An Interview with Søren "Jeff" Lund

by LMan

Jeff mastered the SID chip like few others. The early 90s, a time when many people abandoned the c64, Jeff just kicked off. He released impressive SID works for various demos and groups. The best thing about it: he is still very active in the c64 scene: making music, and even coding his own SID editor.

Real name: Søren Lund
Handle: Jeff
Born: 1974
Nationality: Danish

I think I got my first c64 around 1985, my dad bought it for me. Talk about having a nice dad, eh? ;o)

I have many favourite sid composers to name the most important ones:

Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Laxity, Drax, Metal, Charles Deenen, Jeroen Tel, JCH, Johannes Bjerregaard, Fred Gray,Matt Gray, Tim Follin, Jesper Olsen, Geir Tjelta, Deek, Martin Walker, Link, PRI, Chris Huelsbeck, Ramiro Vaca and more which I just can't remember right now.

Jeroen Tel	Golden Axe song#1 3, Invest Intro, Robocop 3 song#1, Rubicon song#1, Supremecy, Tintin on the moon song#1,
Steve Rowlands	the tunes from those Creatures games ;O)
Reyn Ouwehand	Blackmail song#1, Cosmail-08, Dutch Breeze flip the flop, Dutch Breeze Kramer, Flimbo's quest song#1 #3, Last Ninja 3 song#3, X98 tune
Geir Tjelta/Mozicart	Bended wave, Fame style, flamboyant, Geir Tjelta-02, Geir Tjelta-10, Geir Tjelta 11, Lazy fast, Melodious, Mid July
Metal	Ashtira, Bezerk, Camel funk, Diane, Fusion, Geologic, Groovin high, Jensemand, Koeleskab (his best sid!), Plastic t., Please me, Pornstar, Sayonara, Swinging, telefax, Tjuhej, Trip 2 jupiter, Trip 2 mars, Trip 2 pluto, Vommit, What now
Link	American, Dwarf fly, Hi-t soul, jazz max, Jazz time, Piano wamp
Laxity	Alibi, Arabian, Beginning, Bossa_Nova, Eastend, Happy hour (it's called "Squamp" on the disc I have ;o), Highscore, it's funky, Laxace, Pocket Freeze, S_Intro, S2 Xerxes, Sax nuddle, Sejle op, Sunshine, Syncopated, Their Song, Waste_III, Why die, Wisdom, Wood_Worne song #2, Wow reggae, Zimx_USA
JCH	Buhuu, Chimerang, Chordian, Coops_ups, Guldkornekspressen soundtrack, Heavy hit, Hugo, Hurricane, Knackdick, Scanliner, Su Sweet soundtrack, Tjords
Chris Hülsbeck	VW-title
Heatwave	Fontastic, Intromusic
Jonathan Dunn	Total Recall soundtrack
DRAX	Advanced, Avenge, Baboon, Ballfever soundtrack, Billig Oel, Black Jack, Bombastic, Boneless, Botanical, Bubbers badekar, Busy Nosa, Check it, Conical, Depressed, Disco Arm, Dope Out, Drizzle, Drudgery, End Sax, End Sequence, Exercise, Fashionable Fusion, Faxophone, Fluff, Fondness, Funk, Faarhud, Gloomy, Grillette, Hass, Heartware, Info Tune, Introduce, Jazz solo, Junk Zakk, Loading, Monky Blonky, Mr Satan, Nutriment, Nymphoman, Outro, Peppis Pop, Pianoodle, Porky Pig went to Wolly, Priapos, Profile, Pubhorny, Raccoon, Rolling, Scarlet, Skinflint, Smaask, Tadpole (2 tunes), Thymos, Tristesse, Universal, Universe, Walter, Wendy, Ypsilon, Zynaps
Thomas Detert	Dynamoid soundtrack, Game on Issue 11_90
Charles Deenen	B.A.T. soundtrack
Deek	Crimson, Dead tunes, Deadtunes Version2, Demo tune 9, Explosion, Follin's Folly, Funkish, Get the Witness, Googachild, Hairy Toes, Hairy Toes v2, Infinity, Kwik 4 TDM, Kwik41, Lazity, Load Jingle, Memories, Military, Oole timin, Paradize 91 intro, Propaganda, Puzzlenoid soundtrack, Rhumba, Slapshit, Thief he eats beef, Tiger in a Dress, Treasure, Weebles, Who's the man in the corner, Winzer
Thomas Danko	Censor_Introtune, Elementary, Groove, Ground, Intro_999, Introtune 2, Kik it, Nailed, Planetary, Relax Magazine, Shock Magazine, Shock Magazine introtune, Shock Magazine schizomix, Shuffler, Siestas gone, Singalong, Streaming, Waveform we miss you, Whizkid, Wonderland X introtune
Johannes Bjerregaard	French Fries, Jazz 1, Kamikaze song#1, Shape
20CC	A Trip into E-V-Space, Edwin's Dream, Learn it the hard way, Paradise

I only ran through the main-dir in the HVSC, but would also mention that there are some really great tunes in VARIOUS directory. It just would take me much more time to go through those ;o)

Difficult question... some of those I like are: 12-speed tune, 8th frame, anal'o'gue, Beyond (co-op with Drax), careless, Cave of Rave, Cyberworld (has some elements from a pc tune done by Metal, called Trip to Mars), Donald dick-duck, endtune, Fiskeaande, Funky tune, Funky-Tonk man, Gang i den, Gloomy tune, House, Haard bae-sex, Kumla-man, La samba del pasta bolognese, Le Pissoir, Lover Charlie, Hard Track, pat-kasser, Soft-Ice 2, Spring-pop, Paradise.

It must have been around 1988, I had heard so much good music on the c64 until then and would like to try to do something myself, also I got tired of playing games, so instead I started getting creative.

I've always loved the stuff MON and Vibrants did, it was kinda more like real music and the sound was usually better in general than in other peoples music. However I never really managed to make anything similar to what they did. Well except for a new tune I did together with Drax, called "Beyond" but it was also based on one of his pc worktunes, so I can't take too much credit for that arrangement myself, even though I did most of the editing on c64. We decided to not use hard restart to get this special good old c64 sound, which we know from MON and others. Also the sound of different people's players has interested me a lot, they just don't sound the same ;o)

Well, as I listen a lot to different techno and other electronical music that must be my inspiration source, but normally I just get ideas into my head like someone was throwing them at me. Sometimes ideas simply just pop up in my mind, unfortunately I'm often at work when this happens.

Well first of all I spend quite a lot of time on my sounds, as I want them to fit to the music I'm doing. But there's usually not so much complexity behind my sounds, I use simple techniques. One thing I do is to use more than 1 voice to create a sound, but it's not so easy with only 3 voices available. Forexample you can have a leadsound that uses 2 voices, with almost the same sound, except for that you detune the 2 voices a bit from eachother, this makes the sound much more fat. Pulse and filter are 2 things I spend extra time on as they are very important, I can't really say what I do but often I simply experiment a lot until I have something useful.

Also an old Maniacs Of Noise trick is to do a tune, and the if maybe the filterbass sound is not so clear or fat sounding, simply transpose the whole arrangement a few notes or so. This can make a bass sound much better. About my multispeed sounds, it's mainly a thing about using the wave freq tables right, and again do a lot of experimenting.
I remember when I first heard JT's "Invest_intro" I loved those bongolike sounds so much and within a few hours of experimenting I learned how to do similar sounds myself.
One last thing which is very important is to find the right ADSR values for your sounds, that's one thing Charles Deenen did perfectly, also because the ADSR in the SID chip isn't so exact, so it takes some time to find usable values, especially if you use a player with no hardrestart.

I like almost everything about the SID chip, especially as I do my own players, if I need something special I simply add it to my player. I really like the filters in the sid, very nice ones that can be used for creating quite fat sounds. Also the possibility to combine filtertypes is great. I could have used a bit more resonance and more voices that's the only "bad" thing about SID.

Yes definately, for me it's much harder to do real music, I guess it's the mixing part of it, and usage of effects like reverb, things tend to get messy when I compose "real" music. With c64 it is much easier because you do all the effects like delay, reverb and so, yourself.

That's quite a difficult question. . . But I think it has to be "Mantalos" song #1 by Charles Deenen. The tune is just so perfect everything fits together, the sounds are just so fat. And the melody itself is really nice, really pro' composition.

Well, in general I would say that all the people I've known and still know through my time in the c64 scene is something really special. A lot of good friends, and we have this 1 thing we share, the c64 - the best demo-scene computer ever It has always been really nice meeting c64 people at parties, even though some parties sucked big time.

I like electronic music a lot, especially a lot of different types of techno. You can hear that in some of my newest tunes. But in general I like all types of music, except extreme crap like trash/death-metal.

I can't say that I've heard any impressing remakes of my c64 music, but maybe it's because the tunes the remakes are based on were not too good or kinda miss something. ;o)

Hehe, well that mp3 was just to see if it was possible to make somewhat SID like sound on my old Roland XP-50 synth, but who knows, I might do more remakes of c64 music.

Scortia did the same maybe a year before me, He made a synth version of Laxity's "Alibi" and I guess it was because I loved it so much that I wanted to do a similar thing myself. It's funny because now when Scortia and I are to buy a new synth, it is very important that it can do somewhat c64 like sound ;O).

So my next investment will be a Access Virus synth, haven't decided yet, but the new C-series seems quite ok. And this should make it possible to do some more c64 cover tunes ;o). Actually I've started covering Laxity's "Star-Dream", but I've only done around 1-2 minutes of it. Also I would like to make it a bit different from the original.

Well today I'm a member of Crest and Bonzai, so now and then I do music for demos, also I usually do special tunes for people who ask me. That is if I have the time for it. But I prefer just doing what I like.

I'm trying to do more melodic music these days, good old c64 pop as we know it from late 80'ies and so :O) Also I try to make the sounds fit this style. I am working on my new player editor (as I always do!) but I've had a break from it for some time now. The player was actually finished, but I wasn't too fond of my "tremolo" routine, so I've deleted it and will implement a new idea of mine. A table that gives you possibility to manipulate ADSR and gate just as wicked as you like.

This routine can do that "Tremolo" like effect aswell, which was actually an idea from one of AMJ's tunes. Also I nearly finished a special text-editor to design the screens for my editor. In the future I would like to do smaller demostuff aswell, nothing wild, but just goodlooking. It might mainly be musicdemos ;o)

For the people who have been in the c64-scene for a long time I think it could mean lifetime for them. But one has to move on, even though we have damn good memories from the past time. I think it also has a lot to do with the people you've known during the golden years of the c64-scene. If people want we can make the c64 scene last many years, and I believe that there are still a lot of things to be done on this magnificent machine. I hope to be able to demonstrate that with some of my music ;o)

Yes together with my old friend and groupmate Duck LaRock/Camelot (Anders Daugaard) we made music and soundeffects for a c64 game called "Complex". A few other gameprojects where cancelled unfortunately.

Yes, for more underground purposes I could. But it would probably take several sid-chips. But maybe it should be external sid-chips to avoid the noise created by the c64.

The first known group I was in was X-Factor, but the members weren't that much active so I moved on to Camelot which was the group that ment most to me, I got some very good friends from that membership. Today I'm in Crest and Bonzai which are 2 of my favourite groups ever. I hope that we in Bonzai will manage to finish the demo we've been working on for a long time. I can't say that much is happening in Crest these days, but someday I believe that we will release more demos.

Yes, unfortunately that tool is delayed, but the player is ready atleast. It has quite acceptable rastertime more features than the JCH editor (using player 20!). A table for doing special glide, detune and vibrato has been added. And ofcourse a quite flexible ADSR handler for creating echos reverb.
The player is based on my current player featured in CZP music editor 2, but I have optimized it further and made additions. To compare it with the jch player v20, mine is better and a test showed a max rastertime of $1C which is the absolute maximum. JCH v. 20 can easily take more than $26 rasterlines.
In general I've got quite big instrument table and a lot of other tables which are accessable from the instrument and from the tracks.

It will be available for everyone, I see it as a tribute to the c64 scene of today. The track/sequence editing system will be somewhat like in the JCH editors, so if you find that easy, then that's good ;o) There is a seperate instrument editor, which is far more complex than the one in the JCH editor, but there's a lot of explanation in the editor so I won't find it hard to use. Some of the things might be difficult to use for beginners, but all I can say is that it allows you to experiment a lot and maybe learn new things.

Have no idea, a lot of boring real-life stuff has come up lately, but I hope to get more spare time soon, so that I can work on the editor.

I like the idea of remixing/remaking c64 tunes. It makes our memories of the c64 last even longer I think.

Jeff took the time to listen to the whole HVSC main directory to tell exactly which tunes he liked, and to miss noone. This, and the fact he still does SID music today, too, shows how much he cares for c64 music. People like him keep the scene alive! Cheers, Jeff! - LMan