IN 1984 Dan was finished authoring music sequencing software called "FASTFINGERS" which was reviewed in the May 1986 "Computer Shopper" 6 years later, in 1991, Compute Magazine wrote "Fastfingers was written before the MIDI explosion, yet Laskowski programmed it for 256 sounds and even coaxed an extra sub octave out of the SID chip." The SID chip is the sound chip on the Commodore 64 for for those of you that don't know. The Compute Magazine also stated "The dearth of new software for the 64 has sent developers back to their closets to have another look at older programs to see if there's something to dust off and reissue. Fastfingers is one such program, and the question arises, does it still stand up? We are compelled to give a qualified Yes."

OK now I'm going to list a few fun facts and history about the 2011 release of Fastfingers below each picture.

Fastfingers loading screen

Back in 1984, before large fast hard disks, there was no way to save a whole song in real time. MIDI was just breaking in, so what I did was set up Fastfingers to record up to 5 minutes of high resolution recording ,time wise several samples per second. This took up memory AND DISK SPACE. So when you hit SAVE back then , the entire recording, updated sounds, arpeggios, and transpose bank were all saved to 160 "blocks" on the 1541 disk drive. This took 2-3 minutes and was also just as slow to LOAD. Because most of you now have access to hard disk recording , in 2011, I have released 2 versions of Fastfingers, of which you will receive BOTH. First the original, 160 block version and now a 31 block version SAVE which just saves your SOUNDS and ARPEGGIOS. 20 seconds is better than 3 minutes.....right !!! So for 2011 there is the LONG SAVE and SHORT SAVE versions.

Fastfingers main performance screen

Tuning was tricky back then. We never had the cheap electronic tuners that we have today. Recently I discovered that 10% of the time you may hit a C and be playing a G or E. Most of the time this is due to RING modulation which modulates the main key with a part of the chord. Because of this, for 2011, I have gone through the entire 256 STANDARD sound bank and tweaked most of the sounds to fix this problem. If the sounds changed too much , I didn't modify them. There may be 4 or 5 sounds still in a different key, but I left them that way because the SOUND would have changed horribly.
Fastfingers main performance screen. SEQUENCER flashes when in arpeggio mode

Now ,up above, I was talking about the STANDARD sound bank, but there is also a DBX sound bank which I created way back. I tweaked all of the 256 sounds while monitoring through a DBX box. This was because I wanted to remove the noise from the SID chip and raise the S/N ratio to better than 70db. The DBX box handled noise reduction in 2 ways. During recording it would COMPRESS the sound making the quieter parts louder and making the louder parts quieter. During recording it also kicked up the high frequencies or treble. I did the same with the the Fastfinger sounds. The DBX version has longer DECAY and RELEASE times and filtering is more BAND PASS and HIGH PASS and less LOW PASS. I no longer have a DBX to play these sounds through though, but this could be re-created today by turning the tone down and using a 2-1 or 3-1 EXPANDER PLUGIN while recording in Cubase, Sonar, Pro Tools etc.. The DBX sounds are on the FLIP sides of the 2 disks.

Fastfingers 3 voice editing screen

If I can fully "WRAP MY HEAD" around the 1984 source code, I would like to have a Fastfingers II program to release in 2012-2013. It would be a DJ fun box to play, with a different arpeggio on every KEY using all of the great Fastfingers SOUNDS of the current release. No promises here though, because Fastfingers is enormously complex with over 25 pages of source code.

I'm also planning on releasing Fastfingers for the KORG KAOSSILATOR. It will be on either DVD or 2GB SD card.

I'm planning on releasing many Fastfingers Arpeggios to be used with Ableton Live and the Novation Launchpad.

March 20 2011
Ok. Today I have created a whole new FREQUENCY table which will make Fastfingers even more IN TUNE, but everyone will also get the original frequency table because this may change the sounds somewhat. I haven't heard it yet but theoretically it should be more in tune. I'm getting this fine tuned now. It wasn't very serious. It may have been out less that 1 CENT for U.S. and Canadian C64 computers. The North American table in the Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Manual was based on a 1 mhz clock and the clock isn't really EXACTLY 1 mhz. I punched in the new NTSC numbers. Next I'll have to create a Table for our European friends.