[OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

this is strictly unrelated but awesome and I need to post it somewhere lol.


dude modded his keyboard to sound like a C64 then plays a badass C64 song. ALL PARTS AT ONCE, arpeggios and everything. wooow

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

This is great. This really just took you one hour to make? What time signature is it? Sounds like 3/4 but the melody makes it sound all crassy and shit it's cool as hell

ps the chipophone guy has been around forever and is awesome

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

Yeah, it took me an hour to make, then I spent about 30-60 minutes at home polishing, but I honestly didn't change an awful lot (mostly added some pitch bends, the two beat intro, made a few notes different timbres and made some things slightly quieter/louder).
It is 4/4 with three 'notes' per beat. Think Burning Heat!, Bag and so on.

Yes

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

shamelessly whoring for more comments

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

comment given

this is awesome and i want you to make the soundtrack for my life

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

I will have to see what I come up with next week

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

I love this song!

How do you get the 8-bit feel to the song? I'd love to make a song just like this, but I've never worked with 8-bit tracks.

Re: [OHC][Famitracker] Mechanized Whalesong

I use Famitracker, so it would be more impressive if I made a song that DIDN'T have an 8-bit feel lol

If you're wanting to make 8-bit sounding songs in other programs, assuming you can't find an accurate NES/Gameboy/C64/whatever VST, the important aspects of sounding 8-bitty are
-1. using square waves of different duty cycles - the NES lets you use the traditional 50% on 50% off, but also the more guitar sounding 25% on and 12.5% on. VRC6 expands this to every 6.25% up to 50% for 8 different widths. However, plain square waves are boring. You want to change duty cycles, bend pitches, change volumes, vibrato, tremolo, do arpeggiation, do octave and perfect fifth brief changes, etc etc as much as you can to hide this fact.

-2. Making changes between duty cycles and between pitches, but only every 1/60th of a second - for instance, virt's chiptune guitar samples have one frame of 50% duty cycle then go to 12.5% duty cycle, or one frame of 50% duty cycle then go to 25% duty cycle. Other interesting timbres can be produced by continuing to change throughout the note, or throwing in higher/lower octaves/higher lower perfect fifths for short periods at the start of the note, or... etc

-3. If you want specifically a NES sound, you need NES sound triangle waves. These are not 'pure' triangle waves - they are jagged to have a shape like a staircase going up and down. (They are also fixed volume, unlike everything else in the NES.) (If you want a 8bit sound bass kick, try taking a triangle wave starting at somewhere between C octave 3 and C octave 4 and rapidly drop its pitch over a 12th-6th of a second. Where you start and what pitch you start at determines how clubby vs soft it feels.)

-4. I'd also recommend you sample the noise loop and the mode 2 noise loop (the one that's used for buzzing) - interesting noise drums are made by picking different frequencies and volumes every frame. Like a snare uses a very low frequency of the noise loop for one frame, then jumps up to much higher frequencies - so you get a 'pop'. And by varying where it starts, where it goes to and how fast and at what volumes you get different qualities of snares, and you can keep making new snares forever.

-5. Lots of fake reverb. Single channel echo is done by taking the notes of a channel, displacing them one and a half note intervals down (or a different number) and pasting them into the gaps between notes. So now you have one 'instrument' alternating loud soft loud soft loud soft and playing a delayed version of what it was just playing. You can then play around with making this delayed echo a different instrument, a different octave, a certain volume, etc for different neato sounding effects.
--In particular, since chiptunes are characterized by limited number of channels, you tend to not see many chords - instead seeing intervals, implying chords and progression rather than explicitly doing them, doing arps instead of chords - etc, since doing a chord would be a whole-chip effort for most chips. Not always true though, some chips and expansions have huge amounts of channels.

....

Or just use Famitracker! Up to you rofl