I have always been fascinated by music created on the SID chip. I got to experience it live on the Commodore 64 back in the day as a child ofcourse, but I did not get into music before the Amiga – and that’s a whole different thing – so I missed the boat on that one. Never created an original SID on original hardware. Funny thing I actually have the original hardware to do it now. Anyway. I wanted to at least emulate the sound in a song – which leads us to this. Had a lot of fun tinkering on this one.

I reached out to Matthias Hartung (The Syndrom) himself to ask what the origins of the song actually is, because most of it is unclear and somewhat lost to time.

A little detective work goes a long way.
Here is what we found out.

• See the unreleased game “Mystery” over at GameBase64.
• Original SID file is called mystery.sid.
• It contains two songs; ‘subtune 1’ and ‘subtune 2’.
• Subtune 2 is what I remixed. Find them over at DeepSID.
• Some times the two songs on the SID are referred to as ‘abyss game 1′ and abyss game 2’ like on The Dreamland SID Collection where I discovered it.
• You can find a few more remixes of this, including mine, over at Remix64.
• You can find most things by Matthias Hartung and his groups over at CSDb.

It was made in FLStudio 9.0 with these VST instruments:

• • ReFX quadraSID
  • ReFX Nexus
  • Native Instruments FM8

Vocals were recorded on a RØDE NT1-A microphone. Original SID stems where extracted using Sid2Wave. Maybe. I don’t quite remember my method there. I produced the song in FLStudio using original stems to try to emulate the SID sound with modern instruments. Hence the name of the song. Worked out great.