Star Wizard
By zabutom on February 1, 2026 10:12 pm
Music for Commodore 64 with two SID chips, composed and performed with the defMON tracker software.
defMON?
As if SID making wasn’t already hard enough, this is quite a brutal editor software with a bare minimum of built in features. It requires you to define your own routines for basic things that are usually built into the editor like vibrato, or the dreaded hard restart. For years it was only available to members of Hack n’ Trade (HT), a Swedish demoscene and cracker group. I didn’t want to get into it until I had my own hardware C64 setup, which finally happened in 2025. I also had the privilege during the year to sit down with both goto80/HT and Frantic/HT, the creator of defMON, who both gave me walkthroughs of how it works. After that I was on my path - from there it was just a matter of practice, experimentation and study.
Thoughts
People always say that gear doesn’t matter. However, tools inevitably shape the end result. I believe in the importance of crafts in shaping a personal style and sound. And especially as the SID chip can be quite quirky and unpredictable, each mistake in entering a wrong digit somewhere has the potential to present a new sonic or musical opportunity to be explored by the composer. There is also of the aspect of the state of mind that you can find yourself in, mesmerised by numbers, fingers guided by muscle memory. In short, it’s cozy to boot up your C64 that has its own little station, and only runs one single program.
Composition
I wanted to make something minimal, informed mainly by changes in sonic texture and arrangement. It only has one chord, which is quite unusual for me.
About the name
In 2022 I performed at the Chipwrecked festival on the island of Bornholm under a clear starry night sky. Some people were lying on their backs watching the stars during my set. Afterwards one of the audience named me the “star wizard”..
Setup
A stock C64 has one SID chip with three voices, but there are unofficial mods that allows you to add a second one and run them in parallel, expanding the number of voices from three to six, with one analog filter per SID chip. My setup is using one 8580 which is the more modern version with a cleaner filter, and one 6581 with the warmer, dirtier filter. Here the 6581 is used for the bassline and I'm tweaking the cutoff frequency live during recording. Some delay and reverb is applied to one of the SID audio outputs, and some master bus processing with EQ and Compression.
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