Ramiro Vaca

Ramiro Vaca Schommartz

Born	1969-08-03
Birth Place
Nationality	German
Aliases	R. Vaca Ramiro Vacaz
Website	der-ernaehrungstrainer.de

Ramiro Vaca is an artist best known for Rock'n Roll (C64) and Turrican (C64).

Vaca made music very early. For Christmas 1979, he got a Bontempi organ and sometime between 1984 and 1986, a synthesizer and a Commodore 16. He wrote a drum program in BASIC he remembers to sound poor due to the limits of the TED chip and possibly his self-perceived programming skills. At 16, he bought a second-hand Commodore 64 and swapped disks. One day, he got Soundmonitor. After a few exasperated days on its UI, he started scoring his friends' C64 demos. His friend Miron Schmidt and he reviewed each other's songs.

Vaca studied cartography and graphics at art college in Berlin, but was bored with drawing letters all day. He applied at Magic Bytes and Rainbow Arts (then both in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia) with graphics and music on disk and interviewed with Rainbow Arts founder Marc Alexander Ullrich. Both companies accepted, but Vaca chose Rainbow Arts (soon in Düsseldorf). Chris Hülsbeck already worked there and both reviewed each other's songs as well. Vaca does not know if Hülsbeck had been aware of his application.

In the early 1990s, Vaca sold his C64 (including disks) and professionally switched to graphics only. He moved to Hülsbeck's company Kaiko in Langen, Hesse, which itself worked with Factor 5. Once a year since 1994, he does stage design, lighting and music for a local theatre group in Dreieich. He kept using MIDI in private until he had two kids. His surnames come from Spanish customs. In early 2016, he was managing a gym and now works as a nutritionist. He has enough of playing games, but is still friends with Hülsbeck and, like him, cannot read traditional notation. He has cited a few songs by Cirque du Soleil and Hans Zimmer as compositionally interesting, very elaborate and in great moods. Generally, he finds harmonic wholeness more important than style, rhythm and instrumentation.

Audio Development

Commodore 64

Vaca used internal tools by Chris Hülsbeck. Except on Title - Garrison, it was TFMX Editor. For most compositions, he brought himself into the fitting mood—for example, by listening to nothing but rock'n'roll music before scoring Rock'n Roll (C64)—and often jammed on the keyboard.

Vaca was always eager to hear new effects from other musicians and was inspired by a bit of everyone. His favorite songs include all by his main inspiration Rob Hubbard (starting with One Man and His Droid (C64)) whose interesting sounds, harmonies and moods kept fascinating him, Tim Follin and most by Maniacs of Noise whose fabulous sounds impressed him, Wizball (C64), Arkanoid (C64), and some very beautiful if not as ingenious songs by Hülsbeck. Among his own, he finds too much room for improvement, but considers Rock'n Roll (C64) his funniest, most different, and Turrican (C64) his cleanest. He is open to remixes of his music.

Vaca likes the absolute versatility of SID, but found it difficult to extract the most important elements of a song onto the three voices and especially to choose instrument sounds that did not conflict with each other.

Gameography

Released	Title	Notes
1988-09-??	Garrison (C64)	Partially arranged Garrison (AMI).
1988-12-??	R-Type (C64)	Arranged R-Type (ARC) with Chris Hülsbeck.
1989-06-??	Spherical (C64)	With Chris Hülsbeck.
1989-12-??	Rock'n Roll (C64)
1989-??-??	Rock'n Roll (AMI)	Arranged by Chris Hülsbeck.
1989-??-??	Rock'n Roll (AST)	Arranged by Barry Leitch.
1989-??-??	Rock'n Roll (CPC)	Arranged by Barry Leitch.
1989-??-??	Rock'n Roll (ZXS)	Arranged by Barry Leitch.
1990-03-??	X-Out (C64)	Intro sound effects.
1990-0?-??	StarTrash (C64)	Main music.
1990-0?-??	Turrican (C64)
19??-??-??	Dyter-07 (C64)
19??-??-??	Dyter-07 (AMI)	Arranged by Karsten Obarski.
19??-??-??	Dyter-07 (AST)	Arranged by Karsten Obarski.
2000-02-22	Mission: Impossible (GBC)	With Frederic Motte?