doing, which was making samples, mostly for Ensoniq samples - the EPS and ASR-10.
An independent magazine called the Transoniq Hacker was put in every Ensoniq product made, so Garth put in an ad there, along with his name and phone number for anyone how had Ensoniq questions was free to call him.
The response was significant; often Garth was committing 5-6 hours a day just on the phone. In the pre-Internet days, the phone was a primary way people had to get answer to their questions. And people had questions -the Ensoniq was usually their first sampler.
From 1988 to 1997, RCS's consistant presence in the Ensoniq made RCS one of the leading experts in Ensoniq systems and gear. In 1997, Garth conceived the Translator software, and spent the next year conceiving it and writing code for it. In 1999 Garth spun off Chicken Systems from RCS and released Translator. The rest is history.
Translator was the first Windows program to fully support old hardware samplers and convert them into the newer software samplers that where coming out. Translator served to be critical bridge to taking peoples old sounds and mkaing them work on the new ones.
In 2002, Translator was the first conversion software for the Macintosh, and in 2003 was the first written specifically for OSX.
Today, Chicken Systems spawns multiple technologies related to samplers, such as the Multi-Format Installer and the MV Kit Creator for Roland. Chicken Systems also runs a full-line licensing business, as their conversion technology has made it into the leading sampler products available - Kontakt, EmulatorX, DirectWave, and several others.
When we caught up with Garth, he was on the phone, just like he was in 1988.
Garth Hjelte: Sorry, the person had a registration question, I had to reset a code for him.
Chicken Systems News: Why did you have to do that?
G: When a person buys Translator, he can download a temporary build to use until the CD arrives. We don't believe in downloadable products per se, but we don't like funding the UPS college fund. This is the best of both worlds - the person gets to use the program right away, and he gets a real product in his hands soon enough. And no overnight shipping charges!
CSN: Okay, so I suppose I'll have to start from the begininning. How did you start out in this business?
G: I was in a band called Advent in Seattle. We actually had space in a large rehearsal studio under the Ballard bridge - most of the bands that heralded the grunge age practiced there - Alice In Chains, SoundGarden, etc.. We thought they were crappy; we played prog rock and everyone liked us. But they got the chicks, so you know where that leads to... I did play for an Alice In Chains demo - before they were called Alice In Chains. They were called Sex. What a great name for a band.
Anyway, we all had day jobs, and we needed more time to practice and tour so we could hit it big. So we said - okay, figure out something to make money for yourself so we could have more time. My idea, since I was programming all my own sounds on my DX7 and Korg Poly61 for the cover songs we were doing, was to start a sound company and sell sound packs. I saw what some people were doing with selling DX7 sounds and I thought I could do that too.
But I saw the future, and it was sampling. I noticed that no matter what, every synthesizer I got, I got sick of, because I knew what it would sound like. I saw sampling as the ultimate way out of that. So I got a Mirage, and the first day I had it, I threw up - no one told me it had only 2.2 SECONDS of sampling!!!
Fortunately, by the time we were challenged to quit our day jobs, I had the new Ensoniq EPS. I was blown away by the amount of sampling time and the innovative features. I started making custom sounds, and I put an ad in the Transoniq Hacker, and I was in business!
CSN: Did you quit your day job?
G: No. The other guys weren't innovative enough to quit theirs, and the band broke up. So I was left with something I liked doing.
CSN: Did you make CD's of your sounds and sell them?
G: No, back then nobody used CD's yet. It was about that time that Optical Media International started making Emu CD's, and Akai CD's were just about to come out when Best Service saw the market. For Ensoniq's, it was just floppies. I hired someone to copy floppies all day in my studio while I went to my day job. It was something else. I spent lots of time on the phone, because I put my phone number in the Transoniq Hacker to volunteer help to anyone who had questions.
CSN: So people would find your number, and call you out of the blue?
G: Yeah, I wrote articles for the Hacker and I guess people thought they "knew me" well enough to call. The Hacker was full of great new things for Ensoniq users. You have to put yourself back in the day of no Internet, where you really wouldn't know anything until that time of the month when you found the Hacker in your mailbox. The Hacker was EXCLUSIVELY about Ensoniq gear, and the writers were exceptional and always finding new ways of exploiting the Ensoniq to make it do things that weren't obvious.
So people would feel like they were "joining the community" when they called me. It was what Internet forums eventually turned into.
CSN: What kind of questions did you get asked?
G: Oh, geez, it was "I got a SCSI drive and I can't get it to format", or "I was programming a sequence and all of a sudden I ran out of memory". It was all these "gotcha" things that Ensoniq didn't know about or didn't want to admit. People liked calling someone non-company affiliated because they never were sure what Ensoniq would say.
For my company, I really never got into it to make money, I liked helping people firstly. It was only later when I found the company could support myself - and a family - full time.
CSN: When was that?
G: About 1995, 1996. After I got married. By then I had 5 CD's I was selling, plus about 20 floppy sets. Remember I told you about all the floppies I was copying? I got really tired of doing it on the Ensoniq. There was a program called the Ensoniq Disk Manager by Gary Giebler that copied floppies on computer. it was DOS, and I wanted to do more with it. He never ported the program to Windows, and really never responded to the ideas I had. So I went and took the computer programming knowledge I already had and wrote a Windows program that read and wrote Ensoniq floppies. There were some wonderful people helping me with ti - John Bodenstein from Germany wrote the floppy driver, and John Pfeiffer from my day job (the phone company) were very helpful on topics I had no idea about. I still communicate with Bodenstein.
That program became Ensoniq MIDI-Disk Tools, which we still sell today - about 4 copies a month, if you can believe it.
CSN: Wow!
G: I'm putting it through a rewrite at the moment, we are putting OmniFlop support in there; which XP all the floppy reading and writing got taken away.
CSN: How did Chicken Systems get started?
G: MIDI-Disk Tools was very successful when it was released; I think that was 1995. When Ensoniq released the ASR-X we made Ensoniq ASR-X Tools. One of the things we put in there was a "Translator" that would convert Ensoniq EPS/ASR sounds into ASR-X format. Ensoniq made a critical mistake with their integral conversion reading - the ASR-X lacked the Intial Level parameter in the envelopes that the EPS/ASR-10 had. So, without explaining this out, often times EPS/ASR-10 sounds when loaded into the ASR-X, wouldn't sound, because the envelope started at 0% instead of 100%. To seal the tragedy, the ASR-X can't edit it's own sounds, it needs a computer program to do it. So we solved the problem in ASR-X Tools, whcih can edit the ASR-X via MIDI anyway.
That whole thing got me thinking; after 10 years of solid Ensoniq support, why wouldn't this model work for every brand of sampler? Plus, why should all the other samplers have the great sounds and why can't Ensoniq read THOSE sounds?
A wonderful lady that I still see freqeuently, Robin Boyce-Truitt from Electronic Musician, convinced me to come to a NAMM show and get excited about things. So I went one year down to Summer NAMM in Nashville, and it really pushed me over the edge about what a instrument conversion project could do. I remember walking down 6th Avenue toward the Gaylord Convention Center and getting it totally formulated in my head.
Once I finished coding the first version of Translator, I finally took the final step of creating a corporation and splitting away from one of my partners in Rubber Chicken and changing the name to Chicken Systems.
CSN: I know the story on why you got uncomfortable with Rubber Chicken Software - tell me that again.
G:Oh my - back in 1990, there was the article in the newspaper that talked about a prostitution bust in a Unitarian Chruch in Bellevue, WA. It spoke that several items were confiscated: "50 bras, 75 piece of lingere, and 100 rubber chickens." I said "What??" And, being somewhat naive about that stuff, I thought about it and realized the potential for rubber chickens in the sex trade... well, you know where that goes.
I called all my friends and asked "when I say 'rubber chicken', what does that mean to you?" And they would all say "being hit over the head as a joke." I still didn't believe them, but somehow I got over it and forgot about it.
Sure enough, about a year later I got the newspaper in the morning and starting rading it, and there it was again - since the case finally made it to trial. And there they listed the evidence: "50 bras, 75 piece of lingere, and 100 rubber chickens." And then I freaked out again, called my friends, and they reassured me about it. But I still thought that they were morons - the name of my company was a sexual immuendo!!
But what could I do about it. Finally I thought that if I was going to have a million-seller on my hands, I better change the name. So when I had the chance, I did it.
Tune in next week when we find out the history of Chicken Systems and how, through a pizza delivery, Chicken Systems signed off on a signifcant contract.
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