My Favorite SID Tunes by JCH

Wait, who is this JCH now? What a silly abbreviation. Just using his initials – how uninspired. Must be some kind of idiot. Anyway, it says here that he was active on the Commodore 64 from 1987 to 1992.

Question: SID tunes? What's that?

SID tunes are chiptunes created on the Commodore 64, or an emulation of the C64 or its SID chip.

The SID chip in the Commodore 64 was quite advanced in 1982. It had three channels across eight octaves, ADSR, four different waveforms, pulsating on the square waveform, three ring modulators, and multi mode filtering. The music players written for it were usually called 50 times a second, quickly changing waveforms and frequencies to simulate vibrato, drums and arpeggio chords.

I’ve been listening through all of my own tunes in the latest High Voltage SID Collection which was at #65 at the time of publishing this blog post. I selected approximately 200 tunes and created stereo MP3 files for easy listening here. You could call it sort of “JCH’s Greatest Hits” as compiled by… uh… JCH. Yes.

42nd Street
1989 Vibrants
The name refers to the fact that the tune plays for 42 seconds before looping.

Abstract #1
1989 Vibrants

Accident
1989-90 Vibrants
Cooperation between MSK and JCH. The bassline was taken from some pop hit by George Michael.

Acid 1988
1989 Vibrants

Ages
1990-91 Vibrants
One of the first tunes I made entirely on a keyboard before typing it into the music editor.

Alien Song
1991 Vibrants
The tune starts for real at 0:40.

Aouw!
1989 Vibrants

Batman (Long)
1989 Vibrants
One of my most popular tunes. It was not used in a demo or game pertaining to Batman.

Batman (Short)
1989 Vibrants
A shorter version without the calm beginning. Matches 1:39 in the long version above.

Beatbassie
1988 Jens-Christian Huus

Remix: Click

Better Late Than Never
1991 Vibrants
My first digi tune and player, i.e. features a fourth track with digital samples.

Bill Bass
1990 Vibrants
Cooperation between Drax and JCH. I did the leader, he did all the rest.

Birthday
1988 Jewels
Made in Laxity’s music player. The first 20 seconds is a conversion of a Danish birthday song.

Remix: Click

Bitter
1989 Vibrants

Blizzard
1989 Vibrants

Bones+
1989 Bones

Brubaker (Intro)
1992 Golden Disk 64 / CP Verlag
Made in a quick player. Used in the C64 game Brubaker by Double Density.

Calypso
1990 Vibrants

Can’t Stop
1988 Wizax
Made in Laxity’s music player. It was quite popular in the United States at the time.

Car Crash
1989 Vibrants
An excerpt from 2:53 in the longer tune “Trapped” (see page 6) but with a normal filter bassline.

Casio
1989-90 Vibrants

Cause I Love Her So
1989 Vibrants
I imagined that the words in the title could be sung to the part from 0:14 to 0:30.

Caveman
1990 Vibrants
Cooperation between MSK and JCH.

The Caverns (Tune #1)
1988 Jens-Christian Huus

The Caverns (Tune #2)
1988 Jens-Christian Huus

Centurion
1989 Vibrants

Chimerang
1991 Vibrants
There are interesting changes at 0:47, 3:00, 4:36 and 5:17.

Chordian
1991 Vibrants
One of my most popular tunes.

Remix: Click

Demo Game Example (Tune #4)
1989 Vibrants
Originally made for a game by the demo group Bonzai, but it was never finished.

Demo Game Example (Tune #5)
1989 Vibrants

Diflexing
1988 Jens-Christian Huus
I tried to emulate the style of a C64 composer known as Diflex.

Don’t Be Sad
1989 Vibrants
The first 30 seconds is a conversion of a tune in a proprietary tracker on the Amiga. There are interesting changes at 0:32, 1:18 and 4:09.

Double Speed
1989 Vibrants
The player is called twice as fast, but it was not a real quick player – it was just an early experiment. There’s an interesting change at 1:16 and a melodic one at 2:02.

Downtown
2017 Vibrants

Duchesse
1989 Vibrants

More on page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5 and page 6.

2 comments on “My Favorite SID Tunes by JCH

  1. Greets from a former Toronto Canada C64 user! Wow — a lot of memorable tunes in this list! I use to rip the music from various intros and demos so I could play it back at my leisure.

    What are the licensing and attribution requires for the music you authored? I am putting together some DIY/electronics-modification videos for YouTube, and would like to use one or more of these tunes as background music.

  2. Thanks, and greetings to you too.

    Remember to check out my online player DeepSID too. There’s a link in the side bar.

    Regarding the licensing and attribution, I reckon it’s the same as stated by HVSC. See the bottom of this FAQ page about releasing a cover of a SID tune commercially.

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