Peeking Behind the Curtain - A Chat with the Encore Team

I was promised that this time we'd make a s--t load of money 😉… But I've got a funny feeling that I've been lied to. 🤔

Ha! Well, for me it's the love of SID music. I'd pretty much jump on any project where I'm able to contribute a remix. 👍Also, being part of a team of very talented people of which some have become very good friends helps, too. 😉

Pete & Tomsk threatened me with physical violence if I didn't pony up some tunes. {…}

In all seriousness. I've always enjoyed the art and music from the scene, it's where I started in 1985/86. Putting my wee Scottish town on the map, trading snail mail, and the first steps onto Compunet (although some of that is best forgotten). Given the opportunity to join on Encore500 I found it a great way to finally meet many of the people whose work I'd known of over the years, and get to meet them at last, and not only that, but to learn and share with them. I said at the very beginning when I submitted my very first demo that I couldn't think of a more intimidating bunch of guys to listen and critique your music. These guys & girls are not only great composers who have mastered that in their own right, but their production skills and ears are world class. Comments like shave 3dB off 1400Hz on that one sound are not comments thrown about lightly - it's because they know their s--t! And when you have several world class sets of ears offering production tips, EVERY track on the album benefits. In time, we all learned from each other and had some good laughs on the way - and a few beers. 🙂

I was invited by Danko to join the Encore500 team, and I immediately said yes. I had not previously done any Amiga or C64 remixes, but it felt like it was time to pay tribute to what made me start making music to begin with. If I had not stumbled upon Soundtracker, I would not be making music today, that’s for sure.

Meeting the team and listening to their contributions was incredibly inspiring, and I think the quality of the music made everyone step up a gear or two. 🙂

When I was invited again for Encore64 V2, it was a no-brainer to join.

I was part of the core team in both of the previous Encore releases, so joining the team for the 3rd one was the natural thing to do. However this time, I realized I wouldn't have as much time to invest as before, so I was happy to be able to finish the Warhawk remix I had in the pipeline since a year and contribute that.
This remix was based on a single track guitar arrangement I worked out in order to be able to play it live as a duo with Susanna aka Bass Cadet on Theremin. So naturally, she added her great Theremin and saxophone playing to the remix.
Apart from that, I was still able to give lead and solo guitar to LMan's remix of Compleeto. Coming up with guitar ideas for already existing mixes is always fun. 🙂

It's where the remix scene's cool kids hang around these days, hehe. Jokes aside, the first two outings were fantastic albums, so being invited to join was an honour. Plus the team and project ethics are similar to my Syntax Era project, so I felt quite at home.

I've been invited to Encore500 by Danko, and seemed like a no-brainer when I was asked to participate in the next project.

I was invited by Romeo Knight since we were working together already with our Paradroids band project, having C64 songs redone on a Theremin, a guitar and synths. He was working on his 1970s electro bossa nova version of Warhawk and I did my interpretation of Green Beret as a live band sounding breakbeat cover with some additional vocals and saxophone on top.

I had been following the C64 remix scene for a long time and had planned my own ones for RKO, but they always ended up being too big ideas to finish since there was no deadline to push me through it. This was a great opportunity to not only work with the legends, but also {to} motivate {me} on giving the tracks the amount of time and love they deserve.

We started at Revision. We were a duo before it. There was supposed to be a third member who had to skip Revision for private reasons.

I had no idea what to do this time around 🤔… So I decided to randomly listen to a few tunes on DeepSID. I found a lovely SID called Illumination by Cadaver. My choice was made 😊. Clearly this SID was written with guitars in mind, so this was the direction I started with. Obviously I couldn't do this with guitar VSTs and have it sound realistic, so I switched it to synthesisers. 😉 I did however leave the acoustic guitar melodies I'd previously written in the final version.

I have a hard time just taking any song and doing a remix. The song must mean something to me or hold a strong memory.

The first song I chose is Fist 2. And not the main theme, but song #2. I remember playing the game and walking around, looking for the places on the map where the song was played, then stopping there just to listen to it.

My second contribution is from the game Nemesis. I have strong memories of playing this a lot at a neighbour’s house. However, my neighbour had an MSX and not a C64. Since the C64 version of the song is wrong, my remix is actually a mix between the versions. 🙂

Also, I have a hard time doing 1:1 remixes. I use the fact that music inspires me to create new stuff.

The guy (Miki Higashino) who made the C64 conversion of the arcade version got the timing and some notes wrong, but for the most part it's correct. 🙂

Nemesis, (Gradius in the US) was definitely in my top 3 arcade games. As I've mentioned in other interviews, Paulie Hughes and I spent a lot of Saturday mornings in the Wigan town centre arcades, pumping 10p coins into 'video games'… before & during our time at Ocean Software. That Intro & Level 1 music is kind of etched into my brain from so many attempted play-throughs (which I never completed…) So, when Nemesis released on the C64, it was really exciting but… immediately disappointing once it finished loading and I heard what had been created for the main theme. It was just dreadful (2 channels only, if I remember rightly) and, sadly, I ignored the C64 version of the game because of it.

{Jogeir contributed no less than 3 remixes to the album, so he listed his thoughts on each below - ed.}

LN2 Street Loader - this mellow piece of music just melted me back in the late 80s, so it was about time I did a remix of it. At the time I listened a lot to artists like Alphaville and Sandra, so I tried to re-create that feeling with the sounds I chose, combining the SID with the real deal.

Artillery - Geir Tjelta has been on my tail for about a decade about doing a version of his tune. He covered my Amiga module called Oro Incenso back in 2010 (?) and I kind of promised him to return the favour. It's a great tune as well, and completely different from the usual C64 tune.

Ocean Loader 3 - I would never do this remix if it wasn't for Pete's own words saying Go for it! I didn't want to stray too far away from this iconic piece, but good ol' Pete approved my wild take on it, so that means it's okay (at least!).

I find myself drawn to Jeroen Tel's SIDs (a lot of them if not all). His classical 'bones' in the melodies he writes just appeal to my own musical senses. Supremacy has been covered/remixed a few times and in a few ways so… time for an epic orchestral/cinematic version. Lots of room for creation & invention in this SID. Right up my alley, Blackadder!

I met Romeo Knight face to face the first time at Revision 2023 and we agreed to play a few songs together in a couple of months at X 2023. I thought I’d be original thinking of playing Warhawk, as it’s a really difficult song to play on a Theremin, but it adds a lot of expressivity to the song. Little did I know everyone guessed we’ll play Warhawk right after I said we have one song from Rob Hubbard! But also another thereminist, Martinland had covered it prior, too, with a different approach. It’s weird that I felt the song to be really hard to do on a Theremin and the rest of the people felt it’s the most natural song on the C64 to be played on a Theremin! I thought Ghosts’n’Goblins would have been in that territory instead.

Romeo said later that he wanted to release it as a separate single recording and did the 1970s synth bossa nova backing track. And that version ended up on the Encore album as well. However, it had evolved in the meantime a little and I ended up playing two parts on a saxophone instead since it felt that it suited the backing track a little better.

We had to have a bigger set for the Paradroids show, each of us planning for our own cover projects. I had the idea of recreating the Green Beret loader song. Reyn Ouwehand’s cover inspired me, but I didn’t want to redo it. {…} We agreed on recreating the original song structure instead of looping it, even though the two parts are very different and hard to fit together. I came up with the psychedelic breakbeat stuff inspired by Ozric Tentacles. Crafting it was tedious, but even when I thought I had the final version, I discovered harmonies that were missing from the original, rewriting the chords for the middle of the song.

Well, my musical journey started out with fiddling around with a mod from Barry Leitch in Protracker 1.3, so it kinda fits the circle to remix a tune by him, whilst he's also part of the project. Xenophobe has always been on my list as a possible remix someday, and it seemed like a good opportunity to make a remix of it. Also as I'm more into dance music, but I think the original SIDs / MODs have been more guitar focused, I could finally use my wildcard with Necropolo, to do a 1200Mics like trance track.

Compleeto by ATOO has an incredible energy, I was planning for quite a while to do a remix of it. And I definitely wanted Romeo Knight on the lead guitar, so joining Encore was the perfect opportunity. Romeo Knight agreeing to coop was the cherry on top, and his solo turned out crazy awesome.

I found myself coming back to Wally Beben's Tetris piece several times over the years, usually when life was getting me down. It's such a bleak and melancholic piece, and usually by the time I had finished listening to it, I felt better. Whether that's because it has some nice uplifting sections, or whether it was simply that bloody long by the time you were finished listening to it, you had forgotten what it was you were upset about in the first place. Recently I was watching the remake of Shogun, and I found myself captivated by it. One of the characters, Mariko, was particularly interesting and absolutely key to the storyline. Without giving away anything, when her story arc completes, I felt absolutely gutted. I actually went off on my own to just contemplate her story, life the universe and everything… and so I made the emotional connection between the two.

I started my songs way too early. Had a break, went back and started to change things around and replace instruments. That did not make the songs better. Just different. Quite unnecessary. Lesson learned. 🙂

Finding the motivation to actually do a remix was the most difficult challenge for me, if I'm to be totally honest. I've had no interest in doing any music for months now. I kind of lost my mojo as they say, ha!… But I managed to piece something together in the end. 😉

Several colliding deadlines. The arpeggio parts of Warhawk were incredibly difficult to nail on a Theremin, even after dozens of attempts. As a panic attempt I tried playing them on a saxophone just so that I’d have something as a backup if it fails. To my surprise, Romeo Knight liked the sax and wanted it there!

In Green Beret I didn’t plan the vocal harmonies but sang a lot of clips by intuition. Sewing them together afterwards was a little tedious. Also crafting every drum strike individually takes time and you zone out. Focusing on other things for a few days and then you realize there’s something you need to change in the drums even after thinking they’re final.

On Encore64 V2 quite a few things cropped up which were unexpected and impacted the project quite severely. From the originally invited set of people a couple dropped out quite quickly, and as we progressed, it seemed that 'real life' things got in the way for a few more. For me, losing Danko for most of the project was huge. I won't go into the reasons for his absence, but they were serious and required his attention to be fully focused elsewhere. Firefox was another valuable member who joined on Encore500, contributing lots of things to other people's remixes on that album and he, sadly, had to bow out for personal reasons… So, I guess just the project management and progressing of the album, week by week was the most challenging this time. Which {also} contributed to the lateness of completing my own track

For me, the hardest part was keeping going… I spent a lot of time on the introduction segment {of Tetris}, and was constantly tweaking it as I kept working on the piece. Finding ways to introduce new elements, but at the same time retain the key parts that made the original so captivating, but by the time I got to the little coda at the end, I literally had to just put the mouse down and step away from the keyboard in the middle of writing, because I could have kept going and just needed to end it. Otherwise it could have ended up a lot longer.

I've been late with the track as usual, and almost failed to deliver, but Danko gave me the neccessary inspiriation / ass-kick to finish it just in time.

Okay… Barry Leitch… Other than Paulie Hughes (the stripey Ocean Loader guy), I didn't know anybody who'd stayed in the games industry after the 80s. But Barry has absolutely stuck in there, writing music for a mind-blowing number of platforms since - and is still doing it now. He has both learned new systems and written music drivers for lots of them… And here comes the interesting fact: who writes jingles and ditties for kid's musical toys? That would be Barry Leitch! But no minor chords… can't make the kiddies sad, hehe.

I only knew Danko and Firefox from before. All the other guys were new to me and it turned out they were also very nice people. 🙂

I learned that Barry did the music for Hero Quest and Pete for Bubble Bobble. That was quite cool, 'cause I played both games when I was a wee lad. 🙂

I went to the Zzap!64 event in Kenilworth this year and got to hang out with Pete, Tomsk & Jogeir. Cracking bunch of lads. We all sat about shooting the s--t, having a great time, and then Rob Hubbard comes and joins us! So we all sat outside drinking late into the night. It was getting cold, and the heater was on a timer. Poor Tomsk got stuck with the job of having to get up and press the button to turn it back on every 5 minutes.

IIRC, it was more like every 3 minutes… The only small downer in a completely brilliant 1st day at Kenilworth. Great chat, copious amounts of drink, good food, and just a lovely chilled 3-day break…

He whined an awful lot about it though… People were queuing up to turn the heat on for Rob. 🙂

They obviously knew how to treat an older musician with the right amount of respect.. (not like you lot treat me…) 😂

Just keeping you motivated to stay upright old man. 🙂

From my trip to Kenilworth: me and Tomsk shared a room for the weekend. What I didn't know was that he had a strange routine by going to the toilet every night around 4am, with an open door and just blasting away in the bowl. Of course, he woke me up and just had that satanic laughter when I asked what was wrong with him.

Not to mention crashing his car!

{Yes,} he also bumped into a taxi when we first met, so our long awaited hug was ruined by an angry taxi guy. (Thanks for the reminder, Leitch!)

In the end, it was an incredible weekend with the Encore dudes, we laughed, cried, ate and drank.. (in that order). Also, a huge bonus to get Dr. Hubbard to join us the entire evening/night, just amazing.

So much unwarranted grief for the poor Geordie lad come good. I dunno… Shocking!… LOL

My only insight would be to dispell the comment of 'never meet your heros.' Not one of the Encore team are anything other than beautiful people.

No primadonnas, just great people and talented musicians happy to chat and pass on their knowledge. So refreshing!

Indeed! We only tease you cos you're f--king awesome mate. 🙂

I’m happy about how the album ended up. There were risks with key people dropping out, but we still reached the goal in time. Several legends worked on the album and I got to work with them!

It's been a great experience getting to know and work with the other people on the project. There's been some great laughs, some tears, and a lot of constructive criticism that's definitely helped all of the tracks as they progressed. As for a final thought on my track: watch the Shogun remake series, THEN after episode 9, listen to my remix, and just wallow in your emotions for maximum effect. You'll feel better afterwards… I promise. 🙂

Really glad to be part of this project / team, as everyone is really helpful with ideas, open with comments, and I think everyone benefits from the experience (I've certainly became better in some aspects, thanks to these folks here). Also an awesome group of people to hang out with online or in real life; see some of you for some beers soon in Düssledorf or Saarbrücken!

It's was a bit bumpy this time around, but with some grinding and goodwill we all turned up and got the project over the line! A pleasure to meet and get to know fellow musicians with the same passion! For me personally, Amiga is my life. Like many of you, I started with the breadbox, but didn't create anything until I got into my teens… and the Amiga. We're not done yet, or are we?

The album turned out fantastically, it was great fun and I'm really looking forward to any future projects here.

Yes, I can second LMan. I hope we can go on further with this in the future. It's so much more fun than just sitting in your studio, creating a remix and uploading it to RKO.

A message? Music is fun. Music heals. Music people are cool. C64 people are cool.