An Interview with Michael Kleps of ReFX

Rob Hubbard for the good tunes, Martin Galway for the great sounds.

I can only pass judgement for the real old C-64 tunes as I've quit the C-64 when I got my Amiga in 1987 and haven't listened much to the newer ones.

Spellbound
Auf Wiedersehen Monty
Rambo: First Blood Part II - Tune 2 and tune 10

I simply wanted to have these instruments myself and there where non on the market at that time. I know that there are other 303 VST instruments, but when I started The BassLine there were *none*.

The same goes for QuadraSID. I always loved the SID sounds, but there
was no VST instrument and the available hardwares (HardSID & SIDstation)
are not good alternatives for me, since I'm a great believer in pure virtual studios.

During development of TheBassLine I forgot about the SID stuff, but Carlo Dechimelis reminded me by asking for a SID VSTi and the idea was reborn.

Morphable waveforms, build in distortion, complete MIDI-Ctrl automation and low CPU consumption.

The BassLine was clearly inspired by ReBirth and the lack of a good TB303-emulation as an VST instrument. I simply wanted to have those squelchy sounds myself but no VST instrument could provide them. For various reasons the release was delayed by nearly one year and in that time a few alternatives were released. Pity.

It's emulating the SID and is the first VSTi to do that. It also has a very powerful and flexible modulation engine which allows for a great varieaty of effects and sounds not heard from the SID before. Since it's all done completley in software there is no additional noise and I could (by sacrificing some speed) improve the SID emulation so that every voice has it's own filter, volume and balance.

I always loved the SID sound, especially the fat basses. I wanted to use these sounds in my own music but the hardware alternatives where to expensive for my budget and I'm a firm believer of the virtual studio with no hardware-synths at all. Carlo Dechimelis who remixed a lot of SID tunes suggested a thing like QuadraSID after he bought The BassLine and I thought Heck, why not?

Giving me the most trouble was the GUI and it's structure. How to present all the parameters so that it works and is understandable by the user? Where to get the graphics from? Another difficult part was the SID emulation itself. First I used and improved the open-source reSID-engine, but after the author specificly forbade me to use it in a commercial product I was in trouble since the release was only a few days off so I've done some research and contact Per Håkan Sundell (the author of the C64 emulator CCS-64) who was very flatterd and promptly licensed his SID emulation
to me. It was lacking the enhancements I made to reSID so I all had to understand how his SID emulation works and do all improvements again. Nothing a few worked-through nights couldn't fix.

I just wanted to use the fourth MIDI channel and the Galway-noise in Arkanoid always interested me because it takes nearly no space in memory, is very flexible and can create very errm…. weird sounds.

I think since most people still recognize his name and associate him with the SID, so his name sparked some interest like If Chris Hülsbeck beta-tests it, it must be good. He was also the beta-tester who was most enthusastic and provided 90% of the bug-reports which where always reproducable, logical and described well. Thanks Chris.

I've contacted both Martin Galway and Jeroen Tel. Both showed interest and where very friendly but until now haven't had the time to really do something. Sadly I don't even know if one of them had the time to take a look at QuadraSID…

The usual. Mainly bug reports, feature requests and feature-change suggestions. All that was managable has been fixed/improved/implemented. I think that without the beta-testers some nice features would be missing and make QuadraSID less attractive.

That it becomes the most used VSTi in the known universe 😊

Some useability changes (editing paramters could be made easier)
Some quality changes (filtered-oversampling to get rid of the aliasing noise)
And, of course, bug fixes.

Yes, but this will take a while longer, cause QuadraSID was too much stress and I will start the next project with more sparetime for me in mind. Also there isn't much left to do. All the major instruments categories are available as VSTi's now. I've to think about some ideas I had lately and perhaps by the end of the year I've have another VSTi on the market.

Ripping my first Hubbard tunes and doing small demos with 'em.

'Spellbound' and 'Thrust' with more than three voices, more filters and more effects.

Thanks for the support and have fun.