Defaults: a making-of for retro gaming and Tracker nerds
'Defaults' is the third track on Daddy Issues. If you want to hear the track, you can hear it here:
Space Taxi 3
This song started life no later than 1994, with a strange public domain game on the Commodore Amiga computer. The game was Space Taxi 3, by Andreas Spreen. The title music for the game, written by Andreas using the Protracker software, can be heard throughout Defaults and at the end of the track.
A long-play of Space Taxi 3, in which the title music used in Defaults can be heard.
I had been prototyping Defaults on Polyend's Tracker which is a music production workstation which uses the same Tracker approach as was used to create the music in Space Taxi. During the production process of the track, I kept hearing the Space Taxi title music, and I had to know what it would sound like. I had no idea the process of accomplishing that would be as complicated as it turned out to be.
Polyend's Tracker
Back to 1994
After getting a copy of Space Taxi, I needed a way to play it. I set up an Amiga computer emulator, which is a piece of software which simulates one type of computer within another. So my Mac laptop was able to run the Amiga operating system and games.
The next step was to dig into the game's files to find the music. This was complicated by the game's files being compressed with a now archaic format, which meant I couldn't open them. After finding the de-compression software, which was also Amiga software which I had to run in the emulator, I had to figure out how to make that software work. Then I had to decompress all of the files on the Space Taxi 3 disk and start opening them to guess which one was the title music.
The Space Taxi 3 files shown in the Amiga Workbench. The highlighted file is the title screen music.
CrunchMania, the Amiga software used to unpack the title screen music.
Working with the Space Taxi music file
After finally decompressing the music file, I needed to be able to edit it so I could change the tempo, transpose it to the correct key, and export the individual instruments as separate tracks. I tried using OctaMED, a tracker application on the Amiga, but it wouldn't export audio accurately enough. So I found a copy of the now free MED SoundStudio for Windows 10. This software opened up the Space Taxi music file, allowed me to make the changes I needed, and export each individual part as a separate audio file.
MED SoundStudio running under Windows 10. It can play and edit tracker music made on original Amiga computers.
Finally, I imported the audio tracks for the Space Taxi title music into the Reason music production software, sliced it up into sections, and then experimented with where to use each part.
Arranging the sections of the Space Taxi title music relative to the other parts of the Defaults track.
Looking for Andreas Spreen
I am still trying to track down Andreas Spreen, who wrote the game and the music, to formally ask his permission to use his work in my own, to share any revenue from the song, and also to give him the opportunity to hear what I have done with his music by combining it with mine. Sadly I haven't been able to find him, despite posting on several Amiga user forums, and contacting every Andreas Spreen I could find online.
Andreas, if you're out there, thank you for this strange piece of music which stayed with me for so many years. I have often found myself with that music in my head, and using it in this track was a fun, though slightly sad and nostalgic, experience.
