The PC Gamers Society
After hearing "Ode To the Team Fortress Medic" I wanted to find out more about the PCGS Group in general. Check out what Towlyn, Wedge and Power had to say in our interview.
— The Warthog
PlanetFortress: For the benefit of people who are new to your group: what is your name, and what do you do?
Tolwyn:
I'm David "Tolwyn" Shaw. I've been around the gaming scene since 1994 and
the gaming Music scene since 1996. I've worked with, for you Doom fans out
there, the following Doom PWAD teams: TeamTNT, Memento Mori II, Gothic DM,
Gothic DM 2, Alpha Dog Alliance's Strain, Requiem, and far too many others
to mention. In 1998 I hooked up with a local LAN Gaming club here in Central
Washington called "PC Gamers Society" or PCGS for short. Each month for the
past 3 years we get together around 20-30 people and game for 16 hours, with
a 48-hour straight LAN party thrown in once a year on President's Day
Weekend (which also happens to be the birthday weeked of our own President,
Michael "Wedge" Mattson.
We're more than a game club, though... we've all grown to become really good
friends that like to do stuff with each other that is outside of gaming.
Pizza, beer, we've watched each other's kids grow, etc. So introducing the
club to music as a way of doing more activities together was a natural (and
somewhat inevitable) happenstance.
Over the last several months, I've taken on the role of the Vice President
and Public Relations fellow. I'm the club's resident Quake (any version)
king, TF defender (you mean there's other classes other than soldier?), Clan
Match strategist, file/patch archivist, console command guru, server admin,
and web master. My plate is pretty full.
Wedge: I am Michael "Wedge" Mattson. I would be the so-called "President" of PC
Gamers Society.
First and foremost we are a LAN gaming group that enjoys monthly LAN
parties. In the past
we have also dabbled in online competitive play [PCGS] made a brief, though
disruptive,
appearance in the Top 10 Tourney.
I, personally, have also been known to make an occasional map or two
(Scrummage, bigboxh3, dow2) for Half-Life: Team Fortress. When the
Top10Tourney ran Scrummage as their main map we cleaned house over a couple
of good clans (CSI and Clan Cannibal). One of our few shining moments
(beside our impressive record in Openfire).
Power: James "Power" Bowen. I joined the club back in 1999 (so long ago ;)) and it
was 100% devotion after that.
I started with computers back in High School with Apple 2+'s and a Vic 20 my
Dad gave us, oh and the Atari, can't forget Pong! The computers were fun to
program BASIC into but compared to what we have now looking back just makes
me grin. My computer gaming began with those computers, buying an occasional
Commodore 64 magazine and typing for a hour or two to get a game programmed
in. Quickly save it to tape and hope it ran (which it did about 1/2 the
time. The other half...well, we'll just chalk that up to practice) then play
the game until it stopped loading from the tape or you found another program
to type in from the magazine.
As far as my PCGS duties I'm kind of the fill in guy. Something needs to be
done and I do it. I usually take care of the arrangements for out monthly
LAN's (reserving the room, getting the keys, picking up and returning the
equipment, etc.) as well as making all the patches and drivers available to
those that "forgot" to get them before the meeting. I also do some tech
support for our members when they are having "issues". Also, I try to keep
up with Tolwyn as he does so much for the group. Wedge, Bifferoo and Hunter
are also very key players that do so much more for PCGS than I.
PlanetFortress: What types of music you perform and record?
Tolwyn:
Personally, I do many different kinds of music and don't really have a
favorite genre I work in, except for perhaps gaming music. I dabble in
guitar work, but since I'm not scared to admit my deficiencies at playing
the guitar, I'm somewhat limited to the Electronica genre. I grew up in the
70s and 80s, so I enjoy the music of the 80s moreso than the newer stuff
today. And there's this 6 year technological hole I fell into during college
and post college career work where I didn't keep up on all the music
happenings like Techno, Industrial, Trance, and the overall occurances in
the music industry as it relates to hardware technology (new keyboards,
effects, recording techniques, etc.).
Wedge: Tolwyn is the big-old Music Madman. I have been a drummer all my life and a
slightly trained keyboardist. I like to think I'm fairly musically
inclined. But I pale in all skills but enthusiasm with regard to music and
Tolwyn. My tastes tend toward Rock and Pop of a decade ago (Van Halen,
INXS).
Power: I think Tolwyn hit it on the head when he said I can't sing. However, need a
good vocal of some obscure word and I'm there!
I've actually quite a bit of musical history in my family, mostly singing,
and I've always aspired to singing whenever given the chance. However, next
to people that are better I tend to shy away and let them have the
limelight. Need a cold beer? I can handle that task.
PlanetFortress: Do you do covers, or your own compositions?
Tolwyn: Yes and Yes. I am a strong proponent of original music compositions. But
when you're working with a group of 10 people in the club that are
interesting or are on the fence of becoming interested, you sometimes choose
to take the easy route of working with cover tunes and parodies to hook 'em
in before the real work of drumming up new material begins.
It's easy and fun to do parodies, but you can't give them the exposure that
you want to because it's kind of a cheap and easy way out. That and I don't
want to fork over the money for the mechanical licenses to get them posted
on MP3.com.
We currently have upwards of 6 pieces of original music that I'm trying to
get them to work on lyrics for. But they want to do more parodies! Auugh!
To be fair, however, I'm slowly climbing out of that technological hole; and
working on parodies is a good way to relearn all my studio equipment and new
Hard Disc recording technology and sound recording tools. So I can't
complain too much.
Wedge: Yes and Yes. PCGS has done covers AND our own compositions. I help with
vocals and lyric writing. We have a couple more ideas going and I'm working
on the lyrics for another journey into custom compositions-hood.
Power: Tolwyn does all this. I am just invited over and told to stop at the store.
No, really, I'm just their beer junkie.
It is nice that Tolwyn included me in this but for the most part I'm best
left as a backup singer. No offense taken. I usually have other hobbies that
I devote my time to.
PlanetFortress: Your latest song is titled "Ode To the Team Fortress Medic." Is this your first TF related song?
Tolwyn:
No, actually it's not. Our first TF song was "We Beat CSI." We played a
match with a great bunch of guys called the "CrowBar Swinging Idiots." We
all know how smack talk gets started in Clan matches, and ours was no
different. On their web site, they have a couple of MP3 songs about their
Clan, and one was a great cover/parody of a Stevie Wonder song (or Wild Wild
West for young folks) about how they never get beat, and stuff.
Well, we happened to whoop up on them pretty good on a Top Ten Tournament
match using a map that our own president created called Scrummage. And we decided
to poke a little good natured fun back at 'em. I like to think we have a
good relationship with them and we look forward to their new releases as
much as we like sharing with them our new musical creations. It's all in
fun.
We've also had other people write songs about us. On our mp3.com site, you
can find a song about the aforementioned map "Scrummage." It's pretty cool,
too.
Wedge: The bad blood has since been laid to rest and we're all chummy now.
PlanetFortress: Where do you practice?
Tolwyn: Practice? Heh. We never practice. We Beat CSI was done in a day, as with all
of our songs thus far. I know we could do 100% better if we actually did
take the time to practice, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. We get
together at about 6:00pm, start with the beer (ESB Amber Ale, thank you) and
food, and just work until about 1:00am. I digitally mix until about 1:00am
and then post the song for the masses at about 2:00am. We have a sickness,
we know.
Wedge: Practice? Are we supposed to do that? Mostly in my car. With a steering
wheel drum set and loud speakers to drown my voice and make me think I'm
doing pretty good. When we finally get together to record it's at "Tolwyn
Studios".
Power: That sounds like fun. Should I get the beer? Maybe I can help clean up. I
actually would like to sing more and maybe if I had some practice Tolwyn and
Wedge could help shape me into a decent singer. Who knows?
PlanetFortress: Where and how do you record and end up with a clean .mp3?
Tolwyn:
The recording studio is at my house, in a spare bedroom. I use a Pentium II
400Mhz with 256MB Ram, Mackie Mixers, Kurzweil and Roland Keyboards, Alesis
processing gear and drum modules, Paul Reed Smith guitars, AKG microphones
and studio headphones, and a myriad of other sound effects processing gear.
For recording, I use CakeWalk Pro 8 and Cool Edit Professional.
Each track is recorded seperately and usually dry (no effects) then
compression/limiting and normalization is applied to the track and processed
digitally with any effects that will be used (reverb, chorus, flange, etc).
The original track is archived and the new track is added to the overall
mix. Rinse and repeat for the other tracks used. And I save often. Man oh
man, do I save often. Noise gates and noise reduction processes are added to
the dry tracks and any empty spots (in vocals) and blatant breaths are
removed digitally.
Once the song is completely mixed, I ensure that it's normalized to 100%,
the digital PCM Wave is cenetered, and then a bit of last-minute compression
is added to the overall mix to give it that extra bit of punch. Add about
0.1 seconds of silence to both ends and then I create 2 Mp3 files. One at
192, and one at 128 bitrate. Lastly, I queue the overall mixdown wave file
to be burned to the studio CD and then Zip up the entire Cool Edit Session
and archive that in case we need to go back and add/redo any parts we
missed.
To give you a sense of scope, "Ode to the TF Medic" was completed in over 9
hours. With about 16 vocal tracks, 48 individual wave files and guide
tracks. This song is the first that I didn't sing lead on, with Lorn
"Slader" Conner offering his debut studio performance. It's also the first
"a capella" song PCGS has ever done (and myself, to be honest).
I sang 4 parts with Wedge singing along with me. We had 2 guys in our club
give a cameo appearance (the big deep "Yeah!" in the center of the song and
the nice breathy "Chaaa" at the end -- hey they can't sing, but they had to
contribute, right?). We all had our wives in the other room. Each part alone
sang by itself sounded pretty bad, but we were all amazingly surprised how
well it all came out in the end when all parts were played together.
Amazing what you can do with hard disk recording as opposed to what I used
to do with analog recording equipment.
PlanetFortress: Give us bunches of links so we can find out more about you guys and download your stuff!!
Tolwyn:
My personal stuff is located at:
http://www.doomworld.com/tolwyn
http://www.mp3.com/tolwyn (with Mark Anthony Klem - a GREAT musician)
Wedge: You can try http://www.mp3.com/pcgs. But they have a rule about cover songs
and we're working on the permissions aspect from original artists to make
sure we aren't stepping on any toes. So in that case you can go to
http://www.pcgs.org/files.html. At the bottom is a section of our songs
that MP3.com won't take, yet.
Power: www.powerandfury.net -
Nice location for a little info on how my wife and I got our gaming names as
well as a way to share some pictures with family and friends.
Many, many thanks for thanks to Tolwyn, Wedge and Power for taking the time to answer my questions about the
PCGS Group. Hit their website to find out more about them, and don't forget
to listen to the "Ode To the Team Fortress
Medic" song that sparked this interview to find out what they hell they are all about.
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