Paul van der Valk - Amiga Music Genius

[mai]

Originally Posted by BuZz

poing is the best game ever! but yeh code and music by him.

Is the music from "Pong" game available somewhere?

[BuZz]

pong or poing ? you can listen to the music in poing by loading up the game

[mai]

Originally Posted by BuZz

pong or poing ? you can listen to the music in poing by loading up the game

Just played "Poing v7.0".
I want musics ripped, but seems custom.

[BuZz]

yeh and it is algorithmic also afair, so you may never get the same tune again ;-)

[Don_Adan]

Two more Paul van der Valk songs are available on the WT page.

[hitm4n]

Poing 7 was ace. And the music is definately algorithmic. The algorhythms used were bloody good though, the tunes always worked and built up nicely as you played. One of my most memorable PD games, one of the few Amiga games i still emulate to play...

But bloody hell, Poing 7 is hard...

[LocalH]

For those who are big fans of the Imploder 4 tune, [ Show youtube player ] contains a really good cover of it pretty much from the beginning. The person who recorded the video switched to another song right around the 2:00 mark but this should be a valid link to the ROM.

[s2325]

New remix of Hybris title tune on http://amigaremix.com/
[ Show youtube player ]

[john1979]

Is there a complete archive of Paul's mods anywhere? The AMP link on page 1 has ZERO!

[mark_k]

Just resurrecting this thread because I was looking for old Imploder versions today...

Originally Posted by Mark Wright

and the piece de la resistance...

[ Show youtube player ]

all in about 8K ;-)

That tune was probably ripped from the Animation program on the Imploder 1.0 disk, which is a little system-legal demo/intro (on a draggable screen no less). Search for "Imploder v1.0 The (1989)(Discovery Software)[cr PCI].adf"

Also on that disk are a couple of programs which play sound, Tune and Drums. I'm not sure whether they play just a subset of tracks from the Imploder music or are different.

[Mark Wright]

Blimey, this thread takes me back.

One thing I forgot to remark upon (as is clearly displayed in those YouTube vids of Imploder) is that PvdV's play routine was presumably five channels (or pseudo-five channels) given the 5 EQs... I always thought the percussion of his tracks had a sort of flangey/multiplexy quality to them. Same with Ron Klaren.

So not only was PvdV the first to pioneer getting SID-like sounds out of Paula (before Obarski's similar efforts a couple of years later) surely he was the first to "break" the 4 channel barrier too?

[FromWithin]

Originally Posted by Mark Wright

So not only was PvdV the first to pioneer getting SID-like sounds out of Paula

That's not necessarily true. Listen to any of Fred Gray's stuff from 1988: Eco or Black Lamp. Eco was possibly even done in 1987.

[Mark Wright]

Don't misunderstand me, I realise that programs that coaxed non-sample based synth sounds out of Paula, such as EA's Music Construction Kit, Synthia and Aegis' Sonix all predate PvdV's work. And yes, musicians such as David Whittaker (who nicked lots of his samples from Mark Riley's initial Sonix set anyway), Fred Gray and even Rob Hubbard were experimenting either before or contemporaneously alongside PvdV.

The point I'm making is that, while the musicians named above (together with numerous other hacks) were merely rejigging their ST playroutines to make Paula trigger samples or crude bleeps out of ported data, PvdV had stormed in to steal the show with a completely original tour de force in the shape of Hybris, which not only exhibited his awesome ability for composition but also made deliberate and calculated use of Paula, with amazing results.

In an era when everyone else was still straddling the divide between either looping a low-fi 7 second snatch of a pop song, or toiling with a tempremental v1 Soundtracker only to knock out yet another dismal Amegas/Rallyemaster/Jackdance rip-off, PvdV was already strangling sounds out of Paula that were previously thought impossible. Only Tim Follin's Bionic Commando score bears any comparison. In particular:

[ Show youtube player ]

I don't think the Amiga saw the likes of PvdV's quality again until Fred/Ackerlight, and many years later, Pink/Abyss wrung the hell out of their respective custom editors. In fact, it wasn't until the advent of Phenomena's Musicline Editor and THX/AHK in the mid 90s that Amiga so-called "chip" music came close to the originality and accomplishment of the early PvdV stuff.

And that's because Future Composer, Brian Postma's Soundmon, Startrekker, Bugmon, Sidmon, Delta Music, Jamcracker and TME were all shit. Garbage in, garbage out :-) Only Jochen Hippel (and maybe Sebastian Lentfert/Zzzax) could pull off a truly astonishing "chip" tune in this sorry era. 99% of the "I'll have a go too" garbage made with any of those editors is now only fondly remembered due to sheer nostalgia rather than any musical value. Name me *one* good Future Composer tune! (You can choose any of mine from the Magnetic Fields Chip Music Festival when my name was Kerni).

Blimey. Quite an outburst. Sorry about that.

Final thoughts: what a pity that Felix Schmidt/Suntronic wasn't more prolific. But what a legacy:

[ Show youtube player ]


EDIT: An example of a song that's musically poor but fondly remembered by those who were breathtaken at the time is this one from Sebastian Lentfert as mentioned above (1989):

[ Show youtube player ]

I love it, but it's terrible :-)

Also just remembered all of those early (87/88) Hubbard covers by a young Allister Brimble, but those were made using the limitations of Sonix, so you could hardly call them pioneering. None on YouTube!

[Asle]

hum .. depends of the author I guess. Some good things were created of Future Composer, like the one FC music by Heatbeat (url) or the one by Bit Arts ? (url).
could also add those from I.C.E. mag by EC-Rider or this one by Galaxy/Amaze (url). Now, what about the one by Uncle Tom and Ziphoid ? (url).
I think it really is more about the composer than the tool itself. More examples of Future Composer : Tom Poison (url), Keo (url)

There are a few quite nice Jamcracker also: Backlash (url), Leffty (url), SLL (url), Overlord X (url) or all those by Jeff/Animators, to name a few.

For SoundMonitor, well, there are really nice ones like bp.CLEANXYNTH1, bp.KICKSTART, bp.LOADER (you must listen to this one url). Some by Allister Brimble are quite nice too.

Anyway, I'm sure you get the idea. Now, I would have added Mark II sound system in this list

Sylvain

[other_reality]

Originally Posted by Mark Wright

Final thoughts: what a pity that Felix Schmidt/Suntronic wasn't more prolific. But what a legacy:

[ Show youtube player ]

This tune has this special timetravel effect on me...It instantly takes me back there, sitting in front of my A500 waiting to click that left mouse button to play the game but no....just let it loop for a while.

I remember watching the swirling paranoimia logo for hours.

[Mark Wright]

Originally Posted by Asle

Anyway, I'm sure you get the idea. Now, I would have added Mark II sound system in this list

Sylvain

OK, I'm humble enough to partially take back what I said :-) There is some great stuff you've linked to that I'm amazed to say I've never heard before, and I always considered myself a bit of an authority on such things... thanks for the enlightenment!

Still though; for every one determined effort by a talented composer battling against a crippled system, there are 100 horrible, uninspired copycat derivatives based around it, which dilutes the pool of genuinely brilliant Amiga "chip" tunes somewhat.

I've made this point many times before, but I still maintain that while the liberation of creative freedom made possible by the Amiga, brought about via the drive for accessible "for the people" tools is to be celebrated, the reality of that legacy is that the pool of dross vastly outweighs the drips of genius.

Don't know why I'm suddenly so passionate about it! I think I'm just fed up of seeing recognition going in the wrong direction so often. All in my own personal opinion, of course!

[Predseda]

check youtube

[B14ck W01f]

Did Paul ever write music for the C-64?

[Mark Wright]

Found a couple of half-finished PdvV remixes I made, about 10 years ago, on an old minidisc.. not really worth sharing, but here they are :-)

Animate (Armand van der Helden Mix)

http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/animate.mp3

Hybris (Filtered Funk Mix) -- WARNING: If you have pet dogs, they *will* bark during this song, so play it at low volume

http://www.radiofriendly.co.uk/hybris.mp3

Apologies for low bitrate :-)

[s2325]

Thank you. Is it your music on yotube? [ Show youtube player ] [ Show youtube player ]