Hello there,

I'm Marc Girard. I'm a musician and sound engineer. Thrust 2004 is a project I wanted to do for a long time. I was trying to find a cool Commodore 64 song that could be redone with today's tools.

I had a try last year, without much success I must say. Then, one night, after fooling around some drum sounds, I decided that I'd give it another shot.

To me, keeping the original feel of the song was very important. I heard many versions of C-64 songs but they were quite changed and not exact. I might add that some C64 covers impressed me still, even if they were miles from the original song.

So, I rendered WAV files of the good old SID version and had a quick look at it. The task seemed easy at the start but the more I advanced, the more I realized that it wouldn't be *that* easy, Rob Hubbard is one of the best (if not THE best) computer musician.

In the end I replayed and retracked EVERY parts. Everything's there. I even had to stretch and slow down some parts to figure out what was going on in the SID voice! :)

The arrangement is almost the same as the original song. Except for a few synthetizer pads here and there. Then again, if you really are a freak, I could do a "True to SID" version, no problems! :P

So, I hope you enjoy listening to this new version of Thrust as much as I had fun doing it! Feel free to e-mail me your comments (or flames) at [email protected].

Marc Girard
Febuary 3th, 2004

Hey, the song plays WAY too fast! What were you thinking?

Well, I'm from Canada and we had the NTSC version of the C-64. That is the original speed when played on a NTSC machine. I presume I could probably do a PAL version of Thrust-2k4 but since there's some real time instruments in there (Bass and guitars) it would be a hassle.

Does Rob Hubbard knows about this? His he OK with that?

I contacted Rob via e-mail and asked for his comments about this project, here's what he had to say:

Hi Marc, Yes, I like your version very much. It has a lot of energy and drive. It's amazing to hear it with real instruments after all these years. Are you planning on any more SIDS?

How did you do this? What instruments and equipement did you use?

Many toys of mine. Kurzweil K2500, Ibanez 5 Strings Bass, Gibson LesPaul, Neve 1272 Preamps, Rivera Chubster 40 Amp, Steinberg Nuendo 2.1, Universal Audio UAD-1, many other plugins and soft synths.

Will you do more of these?

Frankly, I don't know yet. There's SO many good SID tunes, send in your suggestions, you never know! :P

Your name rings a bell, where did I saw you before?

My nickname was (and still is) The Zapper!. I used to be in a Commodore 64 group called "EMPIRE". We NTSC fixed many demos and games. You can download "Lemmings" for C-64 to see one of my Empire Intros. Later, I was in a music group called "FORCE TEN" and released numerous songs in S3M and IT format.

You have a web site?

Yes, http://www.marcgirard.com