A Conversation with Brendan Becker

[00:00:00] The Halfling: Thank you all for tuning into the Halfling in the Spaceman. If you're new to our show, we welcome you and hope you're entertained and inspired to start your own journey into active fandom. And if you're returning listener, thank you for choosing to spend some more time with us. And today we are excited to be talking with Brendan Becker, better known as Inverse Phase. He'll be talking with us about composing, performing his chip tunes and how it evolved from his love of computers, programming and music. Brendan, welcome to the show.

[00:00:34] Brendan Becker: Hey, thanks for having me,

[00:00:36] The Halfling: Well, thank you for being here.

[00:00:38] The Spaceman: Brendan, this is such an unusual fandom pursuit. It's not something that a lot of folks are really familiar with. Can you tell us and our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got started doing chip tunes and exactly what are chip tunes.

[00:00:52] The Halfling: Yeah,

[00:00:53] Brendan Becker: So, let's start with the basics. If you've played an old Nintendo game or a Commodore 64 game, or an Atari game or whatever you've listened to chip tunes, it's literally just a tune coming out of a chip that was built to reproduce like a synthesizer chip and almost every old eight bit computer or game system or whatever has one of these in it.

[00:01:19] Brendan Becker: Most of them are called PSGs, which is programmable sound generators, but some of them are FM, which is frequency modulation, like Yamaha keyboard from the eighties or something like that. A lot of people are really, well, the older types at least would be familiar with that ePiano.

[00:01:36] Brendan Becker: A patch that everyone was familiar with. So that is also chip tune where it becomes not chip tune in my opinion, is as soon as we start getting into samples, actual recordings of instruments, so we're talking about specifically old computers and game consoles making music and many of these are extremely limited.

[00:01:57] Brendan Becker: A lot of people, if you tell them to imitate an old video game, they'll be like, oh, it's beeps and boobs and, that sort of a thing. And that's because most of these chips can only reproduce something like 3, 4, 5 sounds at a time and they are beeps and boobs, and white noise or fuzz or whatever you wanna call it.

[00:02:14] Brendan Becker: So, my inspiration is pretty simple. I was a video game addict and once an addict, always an addict, maybe at least for, something like this. And I find an incredible amount of nostalgia and because I've been a programmer and a nerd, and I always like getting down to brass tacks and learning the ins and outs of everything that I can learn.

[00:02:39] Brendan Becker: And now, 30, 40 years later, after all of these systems are effectively dead in the eyes of the common consumer, but extremely nostalgia in the eyes of anyone, that use one of the consoles or whatever. Now all of the development tools are available. People are writing indie games.

[00:02:57] Brendan Becker: People are releasing new software for these systems and that sort of a thing. And I wanted to figure out, you know, how did my favorite video game composers from the eighties. Make their music and, uh, learn about the limitations that they worked under. So I started writing music and played it at shows and played originals.

[00:03:17] Brendan Becker: And people were like, oh yeah, I used to play that game. And I was like, well, no, you didn't. I, uh, wrote that maybe four, five weeks ago you. So then I kind of got off on a tangent and started writing tributes instead. And the tributes hit really well. And actually that's, how I met both of you is, uh, I think I played a cars tribute back in the day at, 

[00:03:40] The Spaceman: you, you did.

[00:03:41] The Halfling: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:03:42] Brendan Becker: You know, it's a lot easier for people to suddenly get it when they hear me doing a song in my particular style but it's a song that someone already recognizes and then, eventually the question will come, oh, do you do original stuff too? Or something like that. And I can. Then I can play something that I wrote and people will be like, oh, it sounds just like an old video game.

[00:04:04] Brendan Becker: Or That reminds me of Zelda instead of, I really liked that Megaman track he played a minute ago, or something like that. 

[00:04:11] The Spaceman: Yeah, the Retro Covered album that you did was really, really good.

[00:04:15] The Spaceman: lot of, well, I guess what we would call oldies now,

[00:04:19] The Spaceman: it was, it was great. and, 

[00:04:21] The Halfling: don't show your age Spaceman.

[00:04:26] The Spaceman: okay,

[00:04:26] The Spaceman: well, 

[00:04:26] Brendan Becker: late, he's done it.

[00:04:27] The Spaceman: I've done Remember I was around when a man actually set his foot on the moon. So that speaks to my age more than anything else. But, thank you for sharing that information. Just curious about the compositions, what tools do you use?

[00:04:41] Brendan Becker: I used something called a tracker and it effectively looks like a giant Excel spreadsheet. Ultra complicated to store all of the music and store all of the commands that get sent to the sound chip and that sort of a thing. But also there are music elements, at first glance you kind of look at it and you glaze over cuz it looks like a bunch of programming commands or whatever.

[00:05:02] Brendan Becker: And there's hexadecimal all over it and that sort of a thing. But there's also, stuff like C Sharp in the fifth octave with instrument six, and then you start looking at it and you notice that it's all spaced out according to the timing of the music and that sort of a thing. So I usually just call it a spreadsheet with a play button for people that, you know, like don't understand the greater nuances of music or programming.

[00:05:25] Brendan Becker: But they're called trackers and there are probably, I would say thousands of trackers, many of them free and a specific tracker will do a specific job. There's a Nintendo Tracker that'll write Nintendo music. There's a Commodor tracker that will write Commodor music. And you know, like the most popular Nintendo tracker that I would say people use is something called FamiTracker, and it's called FamaiTracker because the Japanese Nintendo is called the Famicom.

[00:05:52] Brendan Becker: So, they just kind of amalgamated and jam those two words together. The popular Commodore tracker, so the one I use is Cyber Tracker, but there's others like Goat Tracker and yes, that is goat, like the animal, so it depends on the track that you wanna write or the system you want to use.

[00:06:09] The Spaceman: You know, it's funny when you said G.O.A.T., I was thinking Fallout.

[00:06:12] Brendan Becker: Oh yeah,

[00:06:14] The Spaceman: So, all right. So yeah, this does seem to be a little bit more complex than people who write music in MIDI. 

[00:06:21] Brendan Becker: Um hmm, definitely, And also MIDI is just a protocol. That doesn't define the exact sound of the instrument. For example, in MIDI you have channels and the channel is just what the note goes across, but it doesn't define the limitations of the equipment sending or receiving the data. And it also doesn't decide what it sounds like.

[00:06:45] Brendan Becker: Certainly there's stuff like velocity, which is how hard you hit the key after touch, which is when you let off the key, and you decide that it's with a piano and you decide that it's at this specific volume and that sort of thing. But as for what you send it to, it could be a synthesizer, like something that plays chip tunes or it could be, a really nice like roll under Kurzweil keyboard or something like that, that would reproduce a sample or play a real recording of a piano.

[00:07:15] Brendan Becker: You don't really know what you're gonna get unless you know what's plugged in. So, MIDI doesn't define exactly how the music is supposed to sound. It just defines, you know, this is the data that we were able to capture while the music was being played. So where that differs from chip tunes is you write a chip tune for a very specific system and it has very specific limitations and very specific capabilities and you can guarantee that you're gonna get such and such sound wave at such and such frequency at such and such time.

[00:07:49] Brendan Becker: Even to the point where if you play two sound waves next to each other, if they produce some sort of a phasing effect or whatever, that will be perfectly reproduced. Uh, you know, that sort of a thing. So I like, the way that trackers work a little bit better than MIDI, and there are trackers that output MIDI, but usually trackers and chip tunes and MIDI are two separate camps.

[00:08:11] Brendan Becker: And maybe that's important for some people are like, oh man, I really like that MIDI sound. And it's like, well, you know, MIDI doesn't really sound like anything.

[00:08:20] Brendan Becker: Uh, you know, it's, it's just a protocol.

[00:08:22] The Spaceman: Right, and just for our listeners who might not be familiar with it, MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and it is a protocol for connecting various instruments together digitally.

[00:08:33] The Halfling: I'm just kind of curious because I know you've got a programming background, but I really don't know anything about possible music background. Tell us a little bit about that. Did you study music composition, but how did you do that?

[00:08:49] Brendan Becker: So my music education consists of a Yamaha keyboarding one class, which is they teach you to play on a single tier organ.

[00:08:59] The Halfling: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:00] Brendan Becker: And I took that when I think I was like four and a half or something like that and I barely lasted to the end of it. And then I took general music in seventh grade and that's it. I don't have any formal training.

[00:09:13] Brendan Becker: I did not take a music theory class. I don't know how to read a musical staff. I don't know how to read guitar tabs. I do not know how to play any instruments. I have tried to learn to play the piano, the guitar, the bass, the drums, some dabbling in strings and woodwinds. Uh, you know, and basically what I learned is that I can't do any of that, but I can do this.

[00:09:39] Brendan Becker: This just works more the way my brain works. So I went with that. I.

[00:09:44] The Halfling: Okay. Well,

[00:09:46] The Halfling: oh, 

[00:09:46] The Spaceman: Uh, no,

[00:09:47] The Spaceman: it's 

[00:09:47] The Spaceman: okay. No, No, 

[00:09:48] The Halfling: no. 

[00:09:51] The Spaceman: You 

[00:09:51] The Halfling: know, 

[00:09:51] The Spaceman: It's always interesting to see how people get into these things and, you know, a lot of folks in the modern era who are, new to modern video games or weren't back around in the era don't understand the limited palette that the composers had to work with the limited number of instruments and how sometimes they actually use the mechanical properties of things like fans on the motherboards to talk about how they generated songs. So when you're looking back in time and you're composing, how do you keep true to that, and how do you think that the original composers of these games were able to use the, technology that was available to them with the limited pallet of tools to create the wonderful sounds that they did for all those classic eight bit games? 

[00:10:36] Brendan Becker: Well, okay, so I'm gonna skip to your second question first. One bonus is that, I'm extremely fortunate to have met and I'm even friends with a whole bunch of these composers from back in the day and some really amazing individuals. And in talking to a lot of them, they are actually frustrated that their music didn't come out better.

[00:10:59] Brendan Becker: Often a sentiment that I'll hear is, well, it was the best we could do and you listen to it and you're like, oh man, this is really good stuff. But yeah, like they were actually shooting for something better. and what they got was what they got, you know? So I don't think that, basically, some of the guys and some of the ladies that have written some of these tunes have found tricks, for example, on a chip that can only play three sounds at a time, you wanna play a three finger chord.

[00:11:32] Brendan Becker: If you do that, you're dead in the water. There's no bass, there's no accompaniment because you're limited to those three notes coming out of those three voices on the chip. So one of the most classic tricks is to do what they call an arpeggio. Now to a trained pianist, an arpeggio might literally be a chord, but, in the chiptune world and arpeggio is one of those kind of really fast trill sounds, and you'll probably hear that in a couple of the tracks on Retro Covered even, where, I'm iterating, between all of the notes in the cord, but I'm staying on one channel, to do that. So then I have room for, say, accompaniment or melody or base or something like that. Usually the court is the accompaniments and then, I'll have a base and a lead going on.

[00:12:18] Brendan Becker: That kind of moves us into the first question, which is, how do I stay true to the limitations? Well, it's by using the original hardware and then I'm just actually forced to those limitations because an Nintendo isn't gonna do what a Nintendo isn't gonna do.

[00:12:33] Brendan Becker: So writing on the original hardware just enables me to stick with those and then, to get my own music to sound good. I just kind of follow the same path that any of those other composers would. Well, I'm limited in this way. I guess I just need to figure it out. How can I make this actually sound like good music?

[00:12:51] Brendan Becker: What trick can I employ to get the kind of sound that I want to hear? That sort of a thing.

[00:12:57] The Halfling: So it sort of forced you into the same mindset as those original composers. So you're basically reenacting, it's akin to somebody who goes into the SCA because they want to recreate things in medieval times and have those experiences.

[00:13:15] The Halfling: So they cook with the same type of dishware, they have the same costumes or dress, et cetera. You're essentially doing the same thing where you're reenacting with the same tools, which I think is very cool.

[00:13:29] Brendan Becker: Instead of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, I'm the Society for Chip Tune audio.

[00:13:36] The Halfling: there you go. Is that a thing? Is a society for chiptune

[00:13:41] Brendan Becker: I don't know. Actually this is sort of an interesting tangent for you. You might wanna look up something called the demo scene. Which is an underground scene of individuals that not just do chip tunes, but do computer art in general. 

[00:13:57] Brendan Becker: It could be motion graphics, it could be audio, it could be programming.

[00:14:02] Brendan Becker: And these guys, actually you might even remember one of these from back in the day, but the scene is still very much alive. These are people that make algorithmic computer music videos and this kind of got its start, if you think back to like an old Commodore 64 games, specifically one that you pirated, you put in the floppy and try to start up the game and type in a command or maybe it would auto start if it were on the right system. Instead of seeing the game, you'd see this logo flying around the screen and you'd hear this little chiptune Diddy and whatever and scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It'd be like, Hey, my name's Jack. I cracked this game. Look forward to more pirated games from me. You could call my BBS. That sort of a thing.

[00:14:44] Brendan Becker: And this kind of stuff evolved, into basically people that got tired of cracking games and decided that they were going to pit their cool little kind of cracker intro against the other guys Cool little cracker intro. And they started not just playing a game of leapfrog with the software companies to crack the newest, latest, greatest thing, but eventually that got boring.

[00:15:10] Brendan Becker: And then they started playing leapfrog with each other, trying to see who could get the most out of their old Commodore 64 Atari or whatever system. And that's a society of sorts. To come back to the question, which you can look up the demo scene or you can just type in like demo scene PC or demo scene Amiga, or, pick any old computer or you can pick a category, like they actually have, they're writing five minute music videos in four kilobytes these days.

[00:15:40] Brendan Becker: So you can type in stuff like demo scene 4k, or demo scene 256 bites. And stuff will come up in the YouTube. So give that a go if you want a fun time.

[00:15:50] The Spaceman: It's interesting when we talk about this stuff, one of our goals, matter of fact, the biggest goal we have with this podcast is to connect nerds with their tribes, because everybody has their own interest and there's always a group of folks out there ready to support them and help them get started and collaborate with them and just, chill out and have a good time. So it's good that you point that out to us and I'm really glad, and I'm hoping that we can connect with some of these folks and eventually, and get a chance to talk to them. Now, before we go on, can you tell us how you first made that transition from a video gamer to somebody who wanted to explore the different voices inside the computer or the console? How did you go from being just a consumer of these things to being the creator?

[00:16:40] Brendan Becker: So I have always been around computers as a kid and there's this kind of parallel. I had access to games and programming at the same time. So my dad brought home a Compaq portable, which is the PC. It looks like a Kaypro for anyone that knows what one of those looks like.

[00:17:05] Brendan Becker: It's two floppy drives, a monitor and a keyboard that folds out and it looks like a sewing machine or a piece of luggage. They call it a luggable in the pre-laptop days. So he brings one of these home and he's an editor at a magazine. And, they brought home some, it wasn't Reader Rabbit. It was Easy Reader software.

[00:17:23] Brendan Becker: And I learned to read at the, the rip old age of two and he brings home games, or gets some copies of games from a friend or whatever. And I start playing some like public domain and old DOS games and stuff that he grabbed from a BBS and, you know, whatever. And, one of my games is written in basic, as sort of a Star Wars fighting sort of a game.

[00:17:48] Brendan Becker: And I want it to be easier. And one day I discover that I can break out of the game and look at the basic code for it. And I find the difficulty. In the basic code and it asks you when you start up the game, it's like, enter a difficulty level one to 10 or whatever.

[00:18:05] Brendan Becker: I was like, well, I'd like to enter difficulty zero because that's less than one and that would make the game easier. And what I didn't realize is it was multiplying to figure out how many ships it would put on the screen based on whatever number you put in. So zero made it not generate any ships and the game would crash.

[00:18:23] Brendan Becker: But I did learn a thing or two about programming very accidentally. Then I'd go to the library and check out, books that had program listings to type in and, go home and try and type 'em in. Half the time it wouldn't work because it was Apple or Commadore stuff that would use graphics routines that I didn't have on my PC.

[00:18:46] Brendan Becker: I started learning how to port stuff at a very basic level, you know, oh, this color command doesn't work because I need the color command for the PC. And I had, the little compact manuals with the GW basic reference in the back and whatever and knew how to do that. So I'm maybe six or seven years old.

[00:19:05] Brendan Becker: My dad has already showed me how to get on BBSes, although I wouldn't dare do it without him present until I was maybe nine years old, and then I started doing it on my own, or something like that. And so all of that is happening, and at the same time, I have access to an Atari 2600, and then I have access to a Sega Master system.

[00:19:27] Brendan Becker: And all my friends have a Nintendo. And one thing that drove me in sort of an interesting direction, I chose a Sega master system because I could play Nintendo anytime I wanted, at my friend's place. So I wanted something different, but I did still pine for being able to play some of those games.

[00:19:46] Brendan Becker: And I would write those games in basic, really, really awful, terrible versions of those games. But, you know, like just. Versions of the games that I couldn't have and I got interested in all of that. So eventually it would be time for me to build my own first computer.

[00:20:07] Brendan Becker: Built it at around age 11, I went to a computer show with my dad and we found this table with this guy that had the right prices and I figured out what parts were supposed to go in my computer and that sort of a thing. And, gave it all to the guy and the guy's like, come back in, an hour and I'll have your computer built and whatever.

[00:20:23] Brendan Becker: And I was like, actually could I build it? And he shoots my dad, like, and I'm not a babysitter, uh, sort of look. And my dad kind of shrugs at him and says he can do it, because I had been upgrading RAM and whatever for the neighbor, computer people or whatever for, several years.

[00:20:40] Brendan Becker: And I build the computer and he's like, you're 11, come back in five years and I'll give you a job. Sadly he was in New Jersey and I was living in Idaho at the point, so that wouldn't, really work out. But across from his table at the computer show, think like a dealer room at a sci-fi or anime convention, it's very much like that.

[00:21:00] Brendan Becker: And the entire time I'm there, there's a guy from Software the Month Club, across the alley from this table. And this guy has a sound card. And all PCs at this point in time are beeping and booping and all they can do is one sound at a time. And no one's really using them from music.

[00:21:20] Brendan Becker: You know, you'll get games with really crappy music, but this guy has a sound card and it is playing like all the hits Co. And he's, you know, he's got all sorts of stuff and I'm listening to it and I'm, you know, like, it just, I am. Absolutely floored and enamored. As soon as I finished building my pc, I just spent like a half an hour to an hour just sitting there, like watching all of the stuff and pop up the oscilloscopes and a spectrum analyzer.

[00:21:46] Brendan Becker: And as soon as I got home and I was home with my computer and my dad gave me a sound card for my birthday or maybe it was for Christmas. Gosh, here's where memory goes out the window. I think it was actually maybe more like a Christmas present. But the point is that I ordered 20 discs of that music and the replayer software because now I had a sound card and I could do it.

[00:22:09] Brendan Becker: I only had CGA, so I didn't have any of the graphics modes that it would support. But the program still worked, which was great and I started wondering how this stuff was made, and I started calling up BBSs again because I was already calling them up, finding the software.

[00:22:25] Brendan Becker: And I would find, code to play them back. And I was already a basic programmer. I found something called, Bell's, whistles and soundboards, that I could put the music in my own games and whatever, and hooked up with the neighbor kids. And we started writing games again and doing game development and all the while, There are all these game systems that we don't have, or games that we don't have, and we're doing the same level up sort of thing where, like we're trying to write games that we don't have or write things that we would like to play and that sort of thing.

[00:22:58] Brendan Becker: And I start, you know, writing the game soundtracks for those games. And then after downloading all of this stuff from all of these BBSs and whatever, we're finally on the internet and I discover another scene of people, a scene of people playing around with emulators

[00:23:16] The Halfling: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:17] Brendan Becker: and my eyes get blown as if they weren't already wide open.

[00:23:22] Brendan Becker: My eyes are now, like held open with a mechanical device and I cannot stop staring at all of this emulation stuff. I can play all of these NES games on my computer already. You Like there are dumps of all these games available. Turns out the software is not anything like an emulator that you would experience today, which is near perfection.

[00:23:47] Brendan Becker: Back then, it's little MIDI commands that are getting translated from the Nintendo. So you play Mario and there's like a piano ding coming out of the MIDI port of my sound blaster, going out to this crappy keyboard I have hooked up. And then I would have an all 32 and it would give me an actual piano ding out of my sound card.

[00:24:07] Brendan Becker: But like the game was running and I was starting to explore just all of the possibilities. Now that I have an emulator, this is basically the beginning. Of not just, some people would say it's the beginning of, like console game, piracy, or whatever. But really to me, it was an avenue to run these games and look at what's happening in memory and look at what's happening behind the scenes.

[00:24:31] Brendan Becker: They all have debuggers built in, so I can see, like how the game works and that sort of a thing. And then I just begin to dream and fall down the rabbit hole with learning how old game systems work. So that's a horribly long answer to your question. But I think understanding that like these two things, it wasn't really that one got me into the other.

[00:24:55] Brendan Becker: It wasn't really that, like I had played video games forever as a kid, and then suddenly I was able to make them, although that was true, I also had programming tools, the entire way. And suddenly I discovered the tool that would enable me to do it with all of this information that I had already amassed.

[00:25:14] Brendan Becker: And the puzzle pieces just fit together perfectly for me. So, here we are 40 years later,

[00:25:21] The Halfling: You used your powers for good, not for evil, right?

[00:25:26] Brendan Becker: uh, mostly 

[00:25:27] The Halfling: mostly. Well, I have a question for you because this has kind of been in my mind since we set this up,

[00:25:36] Brendan Becker: Sure 

[00:25:37] The Halfling: inverse phase. Where's the name come from and how did you pick that? And, what's with that?

[00:25:44] Brendan Becker: There are a variety of things, that Inverse Phase can be. The most important thing that people realize is that it is an actual audio joke. So Inverse Phase is a trick that you'll do. I'm sure you're gonna actually, when you're done, with this podcast, you're probably gonna go and edit in an audacity or some sort of audio editor.

[00:26:09] Brendan Becker: And in an audio editor, Here's a fun trick for you. You can literally do an Inverse Phase trick, which is not the same as Inverse Phase me. Just load in any song and highlight only the right channel, which you might have to do the split to left and right tracks, or split stereo to mono or whatever.

[00:26:29] Brendan Becker: Highlight only one of those channels and then pop up. And do you probably have an invert effect, but if you don't have an invert effect, you can amplify to negative 100% and it will invert the sound wave. It'll flip it upside down and what you learn is that sound waves that oppose each other, cancel each other out.

[00:26:51] Brendan Becker: And this is a common trick that people will use to remove vocals or remove certain instruments, in sound. And you can take that a step further. I really like inside jokes. You'll notice that none of my chip tunes have vocals because none of these consoles have enough memory to store an entire, like recording of a vocal line or anything like that.

[00:27:15] Brendan Becker: And even if they do, half of them don't have the ability to play back

[00:27:19] Brendan Becker: the recording at all. You know, they're all synthesis and that sort of a thing. So the removal of vocals is in fact, Inverse Phase and then me removing vocals and just writing a music line instead of the vocals could be considered Inverse Phase.

[00:27:37] Brendan Becker: So there's that also Inverse Phase. You can use the exact same trick, but just with different kinds of instruments to get new wave forms. So you know, because some of these systems are so limited, you play the upside down sound wave next to the right side up sound wave, and it gives you a new sound wave that the system doesn't know how to make.

[00:27:58] Brendan Becker: But because it's able to play the regular and the upside down one, it works, you know? So that's another one and then I did the Inverse Phase logo, which is literally just an inverted, Inverse Phase. So if you invert the logo and hold it up to the light or whatever, if it's on a piece of paper, you can see that it says Inverse Phase.

[00:28:17] Brendan Becker: That one's kind of a party trick. It's probably more funny if you're drunk or something. But, um, , so for everything, I go down the rabbit hole and I probably overthink pretty much everything I do and this is my outlet for that

[00:28:33] The Halfling: I think it's good to have an outlet, everybody needs that though.

[00:28:36] The Halfling: Again, as long as you're using your powers for good

[00:28:41] Brendan Becker: Some people might argue that, my 11 different covers of the Harlem Shake was me not using my powers for good.

[00:28:49] Brendan Becker: But that's about as evil as I wanna take it. I think.

[00:28:54] The Halfling: Oh, is there a particular artist or composer that has inspired you to do this?

[00:29:02] Brendan Becker: Oh gosh, there are so many. I am especially inspired by "Hip" Tanaka, and he is the composer of Metroid and Kid Icarus a bunch of early Nintendo games, like any of the Nintendo games that, had kind of like. I don't know, ten second jingles when you start them up, they don't have a full on title screen song.

[00:29:26] Brendan Becker: They just have a jingle. Many of those games are him. The other composer at the time was Koji Kondo, the Zelda and Mario Composer. Kondo is super talented too, but Tonica just has this sort of flare that I really like.

[00:29:40] Brendan Becker: And there's actually, if you wanna watch, some really good interviews with him, he's featured in the excellent documentary, digging in the Carts so that's one to check out and he's really inspired by reggae and that sort of a thing. So you'll hear a lot of that sort of jive and, listen to the music from Balloon Fight or something like that.

[00:30:00] Brendan Becker: You know, you'll hear some of that. He's probably my main shout out. But there are so many, Junko Ozawa, she's got some amazing stories. She's the original, Namco or one of the original Namco composers., a lot of people blame her for coming up with the signature sound of Namco back in the day.

[00:30:21] Brendan Becker: And engineering some of the sound waves that they would use. I think The Tower of Druaga was, maybe her first could be wrong, but definitely one of her first and I think she did got plus and a few others. so she's another. But yeah there are just so many, composers, a lot of Japanese composers, some European composers, Galway, Martin Galway is, the guy that first pioneered, sample playback on the Commodore 64.

[00:30:53] Brendan Becker: The Commodore 64 can only do three sounds at a time, and he figured out how to get a fourth channel out of nothing and basically what you're doing is the original trick is that there's a line in on the Commodore 64, so that you could plug something like, they had something called the Magic Voice and a few other things that would do speech synthesis on effectively a speak and spell.

[00:31:18] Brendan Becker: Don't expect much, but a lot of these, one of them is called the Carra speech, and it literally has an AV plug coming out of the back of it, and you just plug it into the AV port on the Commodore 64, which has a line in on it, and most people just don't know. That it's there. You can't sample from the line in, like a modern PC plug a microphone or a tape deck or something and the line in and record out of it.

[00:31:45] Brendan Becker: The Commodore will only play it through, but you can control the volume of the line in. And so people would do this hundreds or thousands of times a second and get some pretty crazy samples and sounds out of that. So Galway came up with that effect and you can listen to like Arkanoid intro themes if you want to hear him try to imitate trumps outta that. So anyway, those are a few, there I name a ton more online and you can find me on social media and we'll talk shop about composers 

[00:32:14] Brendan Becker: anytime. 

[00:32:14] The Halfling: sure. Sure.

[00:32:16] The Spaceman: Besides demonstrating in conventions, how do you go about lining up performances?

[00:32:21] Brendan Becker: That is an interesting sort of, you find. conventions are really actually a very good source, either of venue or a source of people that run a venue. There are a lot of game shops, and other places that would like someone, any place that would hire a DJ to play,, just an opening event or something like that.

[00:32:46] Brendan Becker: Sometimes live music is fine, they just hadn't really thought of that. Or they don't know any musicians that would play something that would fit or something like that. Kind of think outside of the box. You can also just literally go to open mics and it looks a little bit weird when you're up there with a laptop or a game boy or whatever, especially, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

[00:33:08] Brendan Becker: But these days, laptop musicians, you know, people bring you know. An iPad or an iPhone or whatever along to play accompaniment for like a guitar singer songwriter, might have a drum track that they play along with or something like that. So, I think that most people are pretty accepting and open-minded, especially in something like an open mic.

[00:33:30] Brendan Becker: You run into a lot of people that just wanna hear something new or interesting. So those are good places to play and that could just be a random bar. One of my first shows was played at a biker bar in Charlottesville that was fun. 

[00:33:43] The Spaceman: Now that's a mix. 

[00:33:44] Brendan Becker: Yeah, and I played pop covers, I played stuff off of retro covered before it was retro covered.

[00:33:49] Brendan Becker: Uh, so, you know, like everyone had heard, like song two from Blur or something like that. So as long as when you're playing stuff that they know, some people will play a cover to get recognition and again, that enabled everyone to get it and then, they were just playing along, jamming along with me, so that was fun.

[00:34:07] Brendan Becker: But, uh, but yeah, just reaching out to people that you think are into games or something nerdy seems to be the best way to do it.

[00:34:15] The Spaceman: Well, that's kind of how you found us by accident. So

[00:34:18] Brendan Becker: Yep, so true.

[00:34:21] The Spaceman: uh, well, that's an interesting story that we need to get into someday, but today it's probably too much of a digression so we've heard about your performances and we've heard about your craft what do you do for fun? What other kind of fandoms do you.

[00:34:36] Brendan Becker: Ah, huge sci-fi nerd. Can definitely always find me watching, one of the latest Star Trek or like series, just finished Orville season three. Absolutely amazing.

[00:34:48] Brendan Becker: I can't, I cannot understate how much, if you are a Trekkie, you need to watch Orville.

[00:34:55] Brendan Becker: It is absolutely amazing.

[00:34:57] Brendan Becker: Seth, really, I was so worried going in, I was like, oh God, I don't want another like, family guy version of Star Trek or whatever. And not that I don't sit down and watch and laugh at family Guy every once in a while, but I just didn't want that to be my like sci-fi destination or whatever.

[00:35:18] Brendan Becker: But Orville ended up being really something else. It is absolutely incredible. And Seth even, I don't know if you've seen the interview with him where he says, I didn't just want to do Family Guy. I wanted to do a serious sci-fi and get seen seriously for it.

[00:35:32] Brendan Becker: And, and that, that really changed my mind about it.

[00:35:35] Brendan Becker: And one of my friends was like, listen, you just gotta watch it. It's just t with a punchline. And, he was right. So I'm, I am a true convert to that, I have also actually been re-watching since as a kid. I didn't really, get to watch all of it. Quantum Leap

[00:35:52] Brendan Becker: has 

[00:35:52] Brendan Becker: been and I mean, what a terrific series that is.

[00:35:54] Brendan Becker: And now there's the remake, and I haven't been able to watch any of the remake, no spoilers, because I'm still finishing it with my partner.

[00:36:02] Brendan Becker: So we're watching, we're, we just got into season three, and hopefully we'll be able to watch the remake soon, but, I've been doing that. Expanse is not going, but I loved Expanse.

[00:36:13] Brendan Becker: That was terrific. Things with time travel are often fun, and that just kind of ties right back into Quantum Leap. I mean, the music honestly is kind of a fun thing. You know, we're not writing music. I'm listening to music as long as I have a gig going, I try not to listen to music when I'm writing music so I don't accidentally knock off someone's idea or something like that.

[00:36:36] Brendan Becker: And that can be a real issue because, like I'm sure there are a lot of creatives out there that, while they're writing or they're, like designing something or painting something or whatever, they listen to music to get inspired. But music is a big source of inspiration for me.

[00:36:52] Brendan Becker: And, you know, for me, it doesn't quite work in the same way. Like, I can't just surround myself with weird or interesting paintings or something like that to do music. Although sometimes it works, sometimes I'll try and leave, , stuff from the demo scene that I'm talking about on and just put it on mute.

[00:37:10] Brendan Becker: So that I can watch cool, like video effects and stuff like that. And sometimes that can work. Playing games, maybe that's obvious, I try to play games a decent amount. And then I'd say most of my free time is actually eaten up by Bloop Museum, giving tours of this video game computer and weird media museum that I help run just north of Hunt Valley.

[00:37:34] The Spaceman: Yeah. Can, you tell us a little bit more about the Bloop Museum?

[00:37:38] Brendan Becker: yeah, sure. Been trying to run a museum or something like it for 10, maybe even 15 years or so. I first started separating, secret Identity Alert, I used to run Mag Fest. 

[00:37:54] The Halfling: Oh wow, 

[00:37:55] Brendan Becker: we don't. We wanna get, we don't wanna get into that. Maybe that's another entire episode.

[00:38:02] The Halfling: Okay. 

[00:38:03] The Spaceman: Do I need to go into a chorus of, we don't talk about MagFest ,no, no, no.

[00:38:06] The Halfling: no. 

[00:38:09] Brendan Becker: oh gosh, lots of history, lots of memories. But, the most important thing is that Mag Fest had a video game room just like many anime and sci-fi icons but I noticed most people were going to the game room to play Halo and Smash and stuff like that.

[00:38:24] Brendan Becker: Not really get educated about old systems, or they didn't really want a unique experience, or they weren't looking for the experience they were looking to play, fighting games with their friends or something like that. But there definitely was like a small group of people that wanted to find new stuff.

[00:38:46] Brendan Becker: I mean, like, and that's actually, me in video games. I'm definitely always out on the lookout for like games I've never played or games I've never seen before or whatever. I'm all about, variety and trying to find something new and fun and just increase my experience.

[00:39:00] Brendan Becker: So anyway, I split off a museum room from the game room and just, started setting up Ataris and 3DOs and CDIs and MSX computers and stuff like that, and a room at Mag Fest. And people would go in there and they'd be able to get their fix. And then I was like, you know what if I, like, I was trying to figure out how I would turn Mag Fest into something that could, I mean, it was already supporting itself, but not really. And I needed a way to support myself and I was like, what if I ran a museum, like a year round museum, with all the stuff that we have at Mag Fest and then just shut it down, and went and did Mag Fest and then, moved it all to Mag Fest and moved it all back and then opened it back up and that sort of a thing.

[00:39:46] Brendan Becker: Um, and that ended up being a great idea that I never accomplished

[00:39:51] The Halfling: Mm.

[00:39:52] Brendan Becker: So I had to back off from Mag Fest because of health issues and my stuff. Lived in a storage unit for a little while and I met a guy running a computer museum, up here in Hunt Valley, which is where I'm sitting right. And, he had a computer museum inside of his computer company and I told him about my ideas and how I wanted something interactive.

[00:40:14] Brendan Becker: I wanted people to be able to play with this stuff and see the oddly enough stuff, and you know how his museum was more computers and business and industrial and my museum would more be why my mom could find me in the electronics department at Sears after seven hours at the mall or something.

[00:40:31] Brendan Becker: But, yeah, we decided to merge the ideas. We're still separate entities, but I take up some of his space. We've got about 15,000 square feet of space. I have over 10,000 items that people can ask to check out. And I'll literally just go and pull it out , a cabinet or storage and hand it to you so that you can interact with it in some meaningful way instead of just looking at it under class.

[00:40:57] Brendan Becker: It's been a lot of fun. So I've, I've spent the last five years really, going full steam ahead with this idea. And at this point I basically live here. I give tours during the day and when tours aren't here, I can go in the back and write music for clients and stuff like that.

[00:41:16] Brendan Becker: And I have two ongoing game soundtracks for Beat Down City and another game that I can't name, but Keep your eyes on, Frank Cifaldi, the Video Game History Foundation guy, for some details about that. But, so I'm constantly kind of going back and forth between one and the other. And then, my little bit of time that I get to Slack off, I go back to the sci-fi shows.

[00:41:40] The Spaceman: You know, talking about the Orville for a second, the thing I like most about the Orville is that the characters are not perfect paragons of human beings like they were in TNG, but they're also not nearly as flawed as they are in Kurtzman era Trek. So it's a good balance. It keeps the spirit of the old while humanizing the characters at least a little bit. So that's my take. That's my take on the interval. And I too was a little worried when I heard that Seth McFarland was gonna make a Star Trek like show. Just because Seth is known for a certain type of crass humor, which sometimes lands and sometimes doesn't.

[00:42:20] The Halfling: Well, he had a passion for wanting to do this and he really wanted to do a Star Trek show and they said no, and. So he said, okay, well if I can't do Star Trek, then I'll do my own version of it.

[00:42:38] The Halfling: And 

[00:42:39] The Halfling: This is what we got and we love it. Haven't been able to see season three yet, but looking,

[00:42:44] Brendan Becker: is, it is something else. You, you are in for a treat.. Um,

[00:42:48] Brendan Becker: the, I mean, it's already good in season two, and I think it really gets progressively better but for anyone that thinks that the show got stale and definitely for anyone that doesn't, it gets real in 

[00:43:01] The Halfling: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. 

[00:43:02] Brendan Becker: it is, nailing it.

[00:43:05] The Halfling: So, going back to what you do, Inverse Phase and then the Bloop Museum, do you have any, and this is such a, I guess it's really a unique niche. But do you have any sage advice for people who are listening and think, oh, this is really cool.

[00:43:26] The Halfling: How do I do this? How do I get involved? What would you tell somebody who might be interested in doing something like this?

[00:43:33] Brendan Becker: Put yourself out there. Don't sit in the corner and do it and not show anyone. Um, you know, like you can't, uh, you, you might, uh, this is, this is actually, so my partner, uh, is also a musician and actually went to school for it. was actually trained to do music and whatever, and we met actually when I was giving a guest seminar in a video game, music class .

[00:44:01] Brendan Becker: And it's a, it's actually a really sweet story, but not to get too far off topic, the point is that I had some emotional battles with my partner and we were trying to I wanted to hear what he was working on.

[00:44:18] Brendan Becker: And I wanted him to show people and he thought, either it wasn't good enough or it wasn't ready.

[00:44:25] Brendan Becker: And you're just, if you think that you can improve and you actually hear a marked improvement to every time you're working on something, then great. But eventually you're gonna hit that wall or that plateau where you need to share your work with the world to improve or even just for them to know you exist.

[00:44:46] Brendan Becker: Maybe I'm gonna say something like, wouldn't you like your friends to hear what you're working on and see what you're doing? And all of the people that I'm trying to give this advice to would say, no, I don't wanna hear my friends to hear this. It sounds awful, but it is absolutely what you need to do.

[00:45:00] Brendan Becker: You need to share, the point is that you're both people and you both love this sort of a thing. You need to find your people and you need to share the thing that you love with them and like even if you're not doing a great job if you share it with people that aren't, negative all the time, then you know, they'll probably give you reasonable advice.

[00:45:20] Brendan Becker: They'll be like, oh, you know, that part sounds a little bit weird, , could you make it sound more like this? Some of them might actually be knowledgeable and tell you exactly what you need to do. Others might not be knowledgeable, but they'll at least be able to identify, your problem areas or give you support and tell you that your tune really jams or, your art's really good or whatever.

[00:45:40] Brendan Becker: Humans are social. You can do art for yourself and you should, by the way. I'm not saying that you should, do your creative endeavor, only for others and not for yourself. You absolutely need to do it for yourself.

[00:45:52] Brendan Becker: But sharing it with others, You're just gonna find a whole new level of appreciation and you'll find people that are doing it and you just need to put yourself out there and you'll find that there are people that love what you do, whatever it is.

[00:46:07] The Spaceman: Find a tribe and your tribe will support you.

[00:46:10] Brendan Becker: Mm-hmm. 

[00:46:11] Brendan Becker: Absolutely. 

[00:46:12] The Halfling: That is definitely sage advice and you were by far not the first guest to offer that advice. It's about putting yourself out there, but also finding your tribe as Spaceman said. So, we appreciate that anybody that comes on the show, if they give that advice, that just sort of solidifies and hopefully our listeners will be inspired to put themselves out there and to connect with a community, that would be supportive.

[00:46:43] Brendan Becker: Even if you're not a creative, most of that advice was probably for someone making music or art or something like that. Even if you're not a creative, you can go out and find people that are doing stuff like what you wanna do, like with the museum, Hey, we're looking for an intern.

[00:47:00] Brendan Becker: Just come on up and ask questions that, you know, like you wanna know the answers to ask how they do what they do and see who's willing to share their information and their knowledge. If you just wanna learn something about it, like when people come up to the museum, my time is unlimited for someone who wants to learn.

[00:47:22] Brendan Becker: So, find people that want to teach you, if you find that you have the time to spend more time hanging out in that environment, see what you can osmo from those individuals, it doesn't just have to apply to an artistic endeavor.

[00:47:38] The Halfling: That's awesome. Again, thank you for sharing that advice. 

[00:47:41] The Spaceman: And so many people we've spoken with have shared some version of that, and a lot of people, I think are leery of becoming involved in online communities because of a problem with trolls, and I don't think we can let a few bad apples in our community to find who our communities are. We have to be good ambassadors for things that we do.

[00:48:03] The Halfling: Yep.

[00:48:04] Brendan Becker: yeah. Do it in person too, because then it's much easier to, you know, we, you can't read social cues online very well and either, I would say that there are many more people these days that have trouble reading social cues. Whether it's an Asperger's sort of situation, even though I know that got removed from the dsm, a lot of people still identify that way.

[00:48:28] Brendan Becker: But also there's a vast number of people that don't know how to convey their emotions or meaning online. And I think that the internet is kind of turning, or online communities in general are kind of turning us all into people that can't interpret each other very well and it's much easier to do that in person.

[00:48:53] Brendan Becker: Like you might still be a person that has issues with social cues, but if you have more cues, like if you're sitting there with, in a face to face conversation, you'll have more to go on than you would if you were just looking at words on a screen plus you'll actually be able to interact with people and it's more fun.

[00:49:11] The Halfling: Yeah. Yeah. I would a hundred percent agree with that. 

[00:49:15] The Spaceman: I don't think you're gonna get any argument from the Halfling or myself about loving to interact with people. 

[00:49:20] The Spaceman: You know, I have, I have severe social anxiety, but when I get around nerds, all the barriers come down. So it's wonderful.

[00:49:28] The Halfling: Brandon, thank you so much for talking with us today. We've really enjoyed it and had a great time getting to know you a little better and hear about your creative journey. But before we leave, could you tell everybody how to find out more about you and projects and music, et cetera?

[00:49:48] The Spaceman: Yeah, and if you have any

[00:49:49] The Spaceman: upcoming projects, 

[00:49:52] Brendan Becker: Oh gosh. I was just on a podcast, but I actually I can tell you. I don't have any upcoming ones, but let me get, when I was just on, and maybe people can look this up, do, do, do, do.

[00:50:11] The Halfling: He's, he's searching ladies and gentlemen,

[00:50:15] Brendan Becker: So look up The Roar Heard Round the World and there's these guys that are researching the Colossus roar, which is the roar you hear in X-Men when you hit the mutant power button and you're playing Colossus.

[00:50:30] Brendan Becker: And they're trying to find this guy and whatever. And we had a great chat about that.

[00:50:34] Brendan Becker: So that's like my number one recent sort of a thing that, you can hear from me online. But, if you wanna hear anything about music or demo scenes stuff or whatever, I'm on the big three, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter., I'm noisiest on Twitter, I guess. Although that might change.

[00:50:53] Brendan Becker: I do have a Mastadon account and I might start moving over that direction. But wherever it is just look for Inverse Phase inverses, like the opposite and phases, P H A S E,

[00:51:06] Brendan Becker: And I am just that with no spaces, no dots, no nothing, on all of those platforms. If you wanna find the museum, it is just bloop, which is b l o o P, like computers go bleep, bloop, museum.

[00:51:19] Brendan Becker: And that is also on the same networks. We haven't got a Mastadon for that, but we're still on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and then both of them have a dot com. So you know, there's inversephase.com and bloopmuseum.com. The Inverse Phase website is really just a link list to all my stuff.

[00:51:36] Brendan Becker: And then the, the bloopmuseum.com actually takes you straight to our museum Patreon. So I've got Patreons for both the museum and my music. So if you wanna support on a monthly basis, that is possible to do also any amount of support is appreciated.

[00:51:55] Brendan Becker: Please don't, jump in like crazy with a big amount and have to back off. I would much rather just have a whole ton of people supporting at a dollar a month or something like that because, slow and steady wins the race.

[00:52:07] The Spaceman: E. Exactly. Now, when you were talking about the list, was it a linked list or a list of links?

[00:52:14] Brendan Becker: Uh, well it could be either, you know, programming joke.

[00:52:18] The Spaceman: yeah,

[00:52:18] The Spaceman: A little

[00:52:19] The Spaceman: programming joke. Sorry, I, you know,

[00:52:23] The Spaceman: you and I probably the only two people we get

[00:52:27] The Halfling: Uh,

[00:52:28] The Spaceman: All right. So it's great to all our listeners out there, be sure to check all of that out. Brendan, we've known him for years and he is a great guy. His work is awesome, and I'm really glad to hear that he is among other members of the community keeping up with the retro console movement and the things that they're doing over at the Bloop Museum.

[00:52:52] Brendan Becker: Thanks for having me.

[00:52:53] The Spaceman: yeah we wanna thank our listeners for tuning in today. We hope that you've enjoyed and perhaps become a little inspired by today's guest, Brendan Becker. Brendan, we want to give you a huge thank you for joining us today, and this is the Spaceman of the Halfling and the Spaceman signing off.