David Whittaker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the script editor of the Doctor Who series, see David Whitaker.
- For the music composer, see David Whitaker (composer).
David Whittaker (born 1957) is known for numerous computer game tunes which he wrote in most of the 1980s and early 1990s, for many different formats.
He is known for the large quantity of his works ([1]) - more than any other composer (in fact, more than most of the other top composers' works combined). He was offered so many projects in the late 1980s that he had to pass some of them over to other computer game music writers (such as his good friends, Rob Hubbard and Ben Daglish). Initially, he had been a programmer, rather than a music maker. The first games, featuring his music, are also programmed and designed by him, such as Lazy Jones.
While making music, he often programmed music directly, instead of using any music composition tools, using just a "machine code monitor" - and then an 'assembler' system/program - including SuperSoft's and then Commodore's tools. Commodore 64 was the format that he composed for, most frequently. He was more impressed with the Amiga's more developed technical sound capabilities, but used a few of the same instrument sounds, in several of his works, for Amiga. Thus, his Amiga music is often easy to recognize. For Shadow of the Beast, he was asked to compose especially good music, as much more memory (RAM) was available for that game - so he used different and very high quality (at the time) instrument samples. He is, these days, working mostly in the field of computer game sounds and voices instead of music.
Although he does not compose much at present, he is still involved in the implementation of Music, Ambiences, Sound FX - and his admitted "forte" - Dialogue (hence, his current moniker: DialogueGuru).
His most successful compositions appeared probably in Amiga games such as Obliterator, Speedball and Shadow of the Beast. On the Commodore 64 his most popular compositions include for example Glider Rider and Armageddon Man. His subtune 21 of Lazy Jones was the basis for the dance hit "Kernkraft 400" by Zombie Nation, which went to number 1 (#1) in many European countries. Also many other tunes, by him, can be heard on Internet retro computer music radios. Other formats he composed for include Amstrad, Atari ST, Atari XL and ZX Spectrum. Many of his old songs are these days remixed by computer game music enthusiasts.
