Chip Orchestral
games music chiptunes awesomeness
I’ll forgive Naoshi Mizuta for stealing my awesome idea just this once, because what he’s doing with it is really interesting. I kid, of course, because while I’ve always entertained the concept of mixing orchestral ‘tunes with chiptunes, I haven’t actually done anything with it yet. So, beating me to the punch, is the really fantastic (samples of the) soundtrack to Final Fantasy Gaiden: 4 Warriors of Light.
The entire concept of the game is going back and saying hey, what if the original Final Fantasy was being made today for the DS? Therefore everything, from the world design, gameplay systems and music, gets reborn and is both old again and new.
From the samples of the soundtrack released so far, there is a really fantastic assortment of sound samples that range from old NES synths to a more 16-bit oscillation style synthesis to modern instrument samples. By picking and choosing, it seems Mizuta was able to milk the best qualities each generation’s sound style had to offer—from the driving crunchy triangle wave basses to the gorgeous square and sine wave leads, as well as modern percussion and even live instruments such as the great trumpet solo found in the main theme.
I’m a big fan of this approach, and may begin to adapt to it myself going forward. There really isn’t much of a downside to utilizing every tool in a medium’s tool belt when all you have is the richness of music history to back you up.
Very much looking forward to hearing how the rest of the soundtrack shapes up as well as the full tracks themselves! We should find out in a little less than a month when the game and soundtrack launch in Japan.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
chiptunes music
Backseat Driver ©2009 Leif Chappelle
Another week, another chiptune! Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m officially one week off due to a bombastic weekend that involved much less time holed in my studio and more spent outside in the gorgeous weather. Not complaining, though! Anyways… With this ‘tune’s creation in mind, I do have another 8-bit ramble in me.
When writing chiptunes today, we often forget exactly what those hardware limitations were back when the games were actually being created. Yes, we have a whopping four tracks available to write in… But, there’s also those pesky things called sound effects to worry about. Not only does the music need to fit in there, so does everything else audible!
You’ve probably noticed at times, playing an NES game, and certain parts of the music cut out. There’s precisely the reason. Wonder why racing games never had in-race music? Likely both Square channels were being used for engine sounds: yourself, and others passing by. Most commonly used for sound effects was the Noise channel, since it creates assortments of white noise that can be shaped by filters into something vaguely recognizable: sword slashes, things hitting the ground, etc. Because of this, though, compositions had to be even more limited. Or, at the very least, compensate for the potential interruption.
The Noise channel also produces one of the most potent sources of percussion for a track. The problem being, if sound effects are getting mapped to it, what you end up with is a very spotty beat that keeps getting interrupted by player actions. As a result, not many tracks used percussion very often. It was saved for special moments that perhaps didn’t require very many noise-generated effects. Games like the Mega Man series however, used the tonal channels for pretty much all of their sound effects, allowing for full percussion and much more rhythmic tracks.
Thankfully, for those just interested in the pure creation of music using those limitations, all four tracks can be used to the furthest extent of their possibilities. In the track above, I used a variety of techniques—most just found by tinkering around—to create what could be construed as as drum kit, breathing, and wonky electrical chaos. The other trick, of course, is creating all of this with a single line of notes without any overlapping bits. Counter-rhythms and the like need to be built around the concept of taking turns playing, which leads to an interesting puzzle of creating the illusion of multiple percussion elements playing together.
It’s a puzzle I’m still working out, but I’m decently amused by what came out of this track. Enjoy!
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
chiptunes music
Celluloid ©2009 Leif Chappelle
After posting last week’s article on my exploration of chiptunes, commenter Kurt posted an excellent reply about something I had yet to cover in the first installment. He mentioned the compartmentalized nature of chiptunes and how they are less about the actual physical notes written and more about how they’re implemented. This is absolutely true. With this week’s installment in what I’m hoping will become a weekly or bi-weekly look at the world of lo-fi music creation, we’ll be looking at exactly how the modular nature of chiptunes and trackers can hinder or aid the writing process.
As with any tracker, chiptunes are created in a format that is optimized to be the most efficient way possible to create music using as little memory as possible. Since size was a huge constraint, this format of music storage and playback was indispensable while games were still hosted in a cartridge-based medium.
For example: While the mp3 attached to this article is 3MB in size, the entire song when saved as a .nsf (nintendo sound file) is all of 8KB.
The way this is achieved is because of how the music is generated and stored. For each sound file that is played back through the NES, there are three major categories by which the song is stored:
- Instrument data
- Pattern data
- Frame Order data
Within the instrument data, each modified wave form is given a set of parameters and assigned a hexadecimal identity. For example, the piece I wrote contains several major instruments: Vibrato Lead and Vibrato Echo, my two main melody/harmony instruments; Plain Triangle, my bare-bones bass synth; and a variety of drum settings. By applying filters such as volume curves, arpeggio, pitch bending, and duty cycle, with just a few parameters one can create an arsenal of different variations on the four channels available.
Within the pattern data, each of the four tracks are assigned cellular ‘patterns’, essentially one or more measures of music, that can be played back in any order. Based on how many rows per pattern are designated in the settings, each beat is given either a note value, a null value or left blank. Each beat can also be assigned an instrument, volume, and up to three effects. As a musical example, a whole measure of 4/4 time would be given 16 rows if you want the least possible value be 16th notes, or 32 rows for 32nd notes.
Finally, in the frame order data, each pattern is assigned to a frame (all four tracks playing a specific pattern). The order becomes a matrix of how everything will play back chronologically. For example, here is a snippet from the piece above during the 1st verse:
0A | 04 05 00 02
0B | 05 04 01 03
0C | 08 08 00 02
0D | 05 04 01 03
Now, to understand better, know that the numbers for each column relate only to the channel that is playing. The far-left numbers correspond to the frame number. In regular notation, this might be the measure number. The easiest channels to comprehend are the Bass (channel 3) and Drums (channel 4): The bass has a two measure pattern it is repeating: 00, then 01. So do the drums: 02, 03, etc. The melody, however (channel 1) has a slightly different pattern. Its first and third measures are different, but it returns to an identical phrase in between, making its melodic line an ABCB pattern. By acknowledging these repeating elements in the music, the composer can save on space and call back phrases without the need to create them anew.
I hope everyone is still awake! With all that said, go ahead and take a listen to the attached mp3 and see if you can’t identify how the compartmentalized nature of the format is being used and in what way. I’ll be back next weekend or the following one for another bit of passed-along explorations!
As an addendum, big props (which I’ve already given via email and twitter, but more doesn’t hurt!) to Jeremy Parish over at 1up for the plug on last week’s article!
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
chiptunes music
Maelstrom ©2009 Leif Chappelle
You may be tempted to hit play, but hear me out first:
I’ve long been praising chiptunes on this blog — for good reason, mind — without actually taking the dive myself. There’s one thing that can be said about music, non-tangible as it is: It’s hard to really understand at its core until you get your hands dirty and do it yourself. You can appreciate it, you can jump up and down in excitement at a rockin’ chorus, but understanding comes from doing.
Does that sound too pretentious? I hope not!
Granted, the doing can be applied to performance just as much as it is creation. Singing your favorite song or melody can act as a form of performance that enhances understanding. Thing is, with stuff of a digital medium it’s a bit difficult to perform unless you’re a professional synthesizer operator. (Props to those folks.)
That said, this week I decided to take that dive and try my hands at tracking out some old-school chiptunes. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the knowledge or experience to wrap my head around it. Thankfully, I found a lovely little program called BoyScout that enabled me gain just that: a toolbelt filled with sound emulation from the late GameBoy.
Not really a looker, is it?
The above are two screenshots from a portion of the BoyScout interface, the left-most being a single cell of music data from one of the instruments, the right-most being the overall sequencer for all four tracks.
Knowing my game music history helped a bit with this one: The original GameBoy was an 8-bit game machine, meaning that it had the capacity for four channels of audio playing at once. Two channels were dedicated to square waves, one channel had a customizable waveform, and the fourth provided white noise. The channels were used universally between both music and sound effects, meaning that composers had to keep in mind that at any moment one of their precious channels could be taken over by a sword slash or jump.
That entire concept however brings with it an inspiration for polyrhythmic writing. Since the channels can change their settings on the fly, so long as the two lines don’t overlap, one can create multiple “voices” in a single channel to create the illusion of far more than four things happening at once.
And so the idea for an almost overwhelmingly polyrhythmic piece came to be. There are multiple repeating ideas that could be grasped onto as the concept of a down-beat, none of which entirely wrong, but none of which totally stable either.
There will certainly be more to come!
Gaming’s Pinocchio
retro games chiptunes
…Becomes a Real Boy Girl
The Great Giana Sisters have a legacy in gaming. Scheduled to come out in 1987, a year after the US release of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros refined the platforming genre, the game was in stores for a brief moment… but it wouldn’t last long. Just as soon as it was released, legal pressure forced them to remove it from the market. The reason should become clear once you see the original Commodore 64 title.
The game was an absolute rip-off of Super Mario Bros. The first level, the way the text at the top displayed, the fireball powerup. The facsimile was swallowed up by Nintendo the whale and their lawyers, barely given a chance to live. For good reason, mind. Supposedly the levels following world 3 began to introduce unique elements that distinguished it away from SMB, but… come on guys, you don’t tackle the giant not expecting to get squished.
The franchise however seems to have been given a chance to redeem itself, a good 22 years later. It has re-surfaced as Giana Sisters DS, still very much in the same vein as Mario. There are still enemies to stomp from above. There are still blocks to punch from below. There is still a fireball powerup… Yet, it looks and moves so good. While Mario may have made a permanent leap into the 3rd dimension on the DS with New Super Mario Bros, Giana ironically brings with her a 2D soul that Mario’s DS adventure sorely lacked.
As an addendum, the original C64 release contained one stand-out originality to it in the way of an awesome soundtrack by Chris Huelsbeck. A bit of a legend when it comes to his chiptunes, the theme for The Great Giana Sisters was no exception.
What interesting times we live in, when former rivals are releasing games on the same system. In fact, nearly all former rivals are finding a home on it. Even a game torn down by massive copyright infringement and legal tape is getting a vastly belated sequel that looks to exceed a sequel to the game it originally ripped off… on the same platform.
Bizarre, yet wonderful.
Famicom Chip-Love
games music chiptunes
Composer Yuzo Koshiro has seen the games industry through its infancy to its present incarnation. Beginning with the action RPG series Ys, through ActRaiser and the Streets of Rage series, he is probably one of the most diverse composers in games in terms of adaptability and variety of musical style. Most recently, he was behind the soundtracks for both Etrian Odyssey I and II for the DS.
Utilizing a medium on the DS with similar sound capabilities to older consoles rather than redbook audio, Koshiro has preserved what I like to call the inherent “game genre” of music. The chiptunes, the synths, the epic themes; they’re all part of a genre of music that seems to only fit in games yet thrives in them.
With his music for the upcoming DS RPG 7th Dragon published by SEGA, Koshiro is matching the game’s desire to be an oldschool RPG using today’s handheld technology. With that in mind, the entire soundtrack exists in two different versions which are available to be switched on the fly: The original version and FC (Famicom a.k.a. NES) version. (Check out samples of both versions of two tracks from the game at the link!) While the originals follow a set of synths reminiscent of PS1 or PS2 instrument samples, the FC version is total 8-bit chiptune style.
The chiptune rennaisance isn’t something just being done by SEGA’s 7th Dragon. It also happened with Capcom’s Mega Man 9, though mainly due to its entirety being 8-bit in style. Regardless, retro graphics and audio are very much something that is coming back into style after being such a shunned aspect of the gaming aesthetic in the transition to realism and ubergraphics. Being a fan of both pixel art and chiptunes, I say bring it on.
