Hello and welcome to Retro Music Retracked, home of retro 8bit chip tune music!
I'm Vlad, the creator of SidAMP, a Commodore 64 music player for Android devices.
As a big fan of retro computers, mainly from the home computers era, and a huge fan of the Commodore 64 sound chip, also known as the SID, I recently started recreating old music using modern tools and trying to make it as accurate and close to the original as possible. On this channel you will find some of my latest work which includes remakes, remixes and sound effects from the best musicians from that era. Are you ready to head back to the 80's and 90's, then hit the subscribe button.
The guitar sound is sampled from the original track and just mapped to the C-4 key as the base; a note which probably has nothing to do with the real guitar chord played; but it's just sample mapping so it doesn't really matter. Is the C-4 note misleading or you think the sound is completely off? Thanks for the feedback 🏁
@@RetroMusicRetracked its completely off. you could drag the original into an analyzer and see the chord values to replicate it with a new alingend sample.
@@RetroMusicRetracked Here's a few ideas: - Martin Galway's "Times of Lore" (this would be pretty epic) - Rob Hubbards "Knuclebusters" - Ben Daglish's "Biggles" - David Hanlon's Enlightenment Druid II" (Fairlight's intro) - "Task III" - Martin Walker's "Citadel" - Martin Galway's "Comic Bakery" - The Galactic Stranger's "I Want More Diamonds" - Thomas Detert's "Magnetic" - Jeroen Soede's "Funky Stuff" - Tim Follin's "Ghouls'n Ghosts (song 9(sid player))" - Adam Gilmore's "The Corporation" - Rob Hubbard's "The Master of Magic" - Johannes Bjerregaard's "Rockbuster" - Kim Christensen (Future Freak)'s "Great Tune" I have so many more, but that's a good bit to consider! XD
Never played "Dragon Skulle"; the tune sounds somehow sad. Just out of curiosity, why there are two, exact the same, instruments, playing exact the same notes, for the main melody?
One of my fav games of the day, fond memories of playing this game, lived for the night raid and jousting! XD This is a phenomenal rendition of the tune, especially if this is done by note matching vs. having access to the actual music data or specs on the tune's creation!
Thank you! Check out also the full version of the track -> ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VImlGP2hca0.html Regarding raides, they were much easier in the Amiga version, specially with Geoffrey Longsword 🤣 ... about the music data, you can get it with SIDDump, but I prefer the C64Debugger more, where you have a tracker like view with a complete SID state for each frame and you can also pause and rewind the song (frames) any time.
Can you make a tutorial video on setting up Renoise for making C64 style chiptunes like this? The setup looks brilliant with the voice channels modulation and such. But there are other details such as this play speed and how it was determined, and other effects to get the SID sounds so good. The "samples" are they just samples of the synth sounds, or actual? That's the kind of info that would be great to learn for aspiring music makers in this style, with this and other such tools! XD Awesome cover!
I've definitely thought about that, and I will create one. To explain everything properly, I'd need to dive into how the SID chip works. There are also some effects that can't be achieved in Renoise without using a SID-like VST, so there are plenty of tricks and hacks happening behind the scenes. I have a good idea of how I would structure the tutorial, but it would be a lot of work and might not be possible in the near future.
@@RetroMusicRetracked Here's to hoping you can make it happen, even as if you don't go in too deep into the SID chip if it will harm the timeline to make the tutorial, it can be a bonus vid for it maybe. Just a thought if it didn't come to mind already. But I really appreciate the consideration for it, thanks!
Righteous! I hope someday Lukhash can give a renoise tutorial on making chiptunes like this or even a how its made with any of his masterpieces! XD I'm especially interested in the setup of the equipment and software used! The visuals of watching the memory as the tune plays is amazing! I will apologize in advance if this renoise rendition isn't make specifically by Lukhash, props to the actual artist as well if different! Lukhash, and other such artists, making it do what it do! XD
Actually the Renoise covers are done by me (Vlad) 😇 It started as an experiment because I wanted to learn how the SID chip actually works and how, with combination of simple waveforms, you can produce cool sounding instruments. With first very good and accurate results, it escalated very quickly into this RU-vid project 🤩 🎶 Check out LukHash's Twitter and RU-vid channels to see some "behind the scenes" snippets, he is very active there.
Original song (SID) data can be viewed using SIDDump or C64Debugger (now called RetroDebugger); everything is put together using Renoise, a modern DAW / tracker. It's also described in comments of my other covers.
I can keep commenting under every video "oh, this is one of my favorites" but it's almost always always true. This tune as well, despite its simplicity is so edged in my brain, its just a joy to listen to as much as the more complex SIDs.
@@RetroMusicRetracked I have a few favorites on C-63, one is Advanced tactical fighter ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NI1goOON0yg.html and my real favorite, of which I wish a 3 minute version existed, but I'm not good enough in a tracker to do it is Last Mission. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UvVZA4WFSTY.html I know the second pattern has nothing more than an extra bass under it, but I feel this song could be so much more
@@neliz2k Never heard "ATF" before. The author is also unknown according to HVSC. "Last Mission" on the other hand is well known; recognisable David Whittaker style 🎶
@@RetroMusicRetracked the tune should be by Kevin Bezant, the 3rd person working on the game as the other two did coding and graphics: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_(video_game)
I remember, when i was a little boy back in the early 1990's, i got myself RAMPAGE for my Commodore 64 😹😺👍🕹️. Also, it was the first of The Hit Squad game tapes, i ever had 😺👍🕹️. The music 🎵🎶 brings back my retrospective childhood memories 😺👍🕹️. A big retrospective like 👍🕹️ from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮.
Thank you very much for your support 😇 I'm glad you like the covers and that they bring some nice memories 🎶 And greetings again to the Finland demoscene 🙏 👋
Thanks! But, credits actually go to the original composer: Jeroen Kimmel 💪 I've rearranged it a little bit, it was really fun working on the ring-mod arps 🎶
Great rendition. The Amiga version had stunning graphics, but the music was very poor. It sounds like some cheap midi instruments were sampled and used. The "sequel" for Amiga CD32 was much better. Anyways, would be great to hear a cover of Antiriad from Richard Joseph.
DEFENDER OF THE CROWN from Cinemaware never gets old - not even on the Commodore 64 nor Amiga 500 😺👍🕹️. A big retrospective like 👍🕹️ from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮.
Nope, that's busted! The notes at 0:25 are off! And doing the reverb simulation with two channels, when you can go through the reverb processor effect is just dumb.
Like I've mentioned in one of the previous comments, all notes, including the part at 0:25, are copied one by one from the source (SID state in C64Debugger). And since there is no vibrato in that part of the song, there is no chance to make a mistake; unless C64Debugger is showing them off too, like by 1/3 or 1/2 of a semitone. And what do you think by off, should the notes be lower, higher, or something else? Regarding reverb, all the songs on all voices (tracks) have already a reverb processor. Some more, some less. If you look at the scopes in the video (specially when playing rectangle waveforms) you can clearly see that reverb is applied, so there are no reverb simulations using extra tracks or whatever.
@@RetroMusicRetracked they're half a note higher. How can you not hear it? Listen to the original again. The SID music doesn't strictly follow standard note frequencies, in fact when Jeroen composed it, he was punching in discrete frequencies directly as one byte values. I don't care what the debugger says, when I listen to the original and this, this is off, annoyingly so. If all the tracks already have reverb (they shouldn't by the way, since only the beginning in the original has reverb), then why are you doing double-reverb with two channels in the beginning?
Agree. Can be also said for many other tracks from Martin Galway; specially: Green Beret, Hyper Sports, Miami Vice, Parallax, Rambo, Wizball, Yie-Ar Kung Fu... some of them are covers but still they sound great.
I was also surprised when I've heard about the conversion. First I was a bit disappointed since the background outside is mainly black, compared to the bluish environment on Amiga. Then I've somehow got used to it and, at the end, enjoyed playing it on the C64 as well as on the Amiga.
That's because in most C64 trackers or in Goattracker you would define instruments (e.g. bass-drums or arps) which can consist of more than one note or waveform. So the patterns look slower, but when you hit a note the actual output in the background is much faster. I always get the song data from C64Debugger (a brilliant tool btw) and what you are seeing in every video is raw SID output of notes, waveforms, pulse-width, envelopes, modulation and filter for every of the three channels.
Not really. Most of the things are manually done in Renoise. But once you start porting a song, after a while, there is plenty of copy-pasting going on.