It’s happened! The new album is out, get it on BandCamp or stream it on Spotify and other platforms.
What have I dug up?
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“Waterfall” is released!
Artwork once again by the amazing AlexArtsMe -
“Waterfall” Track Listing
At this point I’m happy with all mixes, and the mastering has been done. Alex has sent me the first draft of the cover art (who said the album sounds “soothing and peppy”), so we’re on the final stretch.
Here’s the track listing:
1. Turbulent Lily
2. On a Dissolving Ledge
3. Sunken Idyll
4. Icy Misconduct
5. Ocean Spray
6. Set Fondly Adrift
7. The Abyss
8. Steam Leak
9. Diving for Treasure
10. Cheat Cove
11. Sunlit Ripples
12. Fractured Foam
13. Midnight Raindrops
14. Waterfall
It’s all instrumentals this time, so no lyrics!
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It’s called “Waterfall”
I’ve written the 14th track now, and I have titles for all of them. However, that’s the easy part.
I spent most of today working on mixes for Waterfall, it’s been a lot of work. I was doing bits during the week as well as this and I’ve still only got mixes for 8 out of the 14 tracks. (And one of those is Lily’s track, so it was pretty much done – although even that one I’ve rewritten some bits.)
Part of the issue is the complexity of some of these things. Lots of layers to interfere with each other and hide mistakes. Part of it, too, is I’ve been wanting to give them a more distinctive sound. I know my style has never changed much, even from the 1990s, and that’s fine, but I don’t want to start repeating myself!
And let’s be clear: those 8 mixes aren’t final. They’re still rough versions. I have to listen to these over and over on different devices, different headphones, trying to weed out any problems. Sometimes the solution is just moving a fader slightly. Sometimes it’s rewriting a section completely.
As I write this I’m playing the tracks through and making mental notes of things that still need fixing.
But it is getting better!
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Album six progress
A quick update, since I’ve not updated in a while: the work on the next album is still progressing. I have thirteen tracks so far I’m reasonably happy with, although they still all need work on a final mix and of course mastering.
I feel like I need a fourteenth track though, so that is yet to be sorted out. I’m not superstitious about the number 13, by the way, I just think there’s another track for this album still in me!
In terms of length, we’re currently at about 1 hour 3 minutes.
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Beech (BBC Micro Emulator) 0.4
It’s been over 10 years but I’ve been fiddling with Beech again and fixed some issues:
- Builds on Visual Studio 2026.
- Double-sided disks work properly. (Head select in 8271 emulation was broken.)
- Major updates to MODE 7. Hold/release in SAA5050 emulation now works correctly, which fixes a lot of MODE 7 graphics.
Windows 32-bit binary Beech-x86.zip Windows 64-bit binary Beech-x64.zip Source Beech-src.zip Usage, requirements, and other info at the original post: https://darrenizzard.com/index.php/2015/08/24/beech-a-bbc-micro-emulator/
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“The Sign Said Now” Released!
It’s happened! My fifth album, “The Sign Said Now” is available on Bandcamp right now, and shortly will be in other stores and streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube, Deezer, Tidal, etc. etc.).
Fantastic artwork again provided by AlexArtsMe!
HyperFollow page for other links as they appear: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/darrenizzard/the-sign-said-now
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What’s Coming?
There have been unavoidable delays with Alex’s artwork, although it’s coming along well now.
With that in mind, I’ll go through the tracks on the new album. You’ll have to imagine the sounds until it’s released.
- Crystallised Coffee
- Alex likes this one. My notes say “mysterious, glistening” but really I have this image in my head of a crystal somehow containing a complete cup of coffee. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but if I was, it would be freshly mined out of caves.
- Tinted Windows
- “Dark and reflective” say the notes. I sometimes listen to music while travelling and as I watch the scenery pass by I think of it as a live music video. It always works. But what if the windows were, well, tinted? They’d be dark and reflective I suppose.
- Neon Vesper
- I used the word “neon” but still failed to be synthwave. As for the “vesper,” that’s just the old term for evening. So, we have new and old, of course, but with colourful lights breaking through as the sun fades.
- Dancing Sparks
- The image is of something industrial going on, but with an odd reminiscence of that version of Wizardry I did for C64Audio many years ago. Heavy machinery and magic all happening at the same time. The 6:8 time gives it a free-form whirling feel as the track progresses.
- Impersonating an Estate Agent
- The first track with lyrics. I just had this line pop into my head: “Impersonating an estate agent, come see the basement.” It sounded both absurd yet creepy, and had to become a full song. I know nothing about real estate, of course, a fact well-illustrated here.
- A Day of Surprises
- Upbeat with woodblocks in the rhythm and some busy chords going on. And a synth that goes “wow!” every so often. That’s the surprise. Don’t tell anyone.
- The Sign Said This Way
- That beep in the background is from an experimental synth I was coding, a very simple sound but it was nice to find a use for it. The track is quite relaxed, with the guitar finding its own way forward among some meandering keyboards.
- Thirty Years of Now
- A re-imagined and considerably extended version of one of my old Amiga tracks. Always fun revisiting one of those and trying to write new material to blend in with what I wrote all those years back. I wrote a bit about the title in the previous post.
- But His Face Had Changed
- A melancholy start gains power and an unsettling feel via an organ-like lead and some choral pads. While working on the cover, Alex suggested the “he” referred to in the title might be the false estate agent as his true intentions become clear. Quite possibly!
- Stirring Sugar
- Lighter with a shuffle, but still some reflective chords. A lot of my tracks have a retro-gaming feel, but the tune of this one particularly reminds me of my old Amiga modules. Mind you, I wish I’d had strings and brass like this back then.
- It’s a Mistake, Brian
- I chanced upon an old newspaper article about a man doing the right thing in handing a wallet into the police, which was returned to its rightful owner. Good man. But this isn’t about him. This is about a guy who hands everything he sees into the police, regardless of whether it’s lost or not.
- Helicopter Man
- Done originally for a certain streamer who shall remain nameless. I’d made little bonus tracks for his rave streams, and this was one I contributed for New Year 2025. The story is based on an incident his wife revealed from when they were dating. Some people just can’t resist the spotlight.
- The Bell Forge
- I wish there were a deeper reason for this title, but it has bells in it. I mean, some of the others have bells too, but I can’t call them all “The Bell Forge.” It conjures up the image for me of exploring a large, abandoned hall. With bells.
- The Realm of the Board
- The original idea was a song about an old decaying wooden board, but somehow I couldn’t make the lyrics come together. I considered a few different approaches to this “board” idea, even checking a thesaurus, and ended up throwing them all in. That’s this song. It’s as many things associated with boards as I could make rhyme. The funny thing is, it almost makes sense.
There we have it. 14 tracks, just over an hour. Coming soon.
- Crystallised Coffee
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Naming things
I’m no expert at making albums. I’m sure there are right ways of doing things that I’m getting horribly wrong, but nonetheless I’m muddling through.
I’m now at the point with album 5 that I have 13 tracks I’m happy with. I’ve been toying with some ideas for at least one more track, but the total length is already a little over an hour.
Of course, most of them still haven’t got even a basic mix sorted out, and there will be lots of tweaks and changes to come.
To that end, I have to keep track of which track is which. Most of the tracks are just numbered at this stage. For the most part, only ones with lyrics are titled. The rest just have a number, a length and a collection of words which sort of describe them.
As an example, let’s look at a track from Someone Like You. This one was the sixth I started for that album, so for a long time it was called “Song 6.” The description was “nasal synths, bell lead, sense of adventure, harp bridge.”
During a stream I went through the tracks and gave titles to those which didn’t yet have one. For Song 6 I was particularly caught up on this “sense of adventure” and, trying out various ideas, I kept starting my thoughts with “I wonder if…” and eventually realised it fitted quite nicely. So Song 6 became I Wonder If.
If you check on the album, you’ll notice that it didn’t end up as track 6 either. It became the first track. (Ordering the tracks is a whole other matter.)
So back to album 5, itself lacking a name as I write. Eight tracks have names, but I have yet to assign a title to Song 9 (“heavy drums into light guitar/piano-backed, echoey, 6:8, emotive strings, rock guit solo”) among others.
I’ll tell you about one that did get a name, however. It’s Song 13, Thirty Years of Now. This is based on a MED module I made way back on the Amiga, which had the title NewTech. That old tune only lasted about one-and-a-half minutes, so it needed a lot of new material, and given its age it was hardly “new tech”. Time for a rebrand.
I thought a bit about its sound, its feeling, but none of that led to a title – but the age, about 30 years, that seemed promising. I typed in “Thirty Years of New” but as I looked at the words, I kept seeing “New” as “Now”, and the paradox of “Thirty Years of Now” really appealed to me.
I rarely start with a title, and if I do it’s almost always for a song with lyrics: Captain Faded Red was one of those, as were The Second Door on the Left and Bondanavasieta. There’s going to be one on album 5 too, Impersonating an Estate Agent. I don’t know why I thought of that as a concept, but once I started to ask myself why anyone would do it, the words started to come.
Sometimes I think of a title on its own, without a song to connect it to. I keep a collection of interesting titles and once in a while I’ll find I’ve written something which fits one of them. For instance, I’d had “The Earl Tumult” as a title sitting around for ages, and it was quite late in The Telescope‘s development that I assigned it to Song 10.
As time goes on I hope to explain a little more about where some of the titles came from. Vague notions, in-jokes, references nobody else will get, anagrams… oh yes, some of them are anagrams. I like a good word puzzle.
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Blips and bleeps
I’ve used Spotify links here for convenience. Not everyone likes Spotify. Don’t worry, these tracks are available pretty much everywhere.
So, it’s been a long time since I updated this site. And I’ve been doing things. Music things.
I started making music many years ago but as time went on it fizzled out. Real life got in the way.
I didn’t give up entirely, though. Once in a blue moon I’d still write a new track. I used a few of them as background music for my YouTube videos.
Then, in 2015 I made one called Space Voice which got a bit out of hand and ended up at nearly 8 minutes long. I thought, let’s see what happens if I put it out there. So I released Space Voice as a single. It got a few listens, and a couple of friends liked it.
Two years later I was experimenting with some animations on YouTube and made a soundtrack for one of them. It was a bit bass-heavy and weird – honestly, a bit muddy – but the fact I wrote it specifically to put online led me towards making it another single. This was Shades.
Then, during 2020, everyone at work decided to set ourselves a task to do during lockdown. I set myself the task of making a new EP.
To cut a long story short, I did it. This became The Night Wall. I even got a friend to collaborate on one track: Back in the Box featured KURLY on vocals and guitar, and he did a great job.
This made me think, why did I stop making music like I used to? I used to be making new stuff non-stop. Is it just a matter of getting older? Or perhaps just too many distractions? What if I disciplined myself to work on music regularly? What if I streamed work on music so people would expect me to do it regularly?
To my surprise, the rusty gears started to turn again and ideas started to come. I started work on a second EP.
After a few weeks I had enough tracks for that EP. I didn’t feel like stopping, though, and kept going. The EP became an album: From The Sky Down. It included noises made my home-made synth, SoundMaker, and I revised two tracks from The Night Wall with new vocals1. I hired AlexArtMe to do the cover art, and her design led me to restructure the track listing into a loose concept album. I’ll talk about that another time.
At this point I’d got the attention of one or two people online. In particular, Project Dits was (and is) my first big fan. He promoted the album on his streams and was very encouraging for me to continue.
I began work on another album soon after, and after some months, Life as a Passenger was complete. This included the track Gordon’s Theory, which featured guest appearances from John Panettiere, Project Dits, Aisha Anime, KURLY, Chris McAuley and Elfie Oakwood.
AlexArtMe, as usual, provided the cover art, depicting Gordon as a dragon surrounded by his theories.
In 2024, I released a third album, Someone Like You, in which I remade and extended one of my earliest music tracks from about 1992, Stratosphere.
Towards the end of the year, a fourth album came along, The Telescope, once more including a remake of one of my old Amiga tracks, in this case Universe.
That brings us up to 2025, and I’m part-way through making a fifth. You can see how it’s coming along most Sundays at 2pm UK time on Twitch.
- I can’t stand the sound of my own vocals. I don’t know why I keep letting myself get persuaded to do it. I much prefer hiring other people or using SynthV. ↩︎
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Beech: a BBC Micro emulator (v0.3)
Yes, Beech can run Elite [update: 0.4 now available]
Beech is a BBC Micro emulator. It emulates a Model B with 8271 DFS, and also supports the Music 500/5000 synthesizer.
The program is licensed under the GPL v2.
Requirements
Beech is currently Windows-only, and requires at least Windows 7.
Before running Beech, you’ll need to find the following ROM images and place them in the roms directory:-
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- os12.rom
- basic2.rom
- dfs.rom or wdfs.rom (optional, if you want to use disks; either the Acorn or Watford DFS will do)
- ample.rom (optional, if you want to use the Music 5000)
Downloads
Please note that none of these downloads include ROMs, disks, tapes, or snapshots.
As well as Beech itself, you might need the Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable too. If Beech complains of missing DLLs, just download the appropriate redistributable from here and run it. Alternatively, if you prefer, you can get them direct from Microsoft.
Windows 32-bit binary: Beech-x86.zip Windows 64-bit binary: Beech-x64.zip Source code: Beech-src.zip Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable for Windows 32-bit: vcredist_x86.zip Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable for Windows 64-bit: vcredist_x64.zip How to use
At this point, Beech is still in a relatively early state and there are some known issues (see below). However, the vast majority of software works fine. If you do find anything that doesn’t work correctly, do let me know. Supported file formats are:Disks: SSD and DSD Tapes: UEF Snapshots: UEF (broadly compatible with BeebEm) When the emulator starts, it will be in a paused state. To start it, click on the “Go Live” checkbox, then click on the screen display so it will receive keyboard input. (You can tell if the emulated machine has keyboard focus from the border colour. If it’s light, it has focus.) By default, the PC keyboard layout will be used, which should make typing more natural. If you are playing games, however, you’ll probably want to uncheck “PC Keyboard Mapping” so the layout matches the real BBC more closely. In either case, the Break key is assigned to both F11 and F12, and Copy is Home.
The other checkboxes work as follows: “Go Max Speed” makes the emulator run as fast as it can; “Audio” enables audio; “Hear Tape” lets you hear the tape input; “Flashload” speeds up tape loading considerably; “Show Debug Info” opens a side panel with some debugging facilities. Hopefully, everything else is self-explanatory.
If you have a joystick or game controller plugged in, it should be automatically detected, and you can use it in games with joystick support.
How to build
The prerequisites are zlib and PortAudio. PortAudio needs to be placed in “Beech/Beech/portaudio”, and built with MSVC according to the instructions on its site.
Once that’s done, you can build Beech from the Visual Studio solution file in its root directory.
Notes on the Music 500/5000
While the AMPLE ROM is sufficient for the Music 5000, if you want to use the 500, you’ll need to use the interpreter on its system disk instead. Note that the two versions of the language are not compatible: songs for the disk AMPLE will not play on the ROM version and vice versa.
Here’s a quick start guide for each version.
Music 500 Start the AMPLE interpreter with *AMPLE (or, if you have the 5000 ROM installed, use */AMPLE instead to force the disk version to load). If you want to play the song called SONG, just type "SONG" LOAD RUN
and press Return, and it should start. If it produces an error instead, either the disk is missing some extra modules the song needs, or it’s a 5000 program, or possibly it’s just a bad file. Some disks have a MENU file you can load the same way.
Beech plays the blues Music 5000 I’ve found that, although many 5000 disks have a !BOOT file, they don’t have the boot option set. If that’s the case, don’t ignore the !BOOT file because it’ll probably preload modules the music files will need. Either *OPT 4,3 and Shift+Break, or just *EXEC !BOOT manually. This should bring you into a menu system. From here you can load a song/program and play it just by selecting the appropriate options.Some disks have a JUKEBOX program which lets you choose songs from a menu. For more information on the Music System, some good sites are:--
- Colin Fraser’s site
- The AMPLINEX archive
- Retro-kit.co.uk’s page on the Music 5000
- David Banks’s reverse-engineering notes. These were very helpful, filling in gaps with my own efforts reverse-engineering the synth’s schematic, and providing confirmation where I’d actually got it right!
Known bugs
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- Very occasionally the shift keys seem to stick and won’t produce shifted characters. You can toggle the “PC Keyboard Mapping” checkbox to clear this.
- Sound in general is slightly choppy. I need to use more precise timing code.
- The Music 500/5000 synth outputs mono instead of stereo (easy to fix, I just haven’t got around to it).
- The 500’s “SYNCRON” program sounds different from a recording of the real unit. Not sure why.
- The teletext character rounding is wrong on the lowest scanline of each character. This is most noticeable with descenders and double-height.
- Watch Impact’s demo mode. The ball falls through the bat!
- Firetrack’s in-game screen flickers like crazy.
Things I’m thinking of adding
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- Better GUI (including fullscreen mode).
- UI for configuring ROMs and sideways RAM.
- Undocumented 6502 opcodes.
- Tape writing.
- Snapshot saving. (Would need a new UEF chunk type for the Music 5000’s internal RAM. Not sure who allocates chunk IDs.)
- 1770 disk support, and therefore ADFS.
- Internally it’d be pretty easy to add extra modules for the B+, Master and even Electron. It’d be very nice to have the BBC and Electron in one emulator.
- Instant tape loading. This is very tricky because of the way the OS uses interrupts to receive each byte from the serial system. It’s not just a matter of hooking a single ROM routine as it is on, for example, the Spectrum.
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