Rob Hubbard: The SID Composer as Star

The Commodore 64 is the only machine in history whose musicians were famous. Teenagers in 1986 knew the composers’ names ahead of the programmers’ and the artists’, wrote to magazines about them, and bought games on the strength of a byline in the credits.

Rob Hubbard is why. He wasn’t the only great SID composer and he was the one who made the job visible, and the reason has as much to do with a piece of assembly code as with the tunes.

A working musician who learned 6502

Hubbard was born in Hull in 1955, which made him about thirty when he started doing this — old, by the standards of a scene mostly staffed by schoolboys.

That gap is the whole story. He’d been a working musician: bands, session work, teaching. He had theory, he had arrangement, he knew what a bassline was for. Then he taught himself 6502 assembly language on a Commodore 64, which is the part nobody else in his position did.

Understand what he was walking into. The SID chip — designed by Bob Yannes, who’d go on to found Ensoniq — gives you three voices. Three. A bass, a lead, and one spare. There is no sequencer, no tracker worth the name in 1985, and no standard music driver. Whoever wrote the game’s code decided how music got played, and mostly they decided badly, because they were programmers who needed a jingle.

Hubbard wrote his own player routine. That’s the founding act. Instead of handing a melody to somebody else’s engine, he built the engine — a piece of code that read his own data format and drove the chip the way he wanted it driven. Every technique that follows depends on owning that layer.

I’ve made the general argument that the SID chip turned composers into system designers, and Hubbard is the proof, because his innovations are all code innovations that happen to sound like music.

What he actually did to the chip

Three techniques, and each one is a piece of engineering.

Fast arpeggios. Three voices means no chords. Hubbard’s answer — shared with the rest of the good C64 composers, and pushed hardest by him — was to cycle one voice through the notes of a chord fast enough that the ear smears them into harmony. That bubbling shimmer that every great C64 tune has is a chord being faked at fifty times a second. It’s the sound of a constraint being defeated in public.

Multi-speed playback. The standard was to call the music routine once per screen refresh, fifty times a second. Hubbard called his multiple times per frame, which buys finer timing resolution — faster arpeggios, tighter vibrato, effects that don’t fit in a 50Hz grid. The cost is CPU, taken directly out of the game’s budget. Every multi-speed tune on the C64 is a composer having successfully argued with a programmer for cycles.

Drums from the volume register. The SID has a master volume control, four bits wide. Hubbard and others worked out that hammering that register at audio rate produces a crude sampled sound through a chip that officially cannot sample. That’s how you get percussion on a machine with no percussion. It’s a hack in the original sense: using a facility for something its designer never contemplated, because the alternative was going without.

None of that is composition. All of it is why the compositions sound like they do.

There’s a fourth thing that gets less attention and mattered commercially: he made the music fit. A Hubbard tune had to live in a few kilobytes alongside a whole game, so his data format is aggressively compact — patterns referenced and reused, instruments defined as tiny tables of parameters rather than samples. A minutes-long sectional piece occupying less memory than a single sprite is an engineering achievement in its own right, and it’s the reason publishers kept saying yes to giving a musician CPU time.

The run

The catalogue between 1985 and 1988 is absurd. Roughly seventy-five tunes in about three years, working for whoever asked.

Thing on a Spring (1985). International Karate (1985) — the one with the Bach. Commando (1985), where his arrangement for the C64 conversion became, for a generation of British kids, more familiar than the arcade original it was serving. Zoids, Spellbound, W.A.R., Warhawk, Knucklebusters, Master of Magic.

Monty on the Run (1985) is the famous one, and it’s famous for a reason that tells you what he was doing to the form. The title tune is minutes long, sectional, and it develops — themes come back changed, the thing has a structure you could analyse. Nobody had put a piece of music with an architecture on a games cassette before. I’ve written about how the music made that game, and the short version is that people who never played Monty can hum it.

Then Thalamus, which was a games label founded by the people who published ZZAP!64 — critics starting a publisher, with predictable priorities. Sanxion (1986), where the loading screen outlived the game. And Delta (1987), which is his masterpiece: a long minimalist piece with an audible debt to Philip Glass, cycling figures drifting over a bassline that behaves like a sequencer patch, running on a sound chip in a games cassette. The game underneath it has a genuinely clever weapon mechanic and is remembered by almost nobody in comparison.

That’s the phenomenon in one sentence. A soundtrack can permanently promote a design in the collective memory, and Delta is where it happened most completely.

The scene he made possible

Hubbard’s visibility created a category. Martin Galway at Ocean was doing work that stands entirely with his — I’ve written about Galway separately — and Tim and Geoff Follin and Ben Daglish were operating at the same level. Magazines ran interviews with them. Kids taped the tunes off the telly.

The reason this mattered structurally is that it established, for the first time, that a game had authors in the plural. Before the SID composers, a British game was “by” a bloke. After them, credits meant something, and the idea that a specialist could be brought in and be known for their contribution is now the entire industry’s org chart.

It’s also where the chiptune aesthetic comes from, and I’d argue the aesthetic is widely misunderstood — the constraint was real and specific, and the modern nostalgia for the sound mostly imitates the surface of a solution to a problem nobody has any more.

America

In 1988 Hubbard moved to the United States and went to work for Electronic Arts, and this is where the story gets quietly interesting.

He didn’t spend the next fifteen years writing tunes. He became an audio technologist — building sound systems, tools and drivers, working across the Mega Drive and PC eras on the likes of Road Rash and Desert Strike, and eventually running audio technology at EA. The man who became famous for owning his own player routine spent his American career building player routines for everybody else.

That’s a coherent career rather than a retreat. What Hubbard was always best at was the layer between the music and the machine, and EA gave him an industrial-scale version of the same job. He stayed until the early 2000s.

He’s done the retro circuit since — live performances with the Back in Time events, where several hundred adults stand in a room while a man in his sixties plays the Monty on the Run theme. I’ve been to that sort of thing. It is ridiculous and completely sincere.

What he was right about

The lesson Hubbard’s career teaches is one the industry still gets wrong: to make a machine sing, you have to own the code that talks to it.

Everything remarkable about his output came from refusing the division of labour. He was a composer who wrote his own driver, which meant his musical ideas and his technical ideas were the same ideas, and he could invent a technique on Tuesday because a phrase needed it on Monday. Hand the driver to a programmer and you get a jingle. That’s the argument, and the seventy-five tunes are the evidence.

The C64 scene proved that a games machine’s identity can live in its audio, and Hubbard is the individual most responsible for that being true. The composers were designers. They were shaping how the whole thing felt at a level the game code never reached.

Where to start

Delta, full title screen, no skipping. It’s a piece of minimalist composition and it stands without the game.

Then Monty on the Run for the structure, and Commando for the arrangement.

Then find a recording of the SID output on real hardware rather than an emulator with lazy filter emulation. The chip’s filter varied between individual machines, which means there is no canonical Rob Hubbard sound — a fact that would horrify most composers and rather suits this one.