Hello there,

I'm Marc Girard. I'm still a musician and sound engineer! :) After the much beloved Thrust, I decided it was time for another Commodore 64 cover. This time, I wanted to go wild and not follow the exact parts of the original (like I did in Thrust).

My main problem was: Which damn song shall I do? There's SO many good SIDs out there that I found almost impossible to choose only one! :) I had a try at StarBall last year, didn't work out very fine, Flimbo's Quest? There's already a ton of remixes on RKO.
Anyway, I decided to go with a big classic of mine: The Big Deal.

There was a old demo called "FastOne/SUN" back then that had this SID in it. The demo was very simple but still I always loved the music. It's a timeless classic for me.

So I started by rendering the SID again and use it as a guide. In the end, only the intro sound stayed. I tried several drum grooves and loops, didn't work out. Finally, I took the rock approach, it worked out fine.

So, I hope you enjoy listening to this new version of "The Big Deal" 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 BigDeal-2k4 but since there's some real time instruments in there (Bass and guitars) it would be a hassle.

Does Jeroen Kimmel knows about this? His he OK with that?

Well, I don't think there's any problems with this. I'd like to get in touch with Jeroen "Red" Kimmel. If anyone knows him, lemme know.

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