simons à la guitare, en faisant de belles harmonies avec l’allemande Lina Brockhoff, au piano pour sa part¹⁸.

Pour le coup la chanson est ralentie (71 BPM au lieu de 87), et les harmonies sont beaucoup plus jolies que sur l’original, je trouve — notamment la note tenue sur « …and find how faaaaaar to go…« .
Pas de succès international pour eux deux hélas, mais leur version mérite largement d’être écoutée et partagée. Dont acte.

Bien sûr, je pourrai continuer sur plusieurs pages^{19 20}. Mais stoppons là notre étude.

Les plus attentifs parmi vous n’auront cependant pas manqué de noter l’absence d’un titre très précis.
Un titre dont tout le monde connaît le remix au point d’avoir oublié même l’existence de l’original.

The Mother of All Success Remixes.



Je parle bien sûr de « Missing », du groupe anglais Everything But The Girl.²¹

It initially did not achieve much success until it was remixed by Todd Terry and re-released in 1995, resulting in worldwide success, peaking at or near the top of the charts in many countries.

Page Wikipedia de la chanson « Missing »

Sauf que c’est typiquement l’exception qui infirme la règle que j’ai mise en place pour cet article : le remix de Todd Terry a strictement le même tempo que l’original, 123 BPM… au point qu’ils ont même pu réutiliser le clip vidéo de l’un pour illustrer l’autre

Donc, ne l’incluons pas dans notre tableau.
Tableau ? Oui, car tableau il va y avoir. Lisez donc…

Les conclusions
que l’on peut en tirer

On notera que l’un des points clefs des remix sus-cités, outre le boum-tsi-boum de bon aloi, est le tempo du remix : celui-ci a un BPM²² plus rapide que l’original.

Faisons, donc, un tableau comparatif.

Deux remarques mineures :

• Égalité totale entre Reckoning Song et The Fade Out Line, j’en suis le premier surpris. Les motifs, tout ça…
• Prayer In C a été accéléré de plus de 30% ! ‘faut dire que la chansons originale est vrrraiment lente, et le remix est le plus rapide de notre liste.

Et une remarque majeure : partant de ce postulat, on peut stipuler qu’en prenant n’importe quel titre un peu folk/lent, en l’accélérant et en ajoutant du boum-tsi-boum, on peut créer un tube national, voire international — et ce faisant, relancer la carrière d’un groupe en quête de succès²³.

Mais il y a certainement une science de l’accélération et du boum-tsi-boum… Fondamentalement, en changeant le tempo, on change le genre musical, le meilleur exemple étant sans doute la bossa nova, qui est « juste » de la samba détendue²⁴.
En l’occurrence, pour avoir du succès et devenir un hit des dancefloors, il faut apparemment (selon notre tableau de mesures) monter au-dessus de 120 BPM, et donc que le remix tienne de la dance music, du disco ou de la house music.

La house est un style musical au tempo relativement rapide. Les tempos standards de la dance moderne sont moins élevés, généralement entre 118 et 135 BPM — à peu près 10 BPM de moins que le disco.

Page Wikipédia sur la House music

On voit clairement que les artistes qui ont remixé Asaf Avidan & the Mojos, Phoebe Killdeer & the Short Straws et Lilly Wood & the Prick visaient les dancefloors²⁵, avec un BPM oscillant entre 119 et 123 — ce dernier étant accessoirement le même BPM que le titre « Missing » de Everything But The Girl, tant l’original que le remix.
Ceux derrière Le Temps Est Bon et Catch & Release, entre 98 et 105 BPM, visaient plutôt le début de soirée et le cocktail de mariage.

Nous avons donc la recette d’un succès imparable :

1. Dégotter une chanson peu connue voire oubliée²⁶, avec une ligne vocale plutôt sympa et accrocheuse (un « hook« )²⁷.
   • Idéalement, il faut une chanson avec l’orchestration la plus légère possible, histoire que l’on puisse facilement l’éliminer et la remplacer par la sienne propre. Donc, sans doute de la folk, un truc guitare-voix ou piano-voix un peu lancinant…
2. Accélérer son tempo jusqu’à 100 voire 120 BPM, grosso modo et selon le bon sens de l’oreille qui remixe.
3. Rajouter le « boum-tsi-boum », nécessaire motif (…) rythmique — bien calé sur le temps, en bon « four on the floor » ²⁸.
4. Mettre quelques effets à gauche à droite.
5. Et voilà !

Il y a d’autres détails, mais je pense que nous avons là l’essentiel.

Poussons le bouchon
un peu trop loin

Dans une vidéo récente²⁹, j’ai entendu la phrase suivante :

Once you recognize patterns, you can repeat them. (…)
Pattern recognition is how we learn as humans.

Jordan Miller, lors de sa conférence « How to Find the Write Rhythm for your Software Composition » pour Clojure/conj 2023 (à 8’05).

Supposément, donc, ayant reconnu ce motif de « je trouve un titre lent, je l’accélère, je lui ajoute du boum-tsi-boum et quelques effets » pour parvenir à un tube, on devrrrrrrait pouvoir facilement avoir de l’or en barres entre nos oreilles.

Facile. Fingers in ze nose.

* soupir *

Je vais donc tester pour vous.

… dans une seconde partie à venir

So, the story so far¹:

• In April 2019, I started a thread-based Twitter love letter to my years as an Amiga fan, back in the days when I didn’t have to worry about bills, taxes, and dating apparently. This thread tried to give an overview of demos, modules (the musical kind), and music tools on the Amiga (especially ProTracker, and its inspiration: The Ultimate Soundtracker).
  That thread lasted only three days², but got me thinking: Where did the author of The Ultimate Soundtracker, Karsten Obarski, get the idea for his paradigm-shifting³ tool?
  That threw me down a rabbit hole of searches and deleted forum posts and date comparisons and emailing people left and right, trying to answer that one question: When did the « tracker » way of composing music (or, the music sequencer) made the jump from a hardware, physical product to a software product? ⁴
• In July 2021, I turned my 3 love-letter threads into a proper blog post, which quite innocently ended with a single⁵ question, which I’ll sum up as this:
  « Did step-sequencing really made a single jump from the expensive, Australian-made Fairlight CMI II sampling workstation in 1982, to the cheap, German-made Soundtracker software in 1987, as Wikipedia implies? »⁶ I already had the answer in several notes, links, and emails. I just needed to write that down. ⁷
• In September 2021, I started this « Soundtracker origins » series, where I presented the context of the creation of The Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski, its demise as a commercial product, its rebirth in a thousand free clones, the vanishing of its creator, and his apparent inspiration: Chris Hülsbeck’s SoundMonitor, in 1986. Getting closer to 1982, woohoo!
• On January 1st, 2023, I published part 2 of my Soundtracker Origins series, where I explored the origins of SoundMonitor, got to interview Chris Hülsbeck himself, and learnt that his inspiration could be⁸ Steinberg’s MIDI Multitrack Sequencer.

And now, today.

To remind you of the steps to cover, we’re trying to go from this to that.

Steinberg, you say?

In Part 2 of this series, Chris Hülsbeck told me that he remembers using Steinberg’s MIDI Multitrack Sequencer tool on the Commodore 64 computer, around the time he wrote his own tool, Soundmonitor.

Steinberg⁹? In 2023, they are one of the biggest musical software/hardware company, with industry-defining contributions such as Cubase of course, and the VST plugin interface, amongst other inventions.
In terms of well-known names for professional and amateur studio musicians, they’re up there with Digidesign/Avid (makers of Pro Tools) and Ableton (makers of Ableton Live).

But 40 years ago, in 1983, they were three, working from a living room in Hamburg: Karl « Charlie » Steinberg (31), Manfred « Manne » Rürup (32), and Nicole Rürup, Manfred’s wife (age unknown).

At the time, Karl was a musician and audio engineer, and Manfred was a musician and a salesman at a music shop. In the early days of the Steinberg company¹⁰, Nicole took care of design and manuals¹¹.

We’re lucky to have several early interviews online.
Let’s start with Manfred:

Interviewer: « In the 80s you formed a new wave project called Direktion and released ‘Jeder Tag Wunderbar’ in 1982.« 

(…) I went to a studio on the countryside, called Delta-Studio. The studio was willing to take the risk of producing my songs. So I went into the recording room to meet the engineer and there he was: Karl Steinberg. It was one of these moments where two souls meet for the first time.

At that time, 1980, I was part time working in a keyboard shop, at Amptown in Hamburg which gave me access to the latest in keyboards and samplers and to the MIDI¹² protocol which was released in 1982 I think¹³.

from the excellent It’s Psychedelic Baby magazine interview, May 2021.

Says Karl:

I was always interested in electronics; in 1976 I built an analogue sequencer with sliders, but you could also speed it up and use it as a waveform generator. However, my soldering was never too good. Then I became a studio engineer, and that’s when I met Manfred Rürup. We soon discovered that we thought on the same wavelength, and because Manfred was working a lot with keyboards, we always had access to the latest gear.

(…)

One day [Manfred] gave me some sheets of paper which had MIDI data formats on them. As I had already been working with Sinclair computers – ZX81 etc. – I suggested to him that it would be very easy for me to write a MIDI program. So I used a Commodore 64 computer to develop it, which Manfred had at home, and then we just started to sell it to other people we knew.

(…)

I used to work at Manfred’s home. That’s where we started building the little MIDI interfaces which I developed and even soldered up all by myself. They were the very first things we did there.

from the Sound on Sound interview, July 1986.

Says Manfred¹⁴:

At that time I played with Inga Rumpf and thus had the opportunity to visit the music dealers in the morning with my portable SX64¹⁵ and to present our system to them. However, the interest was not very great. But we were only a three-man company: Charly, my wife and I, and when you sell ten MIDI packages, that’s « big business » (laughter).

Google-translated from the TOS Magazin interview, January 1992.
I’m pretty sure I’m missing on a LOT of interviews just because I don’t know the right German keywords to search…

Musicians writing software for musicians… Kinda reminds me of both Karsten Obarski (in part 1 of this series) and Chris Hülsbeck (in part 2), who each saw a personal need and successfully scratched an itch that, hitherto unbeknownst¹⁶ to them, was common to all musicians.

Not much remains online of their MIDI Multitrack Sequencer (1984), not even a screen capture¹⁷. But that’s possibly because that tool was quickly surpassed by Steinberg’s next creation, Pro-16, another MIDI sequencer which quickly gained quite a bit of success from the moment it was released in 1985.

There are many different software sequencers on the market for the CBM 64¹⁸ and they all have something to offer, but none of them are as complete and easy to use as this one. Well done Steinberg: 10 out of 10!

A review of Steinberg Pro16 MIDI Sequencer, aptly titled « The Professional’s Choice« , in Sound on Sound (April 1986).

You can record the notes of a MIDI keyboard, track by track, and replay all tracks in parallel, up to 16 tracks, even with effects like the pitch wheel.

To our 2023 eyes, it looks pretty basic and clunky, but at the times, it was an eye-opener on the possibilities offered to everyone, professionals and hobbyists alike.

Alright, I hear you, « Enough already with the History lesson! »

Did I succeed in contacting them?

My attempts at talking with « those who know »

I agree, this subtitle does not bode well…

Well, I figured I would never be able to contact neither of the Steinberg co-founders directly, so I tried to go the official route:

No answer. Figures.

Let’s get personal, then!
Karl « Charlie » Steinberg has an old-school online presence, where he writes about current projects — ever since he sold Steinberg to Pinnacle in 2003, I suppose he has a lot more free time on his hands. The website doesn’t look quite up-to-date, but he seems to enjoy being the keyboardist for the German band Stier.
Sadly, I cannot find a contact email on his website — I guess we can understand that he doesn’t want to be too easy to contact.
Oh well…

I couldn’t find an online presence for Manfred Rürup, nor Nicole Rürup¹⁹. Damn.
Where to look?

With their early success and growing projects, Karl Steinberg and the Rürups started hiring employees, and were soon joined by musician and software developer Werner Kracht in 1985.
Mr. Kracht worked for Steinberg Research on a couple of educational products, then in 1986 he developed the successor to Pro-16, called Pro-24, for the Atari ST^{20 21}.
Herr Kracht wrote Pro-24 on the Atari ST pretty much on his own, because Herr Steinberg was very busy producing various OEM versions of Pro-16 for different hardware manufacturers — it was a real money-maker for them at the time.

Pro-24 was the first music software written for the Atari. It had quite an impact on the industry as a whole.
That first step on the Atari ST market was key for the Steinberg business, as it would lead three years later to the creation of Cubase in 1989 — mostly created by Mr. Kracht and a small team, as I understand.

Werner Kracht does have a nice online presence, with extensive information about his musical whereabouts — and a long, informative and ultimately bittersweet write-up of his programming endeavors and his relationship with the Steinberg company as a contractor for 25 years (written in German; Google Translate link).
Of note, there is also this recent in-depth video interview (which, yes, I watched from beginning to end). He also published several videos from his early work at Steinberg.

I found his email address on one of the pages on his website.
So let’s contact Mr. Kracht!

Well, that didn’t pay off.
My Steinberg early-employees lead dries up…

In order to get first-hand information, I need to contact Mr Steinberg himself, it seems. An impossible task, I suppose: finding the direct contact address of the former CEO of one of the greatest music company there is!

Oh well…

But.

There’s this one webpage. With an email address.

Where… Maybe? It doesn’t seem to be directly tied to… but we never know… doesn’t hurt to try I guess?

…and, what do you know, the very next day:

My friends, two years after I started this on-and-off quest, I was in direct contact with Karl Steinberg.

Let’s breathe a little.

Interviewing Karl Steinberg

Mr Steinberg (I’ll call him Karl from there on²²) seemed genuinely interested in digging in his memories (and even his attic!) to retrieve memories, send me screenshots and pictures, and generally answer my questions.

So, let’s copy-paste from those emails, shall we?

XB: By email, Mr. Hülsbeck told me that his « inspiration for the note representation came from an early C64 midi sequencer by Steinberg, which didn’t display notes as symbols, but as a list of single letter note name, an optional ‘sharp’ symbol if needed and a number for the octave ». He later wrote that his inspiration was the « MIDI Multitrack Sequenzer » from Steinberg.

KS: As nice as it sounds, I cannot confirm that.

Our first C64 Program was indeed named « Midi Multitrack Sequencer », little known, and so it’s hard to even find a picture (see below).

It already had the « Songtable » which was later continued in its successor, Pro 16.
But there was no MIDI editing with Midi Multitrack Sequencer. Pro 16 later featured a keyroll editor (quite remarkable for that time if I may say so). Midi Multitrack Sequencer had a quantize feature²⁴, which would also allow for double- or half-speed playback, and transpose²⁵; it also even featured sync (Roland) via a proprietary sync interface

I assume you (or Chris) are referring to JMS (Jellinghaus Music Systems) Multitrack Composer (see picture).

Jellinghaus had a MIDI Interface first which was quite similar to ours (UART), and added that list-based sequencer software which is the first I can remember. Given that it was released around 1984, we were quite fast to create a sequencer with « UI »

Private e-mail interview from April 2021²⁶.

Alert, alert, a new player has entered the game!
Karl here mentions Jellinghaus, a company I have never heard of before! And indeed, seeing from the picture he sent me, their tool does seem to include « text-based » notes that musicians will see again appear in Soundmonitor and, eventually, The Ultimate Soundtracker and all of its clones.

Looks like I’m gonna have to dig up information about that Jellinghaus Music Systems!

However, Karl did send me this picture of Pro 16’s Key Editor, which clearly features « textual » notes on the left column: F5, D5, E4, with a # for black keys.

So, could Chris Hülsbeck really have been inspired by Steinberg’s Pro 16 rather than their Midi Multitrack Sequencer — or even the Jellinghaus system?

I asked Chris directly, sending him the Jellinghaus and Pro-16 images above:

I’m pretty sure it was the MIDI Multitrack Sequencer, but there are no screenshots online from the pattern page and as far as I know the software doesn’t run without the Steinberg Midi Interface hardware… so it may have been the Pro-16 too… it’s been such a long time ago!

From private e-mail exchange from September 2023.

I further sent him the Multitrack Sequencer single screen that Karl sent me.

Yes, then the pattern page may have been from Pro-16…

Maybe I was also dreaming about a pattern edit page… maybe they did not even have one… the color scheme and blinking cursor definitely more resembles the Pro-16, but everything is so hazy at this point…

From private e-mail exchange from September 2023.

So, not quite a definitive answer there. Since all of this happened some 40 years ago, I can understand the foggy memories
But since Steinberg’s Pro-16 was being reviewed by a UK magazine in February 1986, and Chris Hülsbeck wrote his own Soundmonitor in the Summer of 1986, then it could definitely still be a match — although quite a tight one, I’ll admit.

Anyway, that Jellinghaus thing is an interesting story in itself, but that’s for another article; let’s continue talking with Karl Steinberg about the early Steinberg history.

XB: [Were you] the sole developer of the C64 Multitrack Recorder and Pro-16?

KS: Yes, I pretty much developed those two programs by myself. Then Pro 24 followed on the Amiga, which was mostly done by Mr. Werner Kracht, myself adding some « low-level » stuff. There was also a version of Pro 16 for the Mac II if I remember correctly, ported by somebody else whose name I forgot.

XB: [What were your inspirations for these tools?]

KS: My inspirations were just to see that it was possible; we only just had started to deal with computers. We (Manfred Ruerup, co-founder, and me) were busy in a decent studio (Delta Studios Wilster), Manfred sold keyboards at Amptown Hamburg and always brought in the latest gear, so there was a lot of inspiration from that end. Also I guess sequential drumtracks was inspiring quantize and pattern concepts.
(…)
Later we dealt with samplers, [Fairlight] CMI, [Sequential] Prophet, etc., triggered everything with everything via the studio patchbay and so forth.

Adapted from private e-mail interview from April 2021.

Alert, alert, we have inspiration!
Karl mentions « sequential drumtracks », which I assume means « drum machines » — but he could also be talking specifically about the DrumTraks drum machine, released in 1983 by the Sequential company (hence, Sequential DrumTraks, with proper capitalization!) — whose CEO, the late Dave Smith (archive), co-authored in 1982 the MIDI specification itself.

Again, a story for another article — but let’s keep in mind that « sequences » and « patterns » were nothing new in the 1983 world of digital music²⁸.

Let’s see his other answers.

XB: I’d like to find out whether [you] invented the whole « pattern of notes » representation, or if [you] got inspired from somewhere else, like a drum machine or the famous Fairlight CMI Series II.

KS: See [my previous answer]
(…)
Not sure what you mean by « pattern of notes »; list-based sequencers like the JMS mentioned above, were probably the first to allow MIDI editing, and that was the obvious choice for computer-based systems as a first step.

Not sure if there were piano-roll type MIDI editors before the Pro 16 addition – it also even featured a score editor later on.

(…)

As for inspirations, I’m certain that it was not only me who was inspired by drum machines. Those were based on patterns and « songtables » (chain of patterns) and featured MIDI, and were the first devices to combine this, so it was kinda obvious to start off from that ground.

Trackers are more closely related to « list-based » sequencers which in turn were the obvious choice from a (pre-)80s computer point of view. There was practically no graphics until Apple, and then Commodore, and then Amiga and many others to follow, and until then you’d have to use computers for music like a typewriter.

(…)

One more note…nothing I say here is proven truth; memories are often changing over time, and I’m particularly bad at this

Ibid.

As I wrote to Karl, his answers brought me new clues and new directions to find when the « jump » of the sequencer idea from hardware to software happened.

I’m closing this interview with the following: a picture of the Card 32, the MIDI interface that Karl created along with Pro-16, followed by his very own comment on it:

As I understand, Pro-16 was not sold as a software on a floppy disk or cassette: it was sold as part of the EPROM of the MIDI interface itself, thus bypassing any other system request²⁹! Incredible piece of equipment…

Oh well, let’s drop a couple more pics, just because I can

And now I can be satisfied in knowing I gave you everything I know

It’s interesting in that it seems to have walked parallel paths:

• The people behind the Fairlight CMI Series II’s « Page R » feature where inspired by a drum machine³⁰ — but this was more about step sequencing, so that did not directly inspire trackers such as the Amiga Soundtracker.

• And now, it seems the « Commodore line » follows this path: Jellinghaus’ Multitrack Composer Steinberg’s MIDI Multitrack Sequencer Chris Hülsbeck’s Soundmonitor Karsten Obarski’s Ultimate Soundtracker — each taking inspiration from the previous one, and adding a significant progress to the initial idea.
  Their common aspect: describing notes not as in a graphical representation, like the Fairlight CMI II’s Page R did³¹, but as « text-based » sequences, such A-3, B-5, F#2³², etc.

Indeed, it looks like the pioneers at the time were quite fast in taking inspiration and improving upon each other’s ideas! What a time it must have been to be in that field!

Now, I have to find out the ones who created the JMS Multitrack Composer — and it seems I’m getting close, as a quick search seems to indicate that they were hardware producers mainly.

So, there ends an important milestone in my little quest!

The next parts will focus on each of the two parallel paths that I highlighted above:

• The Fairlight CMI path: finding out how they came up with the idea for their Page R sequencer.
• The « Commodore » path, going down the JMS rabbit hole, and their Multitrack Composer.

Will there be more parts? Who knows? I sure don’t!

Onwards!

You thought it was over, right?

That would be too easy…

Get ready foooooor: an Á̸͈̣̉͆͊̈́̚͝Ḑ̵̧͕͙̀̅̽̎͊͂̿̏̀͒͛̽͘̕͠D̵̢̥̩̫͈̠̘̫̫͎̰̯͈̘̉͌Ḙ̵̱̖̺̜̼̬̰̟͒̐͒̇̿̌̂̔̊̕͘͘N̷̢̯̜̈́́̿̀̄̀̍͑͌̇͗̓̕̚D̶̹̪̈́̿͛̃̏̔̔͋͑́Ų̷̳̱̮͍̪̬͍̥͓̺̯͉͑͐̐M̵̨̢͈̐͠!!!

Addendum: Manfred Rürup’s take

Since 2023 is definitely not like 2019³³, I’ve decided to approach Mr. Rürup, in order to have his own take on the whole thing, and possibly bring a different perspective.

So here goes, a short interview!

XB: Reading various early interviews (notably this one from 1986 and this one from 1992), it sounds like that Nicole was the designer, Karl was the technician and you were the marketing/salesman. Was that as binary as that, or did you share duties? 

MR: That is correct.

Nicole did not design UI or anything like that. She did all the print advertisements and the manuals. 

Private e-mail interview from September 2023.

As a technical writer myself, I can tell you that just producing the documentation for this is no small taks — but it seems she did it « with an electric typing machine, all the illustrations are ASCII art (!!!) and all the binding and transparent plastic cover are typical office stationary from the ’80s« , as per this eBay UK listing, which I’m taking the image below from.

So, yeah, quite a task in itself!

XB: I mention Nicole, your wife, because she was part of the initial team, as I understand, but I hardly see her name in interviews — most of the time, she’s there as « support », or as manual and adverts designer. How did her role grow with the success of the company? Or did she move to another line of work / company eventually?

MR: She continued to do advertisements and graphics and the manuals. A lot to do, as the software became very complex and so the manuals [grew] bigger and bigger.

Ibid.

XB: It seems that Steinberg’s very first product was the MIDI Multitrack Sequencer. Do you remember if it was influenced by an existing product, hardware or software? What were the competitors at the time in the MIDI market? 

MR: The MIDI Multitrack Sequencer was a single page product, because we preferred one page and no menus which lead to another page. I think it was pretty unique. 

Ibid.

XB: How many copies do you think were sold before you moved on to bigger things? This article says « fewer than 50 copies », and in this one you are quoted as saying « when you sell ten MIDI packages, that’s « big business » (laughter) ». Is the real number in between?

MR: The real number is probably around 50 copies. 

Ibid.

Remember the quote from the interview earlier in this article? « When you sell ten MIDI packages, that’s big business (laughter) ». Well, I suppose selling 5 times above your expectations is a sure sign that your little hobby is onto something, and you should push forward. I’m glad they did!

XB: Who did you mostly sell it to? Did it spread outside of Hamburg, to your knowledge?

MR: I think all over Germany and Austria. 

Ibid.

Chris Hüelsbeck was born in Kassel (300 km from Hamburg) and worked for Rainbow Arts in Gütersloh (267 km from Hamburg), so yeah, I suppose he could have found a copy a Steinberg’s early tools at the time.

Funny thing is: both roads from Kassel and Gütersloh to Hamburg pass through Hanover — which is where the CeBIT, the « largest and most internationally representative computer expo » at the time, happened from 1970 to 2018. So information and ideas certainly spread around from this epicenter

XB: Mr. Steinberg told me about the Jellinghaus Multitrack Composer. Do you have recollection of that tool, of the Jellinghaus company itself, or even of their C64 development team?

MR: What do you mean by « recollection »? Never met them [then nor] since then.

Ibid.

I had to try…

XB: My understanding is that, after the MIDI Multitrack Sequencer, there were a few OEM product and the Pro-16, made by Mr. Steinberg on C64, then Pro-24, made mainly by Mr. Kracht on Atari. Eventually it all lead to Cubase on the Atari, but who’s was the main programmer of Cubit/Cubase 1.0, Mr. Steinberg or Mr. Kracht (or someone else)?

MR: Cubit/Cubase was a team-work of Werner Kracht, Wolfgang Kundrus, Stefan Scheffler, Michael Michaelis and Charly Steinberg. 

Ibid.

Many names, which I could interview, but really, it’s time for this article to be released.

For those interested, here is an in-depth and recent video interview of Wolfgang Kundrus; and Michael Michaelis has a lot of opinions and shares them on his website (en German).
Also, did he forget about Chris Mercer?

XB: It seems to me that Mr. Steinberg was mostly working on M-ROS and low-level stuff, while Kracht (and a team?) worked on the main interface. Is that right?

MR: The architecture and UI idea came from Wolfgang Kundrus, Werner Kracht did the data-storage and handling, Charly Steinberg did M-ROS and other things, Michael Michaelis did work for the scoring and Stefan Scheffler did the integration of the User-Interface funktions. 

Ibid.

I have to say a word about M-ROS, for the sake of completeness.

The MIDI Real-time Operating System (M-ROS) was a very innovative alternative operating system, which worked on several platforms (Atari, Apple), and brought true multitasking to systems that weren’t quite able to do that by themselves. Since MIDI meant having different tools working together in (hopefully) real time, M-ROS turned to be essential to the success of that protocol — provided that those tools were written for M-ROS.

It eventually lead to the ReWire protocol, conceived by Propellerhead (makers of Reason) and Steinberg, which was very much used by most other DAWs from 1998 to 2020.

So, no small feat for Karl to be so prescient and technical in 1989!

XB: Did you yourself do any programming on the Steinberg tools?

MR: No, not a single line.

Ibid.

I suppose Manfred is great with a piano keyboard, less so with a computer one

And that’s it, my friends.

Let’s close this chapter about Steinberg by remembering that they were first and foremost musicians who were passionate about music and helping other musicians achieve their dream!

Find a copy of this home-made album to convince yourself

Other articles in this series:

1. Soundtracking sur Amiga : passion, explications et exemples — The Twitter thread that started it all (in French).
2. Soundtracker origins, part 1: Where in the World is Karsten Obarski? — About Karsten Obarski, author of The Ultimate Soundtracker.
3. The origin of Soundtracker’s MOD format — When you see a Twitter thread with key information, it is your duty to preserve it.
4. Soundtracker origins, part 2: Welcome to Turrican, aah hahahaha — About Chris Hülsbeck, author of Soundmonitor.
5. Soundtracker origins, part 3: Facing a stone mountain — About Karl Steinberg, author of MIDI Multitrack Sequencer.
6. Soundtracker Origins, interlude: The coders behind the Cambrian explosion — Where I get to interview a few key people in the Soundtracker saga.

Préambule

Je ne suis pas fou.

Dramaticule

Longtemps je me suis levé de pas si bonne heure, mon seul objectif restant, une fois les nuages dissipés, de me poser devant le téléviseur familial et de tremper l’une après l’autre mes deux tartines matinales dans mon mug de chocolat chaud (et matinal).
Petit-déjeuner classique, certes, à cet âge, mais petit-déjeuner de champion quand même.

Cette coutume m’a suivi une fois le nid parental quitté et le CDI trouvé. Ce dernier a d’ailleurs eu une forte influence sur mes matinées : je me devais d’arriver à l’heure au bureau malgré la distance en trains de banlieue, mais je ne voulais pas pour autant sacrifier mes heures de sommeil.
J’ai donc choisi le sacrifice ultime : fi des tartines tartinées ; fi de la poudre de cacao lactée. Juste le lait, frais, dans un verre, siroté en regardant pensivement par la fenêtre.

Toujours le même verre, bleu ; toujours le même format de bouteille de lait, avec une poignée. Consistency is key.

J’avais à l’époque cette curieuse compréhension, sans doute d’influence familiale, qu’il ne fallait pas retirer entièrement l’opercule afin de mieux préserver le lait¹. Je l’ouvrais donc seulement à moitié, versais le blanc nectar, repliais l’aluminium de l’opercule pour recouvrir l’orifice de la bouteille, et vissais le capuchon par-dessus l’opercule replié avant de ranger le tout au frigo, bien à la verticale, jusqu’au lendemain matin.

Combien de bouteilles bues ? combien d’opercules semi-ouverts ? je ne saurai l’estimer…

… si ce n’est pour cette courte période de ma vie où je les ais comptées.

Opercule

Comme l’a rappelé Jeff Buckley en introduction de Night Flight, l’une de ses reprises du Sin-é EP, « If you do anything regularly for a while, sooner or later, the weirdoes will show up« .

Bon, là, seul dans ma cuisine avec ma bouteille de lait, il me revenait de jouer le rôle du weirdo.

En l’occurrence, cet opercule me questionnait. Surtout, le placement de la languette du-dit opercule, qui faisait que l’on ouvrait icelui dans un sens ou dans un autre.

À force d’ouvrir moult opercules pour moult bouteilles à l’aide de² moult languettes, j’en suis venu à un questionnement fondamental, pendant le pensif sirotage matinal de lait devant la fenêtre :

Les bouteilles de lait sont-elles majoritairement conçues pour les droitiers ou les gauchers ?

Source : tkt frer

Bear with me for a minute, and you’ll see what I mean.

Voyez-vous, la languette n’est pas toujours placée exactement au même endroit sur l’orifice. Résultat, si l’on se repose systématiquement sur celle-ci pour ouvrir à moitié l’opercule (en tirant sur la languette), on se retrouve avec un versement idéal du lait qui se fait tantôt vers la gauche, tantôt vers la droite de la poignée de la bouteille.

Ainsi, certains matins tout va bien et l’on peut verser le lait avec sa main dominante. Et certains autres matins, on ouvre l’opercule pour se rendre compte que, pour les quelques verres à venir, on devra faire le versement à l’aide de l’autre main³. Ewww…

Deux images valant deux mille mots, voici :

Comment savoir si la filière laitière de l’industrie agroalimentaire mondiale ne fomente pas en ce moment même un complot visant l’une ou l’autre de nos chères préférences manuelles⁴ ?

Oui, vraiment, comment ? Qui pour nous défendre ? Quel chevalier blanc aura un destrier assez fier pour mener à bien ce combat pour les générations futures ?

Oui, qui ?

*soupir*

Notule

J’ai donc commencé à garder les bouteilles que j’ouvrais (et buvais), prenant soin de les nettoyer et surtout de les conserver avec leurs opercules encore attachés.

Lorsque j’ai décidé de mettre fin à mon inlassable collecte de données, j’avais 73 bouteilles en stock, dans je ne sais combien de cartons — mais en tout cas, ça prenait de la place dans ma cave.

Pourquoi les avoir stockées ? Pourquoi ne pas avoir, pour chaque bouteille ouverte par la languette de l’opercule, simplement pris note du sens de la-dite ouverture, et puis jeté la bouteille une fois les notes terminées ?

Parce qu’il est facile de falsifier des preuves. Je voulais agir en bon scientifique, et pouvoir montrer des preuves de ce que j’avançais. Cela supposait une photo finale, regroupant toutes les bouteilles.

Cette photo, en somme :

Ou, pour la science, celle sans capuchons (attention les yeux) :

Notez que toutes les poignées des bouteilles sont dans le même sens, mais pas les languettes ! #complot !

J’ai bien d’autres photos, que j’enverrai à toute publication scientifique sérieuse qui voudra se faire l’écho de cette étude sourcée. Haha.

Calcul

J’avais donc plein de bouteilles en stock, mais pas de notes. Clairement, je faisais de la collectionnite en attendant la motivation pour La Science.

Cette motivation est venue non pas au premier déménagement de mon charmant couple, mais juste avant le second, en 2017. Allais-je déménager à nouveau avec X cartons de bouteilles de lait vides⁵ ? Non, non, soyons raisonnables⁶.

J’ai donc pris mon courage à deux mains une après-midi, tandis que nous commencions à mettre en carton nos affaires utiles, elles.

J’ai étalé les bouteilles sur notre table du salon, comme le montre si bien la photo ci-dessus, et j’ai débouchonné avec ténacité, et j’ai pris des photos, et surtout, pour reprendre la citation elle-même ci-dessus, j’ai (enfin) pris des notes. Science!

Quelles notes prendre ?
On pourrait se limiter à la base : le sens de l’ouverture, indiquant qui celle-ci favorisait.

Cela nous donnerait les statistiques de favoritisme suivantes :

• D pour les droitiers,
• G pour les gauchers,
• A pour les ambidextres (meilleur scénario matinal),
• et AA pour un opercule anti-ambidextre (pire scénario au réveil).

Mais la Science requiert la Vérité Totale. Alors j’ai noté toutes les métadonnées que je pouvais trouver sur l’étiquette ou le bouchon :

• Marque (toujours Candia)
• Produit (toujours GrandLait)
• Type (toujours demi-écrémé)
• Contenance (majoritairement 1L, avec de rares 1,5L)
• Code barre
• Date DLC
• Et d’autres indications que je n’ai pas su déchiffrer : F16, F21, D.12181.F, DE, T64, etc.

Voici le fichier.

Par la puissance de Google Sheet⁷, voici le graphique qui révélera à vos yeux ébaubis toute la triste vérité :

Force est de constater qu’il y a :

• presque autant de G que de D,
• presque autant de A que de AA.

Il appert donc que le distribution de la languette permettant l’ouverture sereine d’une bouteille de lait GrandLait de Candia se fasse de manière tout a fait aléatoire.

La triste vérité est donc que nous obtenons un résultat tristement normal.

Mpff…

Ou alors… Il y a 4 G de plus que de D… Serait-ce là la marque d’un complot plus insidieux et subtil que je n’osais l’imaginer ? Les gauchers sont-ils à très long terme une menace pour les buveurs de lait droitiers ?

L’enquête doit-elle vraiment s’arrêter là ?

Voilà, c’est fait, toutes les données ont été saisies, je vais pouvoir vider quelques cartons et… remplir une poubelle verte.

Ceci étant fait, je m’empresse de finir mon déménagement, laissant promptement toute cette petite histoire se perdre dans les limbes du Pacifique…

Pédoncule

Mangez des pommes.

Postambule

2023.

J’ai depuis longtemps oublié ces relevés, ces bouteilles et ces opercules — ce malgré les litres de lait écoulés depuis pour l’Enfant. Mais le lait est maintenant acheté en briques de carton, pour des questions de compression et de place dans la poubelle, et point d’opercule en vue.

… Jusqu’à ce que j’achète une bouteille de lait, par manque de brique cette semaine-là au magasin, j’imagine. Candia GrandLait, très bien, ça fera l’affaire.

Un matin je sors la bouteille du stock afin de préparer le biberon du Saint Enfant. Je retire le capuchon et… je me retrouve face à l’opercule, qui protège hermétiquement le contenu liquide. Et à nouveau, face à ce questionnement cosmique d’antan.

Je suis ramené à ce délire d’il y a quelques années, je me demande où sont passées les photos⁸, je me rends compte que depuis j’ai compris que l’opercule doit être entièrement retiré⁹, je me souviens de toutes ces bouteilles qui occupaient plusieurs tiroirs¹⁰ puis des cartons entiers¹¹, cartons qui ont déménagé d’un appartement à l’autre avant que je ne me décide à les prendre en photo et jeter le tout¹².

Je retrouverai le soir-même sur mon GDrive le fichier GSheet des relevés. Il est daté du 14 mai 2017, presque 6 ans jour pour jour avant le début de la rédaction du présent article. Les relevés des données des bouteilles indiquent des dates limites de consommation allant de 2012 à 2014, soit 10 ans avant ma redécouverte de ce fichier (2023).
J’ai donc conservé ces bouteilles pendant 3 à 5 ans avant de prendre des notes, des photos, et de jeter le tout¹³.

Et je me retrouve ce matin, par les hasards du Temps et du Destin, face à la 74e bouteille. La dernière bouteille.

Peut-être est-ce là l’occasion de l’écrire, cet article trop long résumant tout ce projet ridicule ? Il me faudrait une chute.

Allez, le petit réclame son petit-déjeuner.

Je retire l’opercule en commençant par la languette, et :

It’s high time I write part two of this series of articles on the origins of Soundtracker, since the content itself has been lying in my inbox for well over two years now…

As a reminder: I’ve been writing about my « quest » of looking for the missing link between what seems to be the first « tracker-like » interface¹ and Karsten Obarski’s Ultimate Soundtracker tool, which introduced a cheap tracker interface² to Amiga musicians back in 1987.

So, where were we?

In part 1 of this series, we learnt more about Karsten Obarski, who became the « Father of the Soundtracker » at age 22. Through existing interviews, we got to understand where he came from, how he came to create his Ultimate Soundtracker tool on Amiga in 1987, why he called it quits a few months afterwards… and where he probably took his inspiration for The Ultimate Soundtracker.

Said inspiration was, by all accounts, an earlier tool named Soundmonitor, which German developer & musician Chris Hülsbeck wrote and released on Commodore 64 in 1986 — a year before Obarski’s own Ultimate Soundtracker. Hülsbeck was 18.

Chris Hülsbeck went on to become world-famous by creating game music, not the least being the Turrican series of games³. He nowadays creates royalty-free music, and oversees orchestral renditions of the Turrican soundtrack, amongst other things. Looking at his Bandcamp page, you could say he keeps himself busy. Buy the vinyls!

So that’s the status of our quest: Soundmonitor seems to have been the original tracker.

Or was it?

Writing computer game music in the 80’s

There’s much to learn about Chris Hülsbeck’s context at the time when he wrote Soundmonitor, back in 1986.

The context is: there were no music tools for the general public — even for seasoned amateurs. The first tools were very expensive and inaccessible to most musicians — let alone people who wrote computer game music.
The Fairlight CMI that I mentioned above⁴ was only used by a handful of people, for instance, and they were wealthy household names already: Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock⁵, Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush⁶, etc. Anecdote: The Miami Vice theme was composed on that tool ⁷.

Before the arrival of affordable tracking software such as Soundmonitor and Ultimate Soundtracker, game musicians had to rely on their programming skills to write their music. Game musicians were, for what it’s worth, programmers before anything else.
Eventually they did write their own music software, however crude and just for themselves, compiling their usual tricks into something easier to use on a regular basis, so as to be more productive.
But in the early days, they simply wrote their music in machine code, adding one hexadecimal value after the other in the code, in order to change volume, pitch⁸, or type of soundwave.

Let’s take Rob Hubbard⁹, for instance. A professional studio musician by trade, he got interested in computers in the early 80’s, at roughly 27. He learned to program in Assembly language¹⁰, wrote music tooling, got hired as a game musician, and within a handful of years became of legend¹¹ of what is now known as « chiptune » music — music that exploits the sound chip included in computers at the time. Rob was a master at that.

Here’s an example of what great C64 game music sounded like in 1985:

He became a master because he knew about analogue synthesizers before he got into computer music, and thus he understood the possibilities offered by their sound chip — namely, the equally legendary SID chip, whose sound is still very much appreciated today¹². Hubbard knew he could program the chip’s registers, and he did that aplenty.

Says the man himself in this video interview from 2017:

« I knew all the chromatic pitches pretty much all by heart in hexadecimal. 30x would be a C, 3Cx would be the octave above that, 48x would be the octave above that…
I knew all the numbers: I could get a machine dump and recognize exactly what was going on. »

« I used to know the SID chip inside & out. The filters were always different on the SID chip, you could never rely on them. »

« The Atari has an 8-bit register, so as you got higher in pitch, the resolution got less and less, it becomes very difficult to get certain notes in tune. You write your music around the fact that as you went higher, you could only rely on 3 or 4 pitches. »

« Three channels is basically all you had at your hand, so there was no choice. Later on I did manage to squeeze more out of it because I developed a digital channel as well. People were doing digital audio, using digital samples, and I was the first person who incorporated that into music, so that I could try to get a rock guitar in there with the SID chip, which was just unbelievable pain in the ass, because you’re using four bit, so the volume register (…)

Sounds like a tedious way of writing music — but not that far off from the Soundmonitor screen you see at the top of this article, ain’t it? And Soundmonitor was easy in comparison. Rob Hubbard, and the other genius composers of that golden era, wrote their music right in the code, in hexadecimal if need be.

His C64-Wiki page even says so:

He admits to having 3 ways of working:

• write directly with the C64 by poking bytes using a machine code monitor;
• write using a pen and paper;
• sit at the keyboard and play until the ideas come out.

« Poking bytes using a machine code monitor ». Let that sink in. Now tracker programs look more visually pleasing, for sure.

And, well, the man himself described the musical landscape of the times in this interview:

Kenz: How did you go about composing your C64 tunes? Did you have a music editor that you used, as there were often rumours you used one you made yourself?
Rob: No, I just used an assembler and edited the source code – most people in those days did the same. There really wasn’t time to sit and write an editor, as there was so much work to do.

Commodore Zone interview.
We can also read in that page that he used Mikro Assembler by Andrew Trott, whose current homepage… mentions his interest for the Fairlight CMI. It’s all tied up, I tell ya!

And in another one:

Had you ever considered a music utility yourself?

« No, because I can’t think of any way to make my methods accessible enough to the average punter to make it worth while. »

Another Commodore Zone interview.

Music-making was thus confined to the programming elite.
Says Rob:

« It’s taken me [a] long while to develop my routines, and I’m not about to give them away! » (Rob hinted that one company which had made free with one of his demo disks might shortly regret having lifted his routines!).

Still that Commodore Zone interview.

Trackers were a few years away, because Chris Hülsbeck had yet to release his paradigm-shifting tool.

Let’s get to that.

The birth of Soundmonitor

Chris Hülsbeck was 18 when he « released »¹³ his Soundmonitor tool, in 1986.
What does a teenage geek do in his spare time? Painstakingly type down type-ins from computer magazines of course!

« Type-ins« ? Old farts like me remember buying magazines full of source code, hundreds of pages of them, that you would bring home and then type for hours on your computer, eventually compiling this code into a program or a small game — or a set of system-crashing errors if you typed something wrong. When it did work, that feeling of pride was immense: You had typed it; it was your work of art.
To many, this was the first introduction to programming — as well as English.

Of course the Internet existed since 1983 for some happy fews, and BBSs (bulletin board systems) were already a thing, but modems were still expensive in those days, and consumer-centric machines such as the C64, Atari ST or Amiga 500 weren’t equipped for global communication out of the box.

Magazines started to feature covermounts¹⁵ (a cover cassettes or floppy, eventually a cover CD-ROM) in the mid-80’s. But still, type-ins were quite popular in the 8-bit era.¹⁶

Alright alright alright, why am I rambling on about type-ins, you ask? Because that’s how Chris Hülsbeck got his start in the computer music world.

See, in early 1986, German computer magazine « 64’er » launched a music competition. You guessed it, the winner was 18-year-old Christopher Hülsbeck, with this piece of music:

If that doesn’t sound like much to your 2022 ears, read what the jury had to say:

It wasn’t easy for us to decide which song was the best – until we heard « Shades » by Chris Hülsbeck. A short breathless moment of silence, a restart, another short listen and then it was clear to us: this is the winner!

The truly unique composition of « Shades » deserves a lot of credit. Comparisons with the creations of professionals like Jean-Michel Jarre, Eberhard Schöner and similar synthesizer jugglers are not even that far-fetched.
« Shades » also compares favourably with the creations of the well-known C64 music professionals Rob Hubard (he wrote the music for the game « Thing on a Spring », for example) and Martin Galway (« Comic Bakery »).

About the future of the young Chris Hülsbeck one can assume: He can become one of them.

(…)
One more point that needs to be said: When we presented « Shades » for the first time to the C64 fans at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, many thought that this piece of music had been « borrowed » from some professional game. But this is not the case.

64’er, June 1986, translated.
If you’re nostalgic for shoulder pads, check out this 1986 CeBIT news report

The interesting part is that the whole piece of music was made available to the 64’er readers, through a 3-pages, 8-columnes long type-in fully in hexadecimal¹⁷.

Even more interesting to us, right in the article presenting the winner, the editorial staff wrote: « Chris Hülsbeck, der Programmierer des Musikstückes »Shades« arbeitet derzeit an einem Editorprogramm » (« Chris Hülsbeck, the programmer of the music piece « Shades » is currently working on an editor program. »)

And, what do you know, five months later came this:

When we started to evaluate our music competition a few months ago, the piece of music « Shades » by Chris Hülsbeck amazed us with some fantastic sounds. Until then, we were only used to something like this from professionals such as Rob Hubbard.

On an enclosed note, Chris Hülsbeck asked if we would like to have the music routine for publication. At that time Chris was programming the routine in an uncomfortable way with a machine language monitor. On the phone, he promised to write an editor around the « music master » (as Chris christened the music routine).

When the sound monitor was finished, we were so impressed that we wanted to make it available to other readers. It became the listing of the month.

64’er, October 1986, translated.

Follows a manual written by Hülsbeck himself, and then this, the type-in for the Soundmonitor program:

Fortunately, you could mail-order a cassette with the program on it. Phew. Enough type-ins already!

Thus was first released Soundmonitor, true father of the trackers. Or is it?

While I started my exploration thinking that Karsten Obarski came up with the tracker layout, it seems Ultimate Soundtracker mostly re-used the layout introduced by Soundmonitor, improving it thanks to the Amiga graphic abilities — and benefiting from the Paula chip, meaning 4 audio channels and the ability to use samples rather than synth sounds.

Now, to find out whether Chris Hülsbeck, in turn, found inspiration elsewhere…

More context setting¹⁸

Chris’ « manual », published in the 64’er magazine, offers some information of how Soundmonitor came to be, and how advanced it was at the time.

The sound chip of the C64 offers considerable possibilities, but unfortunately the comfort of programming leaves a lot to be desired.
There are already several programmes that support the programming of the SID. Most of them are designed in such a way that you can place notes on the corresponding staves or play sounds via the keyboard.
Even complete music studios are simulated, but all known programmes have a decisive disadvantage: the composed music can only be played if the complete programme is in the memory. If you want to place a piece of music in a self-written basic game, for example, you are ill-served with these programs.

That’s why a completely independent playback routine was programmed, which is called « Musicmaster ». With the appropriate data, results are achieved that can even surpass background music from professional games.
However, it would be extremely uncomfortable if the music data had to be entered with a normal machine language monitor, such as SMON. The piece of music « Shades » was composed in this way, which was time-consuming work.

For this reason, a « monitor » had to be developed that specifically supports the input of music data: the « sound monitor ». The programme differs from other sound editors in some essential features.
The main part of the programme, the playback routine, runs completely independently in interrupt. This means that the song can be listened to at any time, even during editing. This is an excellent control possibility, you can immediately hear what you are typing.
In addition, the sound monitor contains a « realtime-record » (recording of music while playing on the keyboard).

64’er, October 1986, translated.

Still, nothing about a possible predecessor, or an inspiration, or anything. Could it be that our quest ends here? That a passionate teenager simply came up with the tracker-format idea by himself, out of thin hair?

How could we know for sure?

Hm.

Let’s ask Chris Hülsbeck.

Interviewing Chris Hülsbeck

Unlike Karsten Obarski, who vanished shortly after releasing his Ultimate Soundtracker, Chris Hülsbeck has remained very active online: he makes royalty-free music through his Patreon, has all his music available on Bandcamp, maintains an active Twitter account, has released orchestral version of his most-known work, etc. You could say he keeps himself busy.

As you could see at the bottom of the first part of this series of article, I contacted Chris Hülsbeck back in 2019 through his website, not really expecting an answer — and getting one within 5 hours! Imagine being able to talk directly¹⁹ to someone whose music filled quite a few hours of your teenage years!

I’ll skip the overly long intro and context-setting from my email, since, well, I’ve already written that into this article

To the first question, then!

XB: Did you come up with the tracker layout for Soundmonitor, or did you get inspiration from the Fairlight CMI (or any other tool)?
Were you in contact with Karsten Obarski, or any other « music-programmer » of the time?

CH: Let me start a bit earlier – despite having had 2 years of piano lessons when I was 5 years old, I never got to properly learn or appreciate musical notation.
By the time I was starting to compose and « program » music on the C64 (around age 16), I had developed my own musical understanding and language, otherwise I would probably have tried to represent the notes in a graphical way just like other musical software at the time.

I didn’t know about the Fairlight sequencer page at the time, but the inspiration for the note representation came from an early C64 midi sequencer by Steinberg, which didn’t display notes as symbols, but as a list of single letter note name, an optional « sharp » symbol if needed and a number for the octave. This made the most sense to me for computer music and the rest came together just by needing a simple layout for the song data and the patterns.

I didn’t meet other music software programmers until years later.

Private e-mail interview from June 2019²⁰.

Alert, alert, we have an inspiration!
Chris used a tool by Steinberg, the editor of Cubase, the world-famous DAW²¹, and inventor of the de facto standard for digital audio plugins, VST²².

Back in the 80’s, Steinberg wasn’t the software superstar²³ that it is today. It was founded in 1984 by Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup, who were musicians and studio engineers, and their passion for the latest musical gear led them to write audio software, starting with the C64.

Their first best-selling software was « Pro-16 » from 1986, a tool able to manager up to 16 tracks of MIDI instruments…

… but their very fist tool was indeed named « Midi Multitrack Sequencer », and released in 1984²⁴.

So, any of these two tools could have been the inspiration for Soundmonitor, it seems, since they date from before 1986.
It’s hard to find any resemblance with the tracker layout of Ultimate Soundtracker or even Soundmonitor, but the inspiration might as well come from the way those earlier tools operated.

Let’s try and get some details from Chris.

XB: So I understand you came up with the tracker-like layout, inspired by « an early C64 midi sequencer by Steinberg ».
Do you remember the name of that sequencer? Was it Pro 16, Trackstar, or even an earlier tool?

CH: I’m actually not quite sure… maybe it was the « MIDI Multitrack Sequenzer ». I did also work with and loved the Pro-16, but I don’t remember if I did before or after the Soundmonitor.

Private e-mail interview from June 2019.

So, MIDI Multitrack Sequencer is the next step in our quest, it seems. And it’s not a small one, since Steinberg is a whole other kind of thing today.

It’s one thing to contact a music composer who is very much present online; it’s a whole other thing to contact the co-founder and CEO of a company whose later tool, Cubase, is used by a large portion of professional and amateur musicians today.

I’ll try my luck anyway. But that will be a topic for another post here — I don’t know if you noticed, but this article is quite long already

Continuing with the interview

Of course I had a few more questions I wanted to ask to the man whose music livened quite a few of my teenage gaming evenings, so here goes!

XB: Your first tune, Shades, was as far as I understand, written directly in machine code — all for a music competition for the 64er magazine, which you won.
What was your journey between writing your own music, and writing your own editor?
And which came first, the song or the editor?

CH: The creation of Shades was actually quite painful, because I had to edit the hexadecimal numbers representing the note data and everything else directly in the computer memory using a program called a « monitor ».

So my idea was to make a similar program, but tailored to sound data, hence the Soundmonitor was born. When I told the writer for the magazine who was responsible for the music contest about my plans he was very excited and suggested that I should submit it to the sister magazine Happy Computer for their « listing of the month » and it was accepted right away.

XB: In an interview, Rob Hubbard said that he composed his C64 tunes directly in assembler, « most people in those days did the same. There really wasn’t time to sit and write an editor, as there was so much work to do. »
Obviously you took the time to do it. Is it because you weren’t a professional at the time — and thus had more free time?

Who else was making a popular editor at the time?

CH: I was still in school and on Summer break when I created the Soundmonitor, so I wasn’t bogged down with professional music jobs yet (as Hubbard said).

I honestly don’t know of any other editors during that time.
The first scene music tracker I became aware of was actually just a hack of the Soundmonitor called Rockmonitor, which added one track of a rather crude sample playback (different from my own sample playback system, which I never released to the public).

I like the idea of professionals not having the time to take a step back and write a proper tool, and being beaten to the finish line by a teenager on Summer break

XB: By the way, on your SID Anthology vol 1, Shades is only the second track. Does it mean Planet of War, the first track, is your first officially released track?

CH: Planet of War was composed and programmed before Shades, with a much simpler player, but it was actually released after Shades because of a delay to find a publisher for the game. But for the album I felt it needed to be chronological in terms of when it was composed.

XB: So, just as for Shades, I understand that all musicians at the time were actually programmers with a gift for melody — which might explain why they were few and fondly remembered (Hubbard, Galway, Follin, etc.)
How much of composing at the time was a result of trial and error?

CH: It was very inspiring if I would find a cool new sound or trick when composing, but often I would develop my melodies just with a piano sound on my keyboard synth and then translate that melody into the machine.
In any case it was a very tedious and technical way of creating music and I think that is one reason only a handful of people developed the skills that truly set them apart from the rest.

XB: The published source code for Soundmonitor takes 5 magazine pages long (albeit, with 3 columns). I find that impressively small for a full musical program! Did you already introduce optimizations in there?

CH: The listing is not a source code, but an actual compressed binary… I never released the source code itself and it’s actually a horrible piece of mess because I was so young that I didn’t care about readability or that I would need to ever go back and understand it…

XB: As I understand it, one of the great step forward was that Soundmonitor could save and load files, with a separate playroutine, saving both time and space for other musicians. Was that also a creation of yours, or did you get inspired from others?

CH: That was just a very cool idea I had to give people the ability to put music into their own games or demos, even if they had only very basic programming skills. It also made it very easy for people to share their music and recipients didn’t even need the editor to listen…

XB: In an interview in 1992, Karsten Obarski said that « Even today’s trackers work in that same way, and still use the tone-event data structures which I invented. (Which is a very simple one.) » Do you understand what he means by « tone-event data structures »? I have an idea, but maybe that talks to you more?

CH: No exact idea, but I assume it’s got something to do with how his sequencer triggers notes and modulations. The Soundtracker format was much more streamlined compared to the Soundmonitor and had real memory management, so you couldn’t easily crash it by making mistakes, but I feel that also made it somewhat less flexible. Because trackers are easier to learn and use, the format has understandably surpassed the Soundmonitor.

XB: I found out that different waves produced different sounds (who would have thought? ). Sine, square, triangle, sawtooth… Did you make use of these? Did Soundmonitor solely relied on such sounds, or could you import other sounds? (I understand TFMX could load samples, for instance).

CH: I took advantage of all the wave forms and possibilities that the SID chip offered and added sample playback to my own developer version of the Soundmonitor. By the time I developed my next tool TFMX, samples had actually been on the way out because they did not work on a new revision of the SID (until a different way was developed much later) and they took too much memory and CPU power to be included in the ever more complex games that were created. So TFMX doesn’t actually include sample playback, but instead I invented a new way of manipulating the SID chip with every screen cycle through something I called sound macros and it could result in complex instruments that almost sounded like samples (particularly drum sounds). This system lived on with later music I created for the Amiga, game consoles like Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive as well as on the Nintendo 64 with a new tool that I developed with Factor 5 called MusyX. This sound tool still featured the concept of the TFMX sound macros and Nintendo actually bought a license to use it for their third party developers.

So that’s it for now!

Karsten Obarski’s Soundtracker took inspiration from Chris Hülsbeck’s Soundmonitor, who in turn took inspiration from Karl Steinberg’s MIDI Multitrack Sequencer. Phew!

What’s next? Will I find the missing link between the Fairlight CMI hardware workstation and later software audio tools? It’s a mystery!

Let’s just say that I closed my emails exchange with Chris Hülsbeck with this small spoiler:

As an aside, I’ve been interviewing the creator of the Fairlight CMI, and I think I know the exact moment when the whole « pattern of samples » format made the jump from a physical drum machine to the Fairlight’s sequencer, and who’s behind it! It’s a small thing, but this is exciting

See you next time!

Other articles in this series:

1. Soundtracking sur Amiga : passion, explications et exemples — The Twitter thread that started it all (in French).
2. Soundtracker origins, part 1: Where in the World is Karsten Obarski? — About Karsten Obarski, author of The Ultimate Soundtracker.
3. The origin of Soundtracker’s MOD format — When you see a Twitter thread with key information, it is your duty to preserve it.
4. Soundtracker origins, part 2: Welcome to Turrican, aah hahahaha — About Chris Hülsbeck, author of Soundmonitor.
5. Soundtracker origins, part 3: Facing a stone mountain — About Karl Steinberg, author of MIDI Multitrack Sequencer.
6. Soundtracker Origins, interlude: The coders behind the Cambrian explosion — Where I get to interview a few key people in the Soundtracker saga.

NOTE
I did not write this, retro-computing enthusiast Thomas Cherryhomes (owner of irata.online) did, on Twitter in December 23rd 2022 — hence the backdated publication date for this post.

I’m turning his Twitter thread into a proper blogpost because it’s a very informative one for my own research on Karsten Obarski, and I fear that this content might be gone sometimes soon, what with Twitter/X turning into a dumpster fire, and Thomas possibly closing his own account and moving to Mastodon…
Yes, there exist apps such as ThreadReader, but they don’t archive threads, they just display them in a more streamlined way.

Thomas’ thread is reproduced as-is, as closely as possible, with only [minor tweaks] from my part here and there. All credits due to him.

It is commonly said that Karsten Obarski created the MOD format.

Nope.

[Obarski’s Ultimate] SoundTracker saved songs[, not MODs].

The format we know today as MOD evolved very quickly through the efforts of many hackers trying to make an in-house tool better.

It was expected that once you had a song ready to embed within a game, that you would use the supplied replay routine, and fill in the blanks at the bottom containing pointers to the up to 15 instrument samples you wished to use.

This wasn’t considered a problem, because this was an in-house development tool for game music, and you couldn’t even modify the preset sounds, because they were hard-coded into the program.

Obi¹ would continue with his original version of Ultimate SoundTracker, eventually splitting out the preset-list to a separate file (PLST), making a source file for it that could be assembled with SEKA-Assembler…

…and providing a separate PRESET-ED tool that could modify the PLST file, thereby allowing a musician to not only have his own presets, but to properly store the important instrument data (length, repeat, replen, etc.), and release it as version 1.8 in April of 1988.

The ability to even SAVE a module didn’t appear until after more than half a year after the cracking groups started disassembling SoundTracker to add features. It appears as early as July 1988 in D.O.C.’s Soundtracker IX, to be used with its replay routine.

It turns out that July 1988 was a watershed moment for SoundTracker, because The New Masters² had significantly modified SoundTracker to add module loading (first appearance of Disk Op menu), making the module format sustainable as a self contained music format.

Finally, that October, Obi released UST³ version 2.0, it also had the Save Module feature, but no Load Module feature. This would never make it into The Ultimate SoundTracker, as Obi would stop working on the program, and even more would happen in the coming months…

(fin)

Thomas also produced a comprehensive look at Ultimate Soundtracker 1.21:

Other articles in this series:

1. Soundtracking sur Amiga : passion, explications et exemples — The Twitter thread that started it all (in French).
2. Soundtracker origins, part 1: Where in the World is Karsten Obarski? — About Karsten Obarski, author of The Ultimate Soundtracker.
3. The origin of Soundtracker’s MOD format — When you see a Twitter thread with key information, it is your duty to preserve it.
4. Soundtracker origins, part 2: Welcome to Turrican, aah hahahaha — About Chris Hülsbeck, author of Soundmonitor.
5. Soundtracker origins, part 3: Facing a stone mountain — About Karl Steinberg, author of MIDI Multitrack Sequencer.
6. Soundtracker Origins, interlude: The coders behind the Cambrian explosion — Where I get to interview a few key people in the Soundtracker saga.

En ce temps d’incertitudes envers les plates-formes de publication en ligne, je vais me remettre à publier des contenus courts ici, afin de ne pas faire profiter uniquement Instagram ou Twitter.

Comme chaque année, il y a des applications qui reprennent les données sociales que l’on stocke sans vraiment le savoir, et nous permettent de les mettre en forme.
La dernière en date est Instafest.app, qui crée une affiche de festival à partir des artistes les plus joués dans Spotify sur les 4 dernières semaines, les 6 derniers mois, ou depuis le début — il y a une éternité, en ce qui me concerne.

Voici donc mon résultat, pas vraiment surprenant :

Pas vraiment surprenant, donc, car je stocke sciemment ces informations sur Last.fm depuis des lustres — avant même l’éternité de Spotify, donc, d’où la disparité.

Ah tiens, d’ailleurs on peut aussi le faire avec Last.fm directement. Let’s go:

Publié sur Twitter avec le titre « Je tiens la barre depuis 1997 » (date de sortie d’OK Computer), un mien camarade commenta que je suis « surtout RESTÉ en 1997 », ce qui est très vrai, étant donné que, quand même, 1997 est la meilleure année pour la musique — aucun lien avec le fait que ce soit l’année de mes 20 ans, bien sûr.

Je remercie cependant ces stats de ne pas avoir pris en compte les heures de bruit blanc que j’écoute en boucle lorsque je dois me concentrer…

Avec l’âge, les envies de cadeaux changent. Les raisons sont nombreuses : on a déjà tout ce que l’on veut, on a déjà trop de choses qui attendent que nous nous y consacrions, on n’a plus envie de gros cadeaux qui prennent la poussière…

Terminés les gros trucs qui prennent de la place, les livres qu’on ne terminera jamais, les abonnements qui s’empileront dans un coin, les gift-box qui obligent à réserver un week-end entier à 300 bornes dans 4 mois, etc. Passé un certain cap, on veut quelque chose d’utile immédiatement ou sur la durée, tout en étant quelque chose qui fasse « cadeau ».

Mais que demander au Père Noël ou pour son anniversaire ? Comment guider vers ce qui à la fois fera plaisir et sera utile sur la durée ?

J’ai posé la question il y a quelques jours¹ sur Twitter :

Question #idéeCadeauNoel :
Que puis-je (m’)offrir de vraiment utile ?
Quel est ZE achat 2020 qui a amélioré votre vie ou votre quotidien ?
Quel est LE truc que vous auriez dû faire il y a des années ?
Qu’est-ce qui rend vos semaines plus simples ?
Je prends toutes vos idées !

Le tweet en question. Attention, compte privé.

4 personnes ayant aimablement « liké » le tweet sans pour autant y répondre, je me dis que l’idée intéresse², et donc autant stocker tout ça sur Internet.

Les réponses au tweet

Déjà, une erreur de ma part dans le tweet initial : mon idée était soit d’offrir à quelqu’un quelque chose de pérennement utile, soit de faire en sorte que quelqu’un m’offre le même type d’idée.
Sous-entendu : un budget « cadeau » raisonnable, et facile à emballer.

Seulement, haha, j’ai écrit « que puis-je (m’)offrir »³, impliquant par là même que, grosso modo, le budget et l’espace requis étaient illimités. Nenni !
Mais de belles âmes, pensant bien faire, sont donc parties sur des idées pécuniairement et papiercadeaulement hors-normes. Je les cite tout de même par honnêteté, dans le chiffre qui termine cette phrase⁴.

Les réponses qui rentrent dans le cadre furent quant à elles :

• Un abonnement à Alternatives Économiques.
• Le livre du YouTuber économique Heu?reka.
• Un bonne machine à café.
• Un Leatherman et une soufflette rechargeable par USB (c’est très précis).
• Une tondeuse (à cheveux plus qu’à gazon, je pense).
• Des dons à des associations.

Bien !

Aller plus loin

Mes questions dans ce tweet n’étaient pas vraiment originales, car ce n’est pas la première année que je me les suis posées, et j’avais déjà cherché réponses à icelles sur les interwebs. Où donc, me demanderiez-vous ? Voici mes sources d’idées des années passées, trouvées au fil de l’eau…

Tout d’abord, un tweet posant cette simple question :

What’s your “it’s expensive but it’s worth it” product?⁵

Eliza Orlins, le 1er décembre 2019.

Déjà ici, on a un bon nombre de réponses, qui partent bien sûr dans tous les sens. Par exemple, les hors-normes / amusantes / touchantes :

• Avoir un enfant.
• Le mettre en crèche.
• Un stérilet (y’en a pour tout le monde…).
• Mon mari / Ma femme (haha).
• Vivre à New-York / Mon loyer / Mon crédit immobilier.
• Des billets de train / d’avion.
• L’électricité.
• Un diplôme de droit.
• Un-e thérapeute / Un-e dentiste.
• Payer des déménageurs.
• De l’insuline / Une mutuelle.
• Du bon maquillage / anti-cernes / produit pour la peau.
• Du bon café.
• De nouvelles fenêtres.
• Un vélo⁶.
• Un chien / un chat / une mutuelle pour animal de compagnie.
• Du cannabis.
• Un Roomba / Roborock. « My little buddy has a built-in scheduler and beep-boops its way around my apartment once a week. »
• Des places VIP de concerts / Des billets Fast Pass aux parcs d’attractions.
• « Equitable mass transit infrastructure for all. »
• « I would say ‘education’, but ignorance is a lot more expensive. »

Mais déjà, on y trouve des choses intéressantes dans le cadre « (se) faire un cadeau qui améliore le quotidien » :

• Une cocotte Le Creuset ou Emile Henry.
• Un autocuiseur programmable Instant Pot, un mixeur KitchenAid, un blender Vitamix.
• Un bon matelas : « You spend 1/3rd of your life in bed, so make it worthwhile. »
• De bonnes chaussures/bottes⁷.

Mais surtout, j’ai trouvé une chouette source d’idées sur Ask MetaFilter.

MetaFilter

MetaFilter, si vous ne le connaissez pas, est un site de partage de liens intéressants, avec une communauté assez incroyable. Lancé en 1999, c’est l’un des derniers bastions de l’âge d’or des blogs communautaires⁸.

Ask MetaFilter est un site annexe mais très vivant, où les membres peuvent poser n’importe quelle question (même anonymement au besoin), recevoir des réponses de la communauté — et marquer les réponses qui leur semblent les plus pertinentes.

Trois questions en particulier m’ont tapé dans l’œil en vadrouillant.

1) What can I buy that will improve my life?

I hate shopping, and only relatively recently have had disposable income. So I’m pretty unaware of what goods and services are out there that could improve my quality of life (defining this as giving me more time to focus on other things, efficient tools, things that will bring joy into my life).

« Seulement » 48 réponses à cette question, mais l’on y trouve quelques pépites. Petite sélection parmi les utiles :

• Un robot culinaire.
  « Up your homemade hummus and pesto games. »
• Un autocuiseur, un batteur électrique.
  « I have a KitchenAid stand mixer and a Vitamix blender. Neither are cheap. Both are essential to my life. »
• Un mélangeur à immersion.
  « Because life is too short to ever have to clean a blender again. »
• Un hachoir.
• De bonnes serviettes de toilettes.
  « Goddamn there is nothing like a quality towel after taking a shower. »
• Des draps de lit agréables, avec un nombre élevé de fils.
  « Anything that improves your sleep is a good thing. »
• « Higher quality versions of things you use a lot. »
  ou, dans le même ordre d’idée :
  « Less stuff. Higher quality of the same stuff you like. »
  ou encore, lu dans une autre page :
  « “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out. »⁹ « I consider it a major lifestyle upgrade, being able to process fresh foods easily and safely. »
• Une inscription à une AMAP locale.

…et parmi les hors-normes :

• « Build up a 3 – 6 month emergency fund. Start or bulk up your retirement savings. Pay down debt. These things pay off well in the long term. »
• Un bidet.
  « I’m squeaky clean down there »
• Un service de ménage deux fois par mois.
• Des cours réguliers de musique / cuisine / céramique / etc. Des choses qui ouvrent le cerveau par la créativité.
• Un vidéoprojecteur plutôt qu’une télévision.

Et parmi ces réponses se trouvait un lien vers une autre question AskMeFi, posée peu auparavant, et que voici :

2) I should have done this years ago!

I’m looking for suggestions for changes in your life or home or work or whatever that seemed like small things but ended up being really impactful.

Donc, cela dépasse le cadre des cadeaux et on entre plutôt dans celui des bonnes habitudes, des idées, des petites astuces… mais toujours dans l’idée d’améliorer sa vie par petits bouts accessibles.

Donc je vais en piocher quelques-uns que je trouve pertinents/amusants :

• « Buying a shit-ton of nesting Rubbermaid containers instead of a bunch of mismatched Tupperware. »
  On a fait ça, ça améliore effectivement la vie cuisinale.
• « Getting a Brother Label Maker and labeling everything in my home so can always find stuff. »
  Vrai. Surtout pour les câbles.
• « Separate twin-size duvets for you and your partner instead of one big shared one. »
  L’amie Fabienne valide. Ajoutons aussi les housse avec attaches, comme on peut apparemment en trouve au Québec.
• « Bought a squatty potty and my life improved x10000! »
  On appréciera l’étude qui va dans ce sens.
• « Made a budget and stuck to it. »
  Souvenez-vous : Don’t buy stuff you cannot afford.
• « I decided to try the Marie Kondo method of folding clothing, and I’m honestly shocked at how much better my wardrobe is. »
  Rien de tel qu’un tiroir bien rangé.
• « Quit wearing shoes in the house »
  On fait ça depuis que l’Enfant est arrivé. C’est cependant plus compliqué de le demander aux invités.
• « Dinner planning: a little magnetic whiteboard, stuck to the side of the fridge. Plan for meals for the week, then figure out your shopping list for the week. Also, track when you had meals, when trying to track the age of left-overs. »
  On devrait faire ça, tient
• « Don’t get microfibre towels or clothes, they release microplastics into the water with every wash. Get white cotton, then you can bleach it too if needs be. »
• « Getting a slow cooker. I can cook hearty healthy meals in bulk without much effort. Just toss a bunch of things in there, turn it on, leave it alone. SO GOOD, especially for days when I’m too sick/tired to function but need food. »
• Un Airfryer. Décidément beaucoup de suggestions touchent à LA BOUFFE
• « Make a point of reading 50 pages every day. Makes getting through books possible. »
• « Ditched the television so the living space isn’t organized around an ugly appliance. »

Et une fois de plus, parmi les réponses, quelqu’un a pointé vers une question précédente dans le même esprit. Je vous présente donc…

3) Everything (in my life) should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Today my dentist told me that I needed to start wearing a nightguard and I was immediately annoyed at having another thing in my life to deal with.
In an effort to balance the scales I would like to hear your suggestions for things/situations/protocols that you’ve eliminated from your life with no ill effect.

Bon, là on a clairement quitté le monde des idées cadeau ou même des petits achats qui améliorent la vie, pour entrer dans le monde des « conseils de vie » : ne plus repasser ou plier certains vêtements, faire don des cadeaux que l’on reçoit sans les vouloir, quitter Facebook, ne plus s’épiler, préparer sa semaine de repas le week-end, couper ses notifications, etc.

Vue qu’il y en a une tripotée en ce bas monde, on va s’arrêter là avec cet article Du coup, je vous laisse cliquer le lien et explorer les réponses à cette question. Parcourez celles qui ont un grand nombre de votes « [x favorites] » à la fin !

Et si les listes de « conseils de vie » vous plaisent, voici deux–trois liens. Ou quatre.

Enfin, si vous chercher des idées simples et différentes pour vos cadeaux (on revient à la question d’origine), je suis tombé sur ce thread Twitter ma foi fort sympathique (version PDF grâce à ThreadNavigator).

Ajout novembre 2022 : ce thread est apparu, avec quelques idées cadeaux sympa. Compte supprimé, fuck Elon

Ajout décembre 2022 : dans cet autre thread, l’autrice demande quels sont les cadeaux quelconques, nécessaires ou décalés que ses lecteurs ont reçus. Elle n’est pas déçue du voyage Compte supprimé, fuck Elon

Ajout décembre 2022 : l’amie et néanmoins autrice Élise Costa a passé plusieurs heures à proposer des idées cadeaux en fonction du profil ciblé, pour les abonnés de son compte Instagram qui le demandaient. Il y avait de très nombreuses demandes et idées, vous pouvez toutes les revoir ici.
Il y a une de ses suggestions qui m’a particulièrement touché. C’était en réponse à la demande pour le profil « Père, 64 ans, aime l’électronique, la nature, les voyages (n’a besoin de rien) ».
La réponse d’Élise :

Ajout juin 2023 : pour en revenir à la question d’origine et à Ask Metafilter, une discussion intitulée « What surprise Christmas gifts have delighted you?« .

Ajout février 2026 : tiens, une question Metafilter sur les petites améliorations de la vie, « The most marginal of gains« . L’une des suggestions est de s’abonner à la newsletter Practical Betterments.

Ainsi se termine cet article. Bonne année à vous, soyez heureuses et heureux !

Note: Cet article (et les suivants de cette série) sont écrits en anglais, pour la simple raison que mes sources, tant directes qu’en ligne, sont anglophones.
Par ailleurs, dans certains de ces articles, il me semble que j’ajoute du contenu original/rarement vu au corpus de connaissances, donc autant faire en sorte que cela profite au plus grand monde

My previous article on Soundtracking¹ was all about passion and nostalgia: presenting a couple of great Amiga demos, playing a handful of notable Amiga modules, and explaining my understanding of how soundtracking worked — you know, the whole « notes as a sequence of letters instead of solfege symbols » thing².

Today I’m starting a series of articles which is no less about passion and nostalgia, but tries to go further behind the curtains, and talks about the ones who made soundtracking possible: Mr. Obarski of course, but also those who inspired him (and those who, in turn, inspired them³).

Eventually, my intent is to find out when the « tracker » way of composing music (or, the music sequencer) made the jump from a hardware, physical product to a software product. Who was the first one to dream up coding that interface? Is it really Karsten Obarski, father of the Sountracker? I want to find out.

So let’s start with the culmination of all these inspirations.
Let’s start where this little « quest » of mine started.

(drumroll)

Karsten Obarski,
elusive legend

Karsten Obarski programmed the Ultimate Soundtracker tool for Amiga 1000 in the Summer of 1987, and released it through German software publisher EAS in December 1987.
He was 22. It was his first ever completed program. He initially wrote it to write his first music, for the first game of a friend of his, Guido Bartels.

Ultimate Soundtracker was the first musical program to mix the tracker format with audio samples (instead of synth sounds), and thus was a tremendous success… in terms of number of tools which stole the whole idea and built upon it, that is. While quite cheap⁴, it failed commercially.
Some say it failed due to a temperamental behavior (= it crashed all too often⁵)⁶. Or maybe it’s because the target customers, musicians, were not interested in that way of composing (=piano-roll and hexadecimal parameters).
Most probably, it failed commercially… because the code was quickly cracked and shared for free. We’ll talk about that too in this article.

Despite its complexity and issues, it quickly gave birth to a host of clones (and a name to its own genre of tools), each building upon the previous clone’s improvements.
Indeed, in March 1988, just 3 months after the initial commercial release of Ultimate Soundtracker, coder The Exterminator/TJC (Netherlander Mark Langerak) released Soundtracker II under his own name (removing Obarski’s full credit, shy of a mention).
Exterminator had de-assembled the original program and released the resulting source code, along with its playroutine⁷. This allowed anyone to not only create music in the tracker format (fine), but they could also freely (as in, illegally) use that format in their own production (games and demos).

While it was illegal to share the playroutine for free, this was the needed spark to trigger the Cambrian explosion of trackers: before long, several other clones appeared. Just for 1988, Amiga musicians witnessed the successive releases of Soundtracker Pro I, TJC Soundtracker I, Soundtracker III and IV, DOC Soundtracker (11 versions in 88), Master Soundtracker, and many others. Check out this graph!

Some would say it was « fair game » for a software that wasn’t successful, and felt abandoned. From Pex « Mahoney » Tufvesson, coder of another clone named Noisetracker:

« The basic idea of ​​Soundtracker was delightful, but unfortunately there were some serious bugs and other shortcomings. I tried to contact Karsten Obarski with bug reports, but was told that he was not going to do anything about it and that Soundtracker was not a commercial success. Today it would be classed as abandonware, but at the time it was just frustrating. »

Pex Tufvesson took matters into his own hands and disassembled the entire program. After much effort, he had the entire assembly code for Soundtracker on his desk. He fixed the bugs, increased the number of samples from 15 to 31, and released Noisetracker 1.0 on August 1, 1989. However, this first version also contained some bugs, so version 1.1 was released just a week later.

Techworld interview (automatic English translation)

Abandoned? Truth be told, Karsten Obarski didn’t last long in « the scene » (of which he was never a part of anyway).
He did release a couple more versions of Ultimate Soundtracker, including v2.0 in October 1988 which implemented (and thus made official) the famed « module » or MOD format. That file format, created in July 88 by the DOC Soundtracker IX clone (coded by Unknown/DOC, aka Michael Kleps⁸), combined note patterns with audio samples into a single file.
And then, as Keyser Söze would say, « Poof, he was gone ». No more updates to Ultimate Soundtracker. He was not heard of anymore on the Amiga, as far as I know. Barely a year had gone by since the initial release of his groundbreaking tool.

He kept working on games for a bit, specifically for the reLINE publisher, for which he composed the music of the game « Dyter-07 » ⁹. Then, by 1993, it seems he left the computer world for good.

What’s left of him is a legacy, both in terms of composing process, but also in terms of « sound »: Ultimate Soundtracker was accompanied by the legendary ST-01, a sound disk, which contained audio samples which Obarski ripped from his own synthesizers ¹⁰, and which came to define the early sound of the Amiga.
Obarski himself provided the template: Ultimate Soundtracker came with several complete demo songs, showing that the man also had a knack for melodies. Amegas, Crystalhammer, Endtheme, Bluesong, Blueberry, etc.: Titles that bring nostalgic stars to the eyes of any kid from these days

The man behind the legend

Not much is known about Karsten Obarski, really. Only a couple of interviews are available online.
Let’s dive in, and find out what brought him to create Soundtracker!

The two main interviews are:

• The one on the Amiga Music Preservation site (date: unknown, but most probably around 2005), with pictures!
• …and the one from the now-defunct AM/FM disk-mag (date: 1992, since he says he was 27 years old at the time).

In addition to that, there are a few sources here and there, for instance a biography on the VGMPF wiki, a since-deleted page on Wikipedia from 2008 (now forwarding to the Ultimate Soundtracker page); the since-lost Karsten Obarski Tribute Project, with a short message from The Man himself in 2001; … and that’s it! If you know of more, I’m interested

So, from these interviews, what can we learn?

What made you start programming the SoundTracker?

A short time after that I [moved] to the Amiga I realized that everyone used large sample loops instead of coding music.
I couldn’t understand why no-one used samples as instruments. So I sampled a few sounds from my Yamaha DX21 and programmed my first music routine.

AM/FM interview

How did you get the idea of creating Soundtracker?
A friend of mine (…) asked me if I could write some music for him (…). At that time I had already experimented around with a playroutine on my brand new Amiga (…)
So I begun to code a simple-to-use editor to generate the data to be used by my playroutine. After some improvements, my Soundtracker was born.

AMP interview

Sounds like it came out of thin air!
But let’s look at the question right before this one:

Which composing programs have you been using?
In the times of the « 64 »¹¹, I’ve used Chris Hülsbeck’s « Soundmonitor » to implement some music-tunes in my codings.

AMP interview

Ah ha! That’s interesting. So, Karsten Obarski had a Commodore 64 before he bought an Amiga 1000, and on that C64 he discovered Soundmonitor, which… is a tracker-style program from 1986, the year before Obarski wrote and released his own Ultimate Soundtracker!

Indeed, while it’s much less easy on the eye, we can see similarities: channels (three, in that case, marked TRK for « tracks »), line positions on the left sidebar (SP for « song position » I guess, or maybe « step »?), and more settings.

Browsing other sources, we find that this is the same conclusion reached by others. For instance, in his book « Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes« , author Kenneth B. McAlpine writes:

Peter Moormann goes one step further in his book « Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance« :

French blog Geekzone treads the same waters in their article « The little-known history of trackers » ¹², but goes one step further: author and audio producer Jean-Christophe « Faskil » Detrain relates that, for purists, Hülsbeck’s Soundmonitor was the first necessary step, but Obarski’s Soundtracker was indeed the first real tracker — because to said purists, a real tracker has to use audio samples, not synth sounds.

Still, to Faskil, « C64 wins »: the first tracker is indeed Soundmonitor.

Looks like Karsten Obarski took inspiration from Chris Hülsbeck, contributing a nicer interface around the tracker format and most importantly sample playback, along with a fourth channel¹³, right?
Ergo, that would make Chris Hülsbeck the real father of music trackers?

It’s not quite that simple. Turns out, Hülsbeck got inspiration somewhere too — of course.

But before we dive into Chris Hülsbeck’s own inspirations for Soundmonitor, let’s try to understand another aspect of Karsten Obarski’s legend: after releasing such an important piece of software, why did he disappear all of a sudden, vanishing without a trace? Let’s answer the title of this article.

After releasing a key software product, Karsten Obarski more or less disappeared, never to be heard again of in the game music (or demo music) world. Why so, and where is he now?

The answer to « Why did he left? » can be found by mixing various sources.

I was very proud to have invented a milestone program.

The data structure of my MOD files even still lives today on PCs and all other music programs, after they ripped parts of my program and modified my playroutine as well.

But say – how many people who know about « trackers » and modules also know their roots? Who knows me? That’s only a few of them.

AMP interview, adapted.

I would like to thank (…) all those who care about the young but forgotten history of computing, with all these great guys.

AMP interview, adapted.

When and why did you give up the SoundTracker project?
After I’d sold my copyrights to a company named EAS for a few bucks, and the Soundtracker clones started to come from all directions, I didn’t have the inspiration to code any more on that program.

Did you feel bad when other people stole your idea/program?
(…) It wasn’t funny when people made some patches on the SoundTracker and then thought of it as their own program, removing my name completely.
Even today’s trackers work in that same way, and still use the tone-event data structures which I invented. (Which is a very simple one.)

Do you have anything to say to the programmers of new trackers?
Just try to find new ways by yourself and do not spend so much time making the same things others have done before you.

AM/FM interview.

So, by the looks of it, he wasn’t too happy with the situation, and decided it was time for him to find a new hobby.

Now, « where is he now? », you might ask me, and I’m glad you did. Again, we resort to the available interviews…

Are you still active in the scene these days?
I now have a job as an electronic-specialist at an industrial company. Sometimes I program a little bit at our circuit-board testing machines – that’s fun enough for me

The other free time I like to spend with my wife, my motorbikes, my old house, my synthesizers and my very few left friends.

AMP interview.

Indeed, while desperately looking for anything resembling an online presence of Karsten Obarski, the closest I could find was an empty account on the Tinkercad website. Tinkercad is a free tool to create 3D models of, amongst other things, circuit boards. We can only guess that he was trying it out for fun…
(Edit in 2023: the Tinkercad account has since been deleted)

But [music is] still just a hobby – and in the Summer my wife and I often prefer to ride with our motorbikes [rather] than sitting in the house.

KOTP website, adapted.

So there you have it. Our hero, proud of his accomplishment and eager to try something else, left the Amiga town, riding his motorcycle into dawn…

Goodbye, you legend. Goodbye.

Lacking direct interaction with Karsten Obarski himself (and believe me, I tried to track him down, or to find at least an email address), this is the best I can do. Karsten, if you read this, please contact me

Let’s move on to Obarski’s apparent inspiration for Soundtracker, then, in order to find out, in turn, his inspiration.

So, Soundmonitor was created by Chris Hülsbeck. This name might ring a bell to old-timers: he scored such well-known games as Turrican and Turrican II, Apidya, R-Type, etc. Unlike Obarski, he did not disappear, but kept very active in the gaming music scene, even producing several of his own albums (and royalty free music) and orchestra versions of the Turrican music.

All this from writing an audio tool on the C64 on 1986, probably as a teenager? Nice!

We could dive into the numerous interviews of him online, sure.

But, just in case, let’s try and ask him directly!

He seems to be very busy, I doubt he’ll ever answer…

5 hours later:

So that’s going to be the topic for the next part of this series

See you soon!

Other articles in this series:

1. Soundtracking sur Amiga : passion, explications et exemples — The Twitter thread that started it all (in French).
2. Soundtracker origins, part 1: Where in the World is Karsten Obarski? — About Karsten Obarski, author of The Ultimate Soundtracker.
3. The origin of Soundtracker’s MOD format — When you see a Twitter thread with key information, it is your duty to preserve it.
4. Soundtracker origins, part 2: Welcome to Turrican, aah hahahaha — About Chris Hülsbeck, author of Soundmonitor.
5. Soundtracker origins, part 3: Facing a stone mountain — About Karl Steinberg, author of MIDI Multitrack Sequencer.
6. Soundtracker Origins, interlude: The coders behind the Cambrian explosion — Where I get to interview a few key people in the Soundtracker saga.