Hi! My name is Linus. I'm a musician and mad engineer with a soft spot for 8-bit computers and the sounds they make. I compose for and perform music on a variety of instruments, synthesizers, 8-bit computers, and things that I build or repurpose such as the Chipophone and the Commodordion. I'm also intrigued by procedural art and sizecoding, be it on traditional setups like the Commodore 64 or my own microcontroller-based hardware.
Having experienced Sonix on Amiga in the 90's, I am really amazed by this! The only thing missing would be a filter to get a sharper/more mellow sound.
Music on tracker need a lot of patience and dedication, 4 track one note a the time was very limitating, but thanks to the sampling chord trick, it was even difficult to do that on a famicom tracker or C64 one, by using arpegio for emulate the chord, on the SNES it was the memory limited to 64kb that was a pain in the ass to deal for sampling continuous strings or pad sound, you must use a very short and lofi sample for that convert in there BRR format, the megadrive feel more friendly with there FM and master system chip plus sampling for the drum and some extra.
The next step could be to introduce a gate/stutter step-sequencer to automate the rhythmic gated effect and just focus on performing the chords and harmonies. Either by recording your gate pattern live, or through a TR drum machine pattern styled interface where a row of keys each turn on/off 16th or 8th positions within a bar.
I was blown away by tracker music when I first heard it on the Atari and later PC, but the memory constraints on 16 bit machines did tend to reduce the variations of chord samples, and there was a big influence of rave music so a lot of tunes sounded a bit samey at that time. In contrast on the C64 people were writing fast arpeggiators to simulate more voices, and there seemed to be more chord qualities being used -- the Follin bros certainly seemed to like maj/min 7s and some altered dominants.
Excellent video! When you're stacking two fifths CG and GD to get a Csus2 or Gsus4, do you hear G more pronounced since two channels are playing it? (And thus perhaps making it sound more like a Gsus4?) I couldn't really make it out myself, but I wonder what your experience is when building it. The trick of stacking chords to make others can be used on an accordion too, by the way, but in that case each note would only be played by one "channel".
So many little clever and intuitive design choices here! Each step made perfect sense as to why that's the way you'd go about it, but I don't think I'd have thought of it all myself! And that's the mark of good design really isn't it? Something that seems obvious in retrospect. I particularly enjoyed the use of pitch shifting alongside remapping there at the end, of course! But also wow! What a fun project this is, and thanks for sharing it with us :)
We already know you're a Wizard... "A Mind Is Born" and the Chipophone... but can you tickle the MC68000 + Paula into becoming a software defined synth?
the way you release the harmony on the mainhand melody as you play the left hand to emulate the limited channels of the gameboy is impressive attention to detail
Delightfully clever design! I dig it. On an unrelated note - could you tell me about your piano? It's been a pleasure hearing it over all these years, and I've grown quite curious about it. :)
That's a clever way of managing both inputs and memory. There's a fairly obvious gap in chord coverage, with no Dominant 7th, but apart from that it gets almost everything.
That's a valid point! Depending on what other instruments are playing, it might be possible to get away with VII dim, or a V7 without the third. Another chord that's missing (and harder to fake) is the augmented triad. But a trade-off had to be made.
It would be super cool to have a 'legato' mode modifier key that when pressed would keep playing and transposing the same sample. This would result in changing the brightness while also changing the pitch with the correct amount. Resulting in the ability to play connected melodic phrases in the original amiga/tracker style.
Att some point lft will have auch a large collection of amazing instruments that he can just go somewhere with 4 copies of himself and just go play Space Debris
I recently built a shitty simulation of something like qwertuoso for practicing synth stuff in libSDL for Linux, and this amazing program makes me itch to build this as well. This is great!
the chord "brightness" setting at the end blew my mind this all works so elegantly, it's so cool!!! I wonder if there are any market synthesizers out there that work similar to this, it's pretty darn unique!
