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(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

how did I compose the music - hmmm yeah I just used to put in in as numbers in READ and DATA statements (and still do in fact whenever I use that routine). I had a list of frequencies blu-tacked on the wall, or maybe on the Galaxians arcade cabinet that used to take up half of my bedroom. I wrote the whole of Earth Shaker like that, just poking in numbers I'd looked up in the back of the Spectrum manual smile when I worked at Zeppelin a couple of the guys there took pity and gave me an assembler.
The Earth Shaker tune was obviously a bit influenced by the one in Arc of Yesod, which I loved. I remember trying to only use chords and notes which sounded good played by the routine, as some verged on the grindy Manic Miner chords. I noticed that mathematically pairs of numbers which are coprime (have no common factors) often generate the best chords because the chord then lasts longer before it repeats. You could even make it sound like triplets if the frequency repeated at the right interval, which I used at the end of one of the sections.
Wouldn't hold your breath for a World Shaker ZX release though - it's something I would love to do but realistically with a full time job, two daughters and all the other million things I do I'll pencil in a tentative July 2045!

2

(5 replies, posted in Sinclair)

Thanks irrlicht project for inviting me to the forum

I uploaded some spectrum-related music to SoundCloud last night
https://soundcloud.com/abandonware/tracks, some is 1-bit and some
tracker-based versions if anyone is interested in listening.

Michael Batty
(spectrum programmer back in the day:
Earth Shaker, Full Throttle 2, Tai Chi Tortoise etc.)