(Originally posted on Blogspot on Saturday, July 2, 2011)

Hello dear readers! I know it’s been exactly a month since my last post… I apologize. This summer has left me rather busy catching up on life and catching up on bills, paying people back money I owe (all paid back now!), and struggling with a car on the fritz! Yowza! During the year, I work a consistent weekly job at a school with consistent pay, but, being at a school, I am let go for the summer. So in the meantime, I’ve been finding odd jobs/freelance work in order to pay the bills. It’s been consistent enough where I haven’t had any major problems, but it’s left less time for music, sadly.

So in short, I haven’t forgotten my readers (and listeners)! I think once September returns and I have consistent work again, I’ll be able to work on things and post more often! I still have big plans for an awesome September remix or two (celebrating a 20th year anniversary of something…) and a TON of 8-bit remixes in October (to celebrate the three year anniversary of something else!!!) As well, my EP is still in the works… and still being delayed. Heh. It’ll be finished this year, for sure!

Well, onto the 8-bit remix! This one is for Sonic 3’s Ice Cap Zone (one of my fav Sonic tracks!) Once again, I made this one a little while ago, so it’s hard to remember all the details, but I’ll speak on what I can remember:

Drums and effects: I made the hi/hat metal sound with the noise channel, with a Duty/Noise at 25%. This gives a more metallic sound than the usual ‘white noise’. You can hear this effect used extensively in the famous Mega Man 2 – Quick Man stage. As well, the backwards ‘sweep’ sound was a simple noise channel track with a reversed volume slope. I used a simple ‘kick’ wav sample on every quarter note on the DCIM channel. Pretty basic stuff there, but it works well.

Instruments: The bassline was simple – just the triangle channel (as used in most NES tracks.) For the intro parts, I have two square channels with a little bit of a fade-in with the volume channel. This gives it more of a ‘pad synth’ feel, much like the original. For the ‘chorus’ part I have one square channel playing the melody – once again, pretty basic stuff. For the arpeggios, though, things get a little bit trickier. In the instrument editor, the arpeggio tool only goes from -10 to positive 10. This means you can’t do octaves at -12 to 0, which would be ideal. In order to achieve the arpeggios the way I needed, I set them at ‘-6, -6, 6, 6’ – which means in order to play the notes I wanted, I’d have to play a 6 half tones higher (example: to get a G I’d have to play a C#.) Here’s a picture of the editor:

Well that’s pretty much it! Here’s the track!

As always, thanks for reading!
-Pouch!

(Originally posted on Blogspot on Sunday, May 1, 2011)

Alright, so it turns out I have a few 8-bit tracks on stockpile. Phew! So I was able to release this April’s second 8-bit remix (a day late… I know…) This one is a short, easy one – but it has a unique element to it, especially for a Nintendo track!

Yup! It’s Mario 64’s Endless Staircase music, a personal favourite ever since I was a kid! It’s interesting because it uses the Shepard’s scale.

From wikipedia:

“…named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.”

In lament’s terms, the same notes are played an octave apart, with the higher set of notes fading out, and the lower set of notes fading in (repeating forever). This gives the illusion that the music is forever ascending (much like trying to walk up an endless looping staircase!)

In order to achieve this effect in 8-bit, a feat I was curious if even possible, I needed two of the exact same sound. Lucky for me, the NES has two square channels! I programed the sequence in Square 1 and slowly adjusted the volume to fade in from the bottom and fade out at the top. I pasted a duplicate of this pattern in Square 2 at the half way point. IT WORKED! With this done, all I needed to program was the string part – I simply used the triangle channel for this. Nice.

Enjoy! Comments always welcome!
-Pouch!

(Oh, and I do have a remix for April. It’s not the track I intended to release, but instead, it’s a remix I did for Imogen Heap’s ‘Song That Never Was’ a while back. Expect that tonight or tomorrow!)