|
It looks like Ben did a pretty good job of explaining things, and I guess everything might be cool now, but if there's still any misunderstanding here I'd like to clear it up and maybe give you a little more information. Plus, it's very easy to assume everyone writes chiptunes the same way when this couldn't be further from the truth.
The tl;dr version of this is: I do not sample, and I do not use plugins. Many "8-bit remix"es on the internet constantly break rules of old sound hardware. Often people will play too many notes at once (often you get only 3-4 simultaneous tones, but modern software lets you break the rules). Also, we consistently see that people cannot resist using the Mario "jump" noise as a bass drum, "coins" as snares and apparently pause noises are now a guitar riff. Case in point: [www.youtube.com] At the risk of hurting someone's feelings: Ugh! I totally applaud Quinton's dedication to do an entire album, it's something that takes a lot of hard work and time, but this is not the level of intricacy and/or authenticity that I stand for. I feel that work like the Radiohead albums that everyone saw on Youtube or whatever still stand on their own, I guess what gets to me is when everyone just tacks "8-bit" onto everything rather than saying "NES-inspired" or something to more accurately describe the work. But that's not what I'm here to explain.... The reason I named specific games in my posts was because some of the sound chip setups I use are kind of rare in "real life", especially to people outside of Japan. However, none of the sound chip setups are exclusive to a specific game. For example, the VRC6 in Kinda I Want To/2A03 (where I mention Castlevania 3) is also present in Esper Dream 2 and MADARA. It's just that some of the games that used them are well-known, so I listed those, hoping to give people an idea of what they could look for if they wanted examples of what the chip sounds like. Maybe a better example (other than using "soundcards", which most game systems don't have; it's even more basic than that)... let's step outside the realm of chiptunes or 8-bit music or whatever for a second and just talk about keyboards and musicians. Here's a song using a Casio VL-1/VL-TONE, a really simple Casio keyboard. [www.youtube.com] recognise it? but wait! That same rhythm appears in this song, too: [www.youtube.com] Is one group ripping off the other? No, the hardware is so basic that it can only reproduce certain sounds. In this same regard, I'm just using the same hardware that Castlevania uses, but I reproduce the instructions sent to the sound chips by hand. The waveforms that come out of all of the systems I use (a Nintendo in this case) are so basic that you can read a technical document and recreate the waveform from scratch without even touching a cartridge or the hardware. And in basically all cases, I've created "kits" that imitate the design specification from the hardware docs as close to exactly as I can possibly get. It could even be argued that this part of the process is art, in and of itself. I'm almost finished, but before I go, let's deconstruct an actual sound effect instruction. I don't actually use the Castlevania "whip" sound (or anything similar) anywhere in my music, so here's the "fireball" noise from Mario. I've remade it by hand just from listening to it: 
Or, here's the noise when you stomp on a koopa (turtle) shell, again recreated entirely by-hand and by-ear: 
This is how I write music. Where others might be running a game on their NES or in an emulator and pressing record or downloading a WAV file of the effect, I'm doing it from scratch. I want to get nitty-gritty and discover how the hardware works. So, now let me give you a chunk of what NIN looks like on my end, by comparison (by the way, this is only two beats of the song): 
I don't think we're in Castlevania anymore, Toto! =] Sorry this was really long, but hopefully/maybe someone will find it interesting. Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/2012 12:14PM by InversePhase. | |
