David Whittaker
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David Whittaker is a British musician who was born on April 24, 1957 in Bury, England. He is one of the most popular video game musicians in the world. He is known for composing such gems as Lazy Jones and Shadow of the Beast, which are the top soundtracks that made him popular. Glider Rider is also another one of his popular works. Also, he has probably done more game soundtracks than any other video game musician. Sometimes he was offered so many jobs to do music for games, he would sometimes have to decline and have the jobs given to other composers. David started to compose game music at age 24. According to Whittaker, he claims to have done about 100 game soundtracks for just about every computer and over 400 Commodore 64 soundtracks. He started out playing in a band called Beu Leisure, which he says got quite well known around Altricham. After he bought a Commodore VIC-20, he started to program on it, which he said led him to Mr. Micro and music programming. After some time, it became a full time job for him because he excelled at game music more than other programmers at the time. He was the main composer and sound designer for various developers such as Audiogenic and B.I.T.S. While Whittaker no longer composes or programs, he still works on video games, doing speech dialogue editing/recording at Electronic Arts. He got the job at E.A. from a call from Rob Hubbard telling him they needed a sound designer, so David lived in the US at that time and got a mansion there. David eventually moved back to the UK since he wasn't pleased with the U.S. economy and he was a little homesick. While some fans call him the best SID composer, Whittaker claims that Rob Hubbard is truly the best, and he's just the most peripheral audio designer in the industry. His favorite computers that he liked to compose on were the Commodore 64 and the Commodore Amiga, with the Commodore VIC-20 being his least favorite. Whittaker says he appreciates the fans' support over the years.
Whittaker was usually good about lending his music engines to other companies. When Manfred Trenz was developing the NES version of Turrican, Whittaker let him use his music engine, which was then modified by Trenz himself. Whittaker also lent his sound driver to Kevin Bateson to use during the development of the NES and GameBoy versions of The Lion King. In the SNES era, he lent his sound driver to the Japanese developer Imagineer.
In 1999, ZombieNation, a video game music remix group, stole David Whittaker's Lazy Jones tune for the Kernkraft 400. This got David's attention and he didn't approve, so when he called them up, they apologized about it and paid him 9000 GBP to use his song, which he claims he was paid more by ZombieNation than he got paid for the game.
Whittaker also composed the music for some unreleased games including NES ports of Populous and Tip-Off, a baseball game.
Contents
Music Composition
Whittaker has been notorious for copying and pasting his music and transposing it to a different key. This is especially true in his NES soundtracks.
Amiga
He wrote his own audio driver and wrote in hex code. Whittaker said his instrument samples were taken from his Korg M1, a popular keyboard at the time, and also programmed some waveforms of his own.
C64
In an interview, David Whittaker said he used a Yamaha CX5 and Jupiter 6 with an assembler. He then wrote his own audio driver and programmed his music.
GameBoy
Whittaker converted his NES music to the GameBoy using his own audio driver.
NES
Whittaker created his own audio driver that he converted from his C64 sound driver and programmed the music in hex code. Whittaker arranged Neuromantic Productions music in many ports of Krusty's Fun House. David was known for lending out his driver to companies that needed it. Whittaker licensed his audio driver to Manfred Trenz for him to use in his Super Turrican NES game. The sound driver was later modified and used by Manfred to compose music. David also lent his driver out to Virgin Interactive for use in their Lion King game for the NES and GameBoy.
SNES
David wrote in hex code using his own audio driver. His instruments were sampled from his Amiga samples from the Korg M1.
Gameography
Picture Gallery
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David with his Korg M1; [1]
