My Favorite SID Tunes by Future Freak

Kim Christensen, known as Future Freak in the European C64 demo scene, barely released more than two dozens of tunes on the Commodore 64. He was only active from 1987 to 1989.

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 Future Freak’s tunes in the latest High Voltage SID Collection which was at #65 at the time of publishing this blog post. I picked 18 out of the 25 tunes I liked and created stereo MP3 files for easy listening here. You could call it sort of “Future Freak’s Greatest Hits” as compiled by JCH.

All of the tunes also have mono MP3 alternatives from SOASC created using a real C64.

An Old One
1987 Dexion SOASC
Made in Rob Hubbard’s music player.

Chopper
1989 Flexible Arts SOASC
Made in Laxity’s music player.

Cooperation Demo
1987 New Life / Dexion / Zargon SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player (perhaps better known as Red).

Dexion Demo
1987 Dexion SOASC
Made in RockMonitor. Features a fourth channel with digital drum samples.

Dexion Intro
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player.

Dexion Ranking Demo
1987 Dexion SOASC
Made in RockMonitor. Features a fourth channel with digital drum samples.

Freaky One! (Version 2)
1989 Flexible Arts SOASC
Made in Laxity’s music player.

Great Tune
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player.

Highscore
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in Rob Hubbard’s music player.

Hopper Copper
1988 Silverbird SOASC
Made in Laxity’s music player. Used in the game Hopper Copper.

The Last Hero
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player.

Magnetic Fields
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in Rob Hubbard’s music player. Conversion of “Magnetic Fields, Part 4” by Jean-Michel Jarre.

Nice 5
1988 Horizon SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player.

Rising
1989 Flexible Arts SOASC
Made in Laxity’s music player.

Rocky Star (Intro)
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player. Check out the nice change at 2:05.

Rocky Star
1988 Dexion SOASC
Made in RockMonitor. Features a fourth channel with digital drum samples.

Title
1989 Flexible Arts SOASC
Made in Laxity’s music player.

Zenobits
1988 Zenobits SOASC
Made in Jeroen Kimmel’s music player.

This was most of Future Freaks’s tunes – my personal favorites. If you would you like to hear the last ones, please download the High Voltage SID Collection as well as a SID emulator for your system.

All of the SID tunes have been saved as MP3 using SID plugin revision 33.293 for XMPlay 3.8.2 with the LAME encoder installed. I turned on stereo emulation and also adjusted the filter setting for various tunes.

Download all MP3 files: SID_Stereo_MP3_Future_Freak.zip (134 MB)

Updates

November 26, 2017: Added two remixes.

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