NES Audio: The Arpeggio Effect 

europian games in a nut shell glad i am in america

Because TIM FOLLIN, BABYYYY!!

Tell me a good american-developed NES game :P

Appleboy78165 it's an awful game to players with no skill.. bullet hell games are supposed to be tough awesome game

Awful games with great soundtracks: Wishing the other programmers had been as enthusiastic and driven as the audio guy.

The technique was used on game boy color with the games Prisoners of the Sun and Atlantis: The Lost Empire to mention a few

Tell that to the composers who used the VRC6 and the MMC5 chips.

My favorite arpeggio example by a Japanese composer comes from the NES version of Castlevania 3. The song In question is called Rising. Another awesome example comes from the game start theme from the original Metroid.

ikr

It's actually a GBC game.

@@Nikku4211 That's what I came here from. I was just wondering if it was Arpeggio.

@@Nikku4211 The GBC used this effect way too often.

@@MaoRatto shiiiit my b, a 5 year old typo, fixed

It's the Alberto José Gonzalez's signature :)

dude examples of overclocked music in nes music would be awesome, honestly i wonder what ever happened to explod2a03

Oh yes, absolute classics. Good call!

Yeah, they really liked this effect. I actually just browsed "Bee 52 ost" and this video popped out.

Totally agree, Quatro Adventure and Arcade are my favorite NES ost. (btw. Bee 52 is by Codemaster) (I realized that in my country there was different cartridges with Codemaster games: The gold five: Big Nose Freaks Out, Micro Machines, Fantastic Adventure of Dizzy, Ultimate Stuntman, Big Nose the Caveman and The gold four: Boomerang Kid, Super Robihood, go Dizzy go and Soccer)

DireAngelic Only the American Version

With polyphonic pickups (and a polyphonic output jack...in case it isn't obvious) a pedal could be made to do this on guitar.

***** Ahh very cool, didn't realize the same composer was already featured in this video

It was Tim Follin's first NES game, actually.

it is real music from the 80s

Europeans composer were mostly rock fans (prog rock for follin) so imitating guitars was main in their mind. Japaneses composers were mostly classical/jazz musicians (in 8 bits era)

+unused channel Arctic Caverns from Battletoads.

almost every game has a fraction of this effect

@@mother-fng-bonswa3612 including Mega Man. (See Bubble Man)

What are you referring to exactly with "doing what Tim Follin did"? As far as I know, his arpeggio effect did just that: simulating chords on a monophonic channel.

@@quadpad_music He also worked on music for ZX Spectrum games that used its beeper. He used tricks to render multiple channels in software and play then on the one channel, one bit ZX beeper.

Mario's music was/is amazing, but not in the same way many other songs are. It was written specifically to not be extremely apparent and noticeable, while still sounding nice and 'funky' and driving the beat. It wasn't too flashy so that people could focus on the game but wasn't bland or 'typical' at all. They also help set the tone/mood, as the overworld music is fairly upbeat in contrast to the darker 'underground/dungeon' music. In summary, Super Mario music wasn't written just to solely to sound nice, but to aid the gameplay in a way.

@@woomy8971 Yeah...Mario's music is honestly still soooo masterful, compared to stuff even today. The limitations...and it's still famous. There's a reason for that - I think Koji Kondo's a genius in the true sense of the word.

@@woomy8971 I personally like to put it this way: There are two types of quality in computer music: The technical quality, and the coompositional quality. "Technical" refers, in this case, to sound design, and how do you use it to exploit the hardware. It´s part of what makes the fun of creating computer music in the first place, what makes it different from composing something for a "real" instrument. "Compositional", in the other hand, is as self-explanatory as it can be. It´s just how well composed the music is. If Mario´s music had been thought to be played on a piano, no one would be complaining about how "dull" it sounds sound design-wise, because there just wouldn´t be any sound design in the first place. Japanese composers just thought their music under the same rules that they used to make non-computer music. They only thought of compositional quality, leaving the technical aspects totally behind. Their music, in the end, was compositionally good, while at the same time sound design-wise mediocre. PD:Sorry for bad english :P

@@quadpad_music your english is great! thank you for writing this comment :)

Ruko Michiharu The arp effect is literally a hallmark of chiptunes so...

benaldo138 Not if you have 6 channels or more ;3 Like in, you know, 16 bit systems! And you know, the best-sounding NES games don't use this effect! It was only heavily used in the commodore 64 because that thing only had 3 sound channels which isn't enough...

I said a hallmark, not universally used! It's just a very chippy stylistic choice is all. Sorry when i talk about chiptunes i tend to just refer to ones using waveform gens and such rather than being sample heavy like the SNES. Cause IMO once you get into sample town too heavily it stops being chip and starts just being awesome music. :D

benaldo138 Chip music is just as awesome as real music, in my opinion even more so, just listen to the Turbografx 16 with its amazing 6 channels of programmable waveforms! And the Sega Genesis with its 4 operator FM synth music! I love them ^^ SNES uses samples but due to bit-rate reduction it sounds just fake enough for me to call it chiptune, and I love it too ^^ Sunsoft made some of the best sounding NES games and they used sampled bass on the DPCM channel, that's amazing!

Ruko Michiharu Sure, quick arp is poor man's polyphony, and i often think that it should be used a little less. But sometimes, it's absolutely perfect. If we're staying with the NES, how about Solstice intro by Tim Follin?

The Follin Bros, Mane

PsychadelicoDuck No. They use four channels for the most part (as far as I know).

Sure. But this video is mainly about the NES.

I honestly don't like the Arpeggio effect so much on the Nintendo 8-bit consoles. On the Commodore 64, it is utilized properly, usually combined with other effects, which makes it sound fuller (like variable pulse width modulation). I wonder which is the first soundtrack using this effect. The oldest usage of this effect I know of are the arcade game "Mr. Do Run Run" (1984) and the C64 game "Kong Strikes Back" (1984).

It wasn't just an effect. It was a workaround to play chords because you had a limited number of channels (5 for the NES) and each channel (or "instrument") could only play a single note at once. The best you could do to play a harmony in a single instrument was to arpeggiate the notes very fast.

Try some of the music by Alberto J. González, he usually paired it with pulse-width change effects, as much as the NES allows...

@@vuurniacsquarewave5091 - Yep, him and Jeroen Tel always did it that way, and it turned out really well for them!

ok