Sega MegaDrive Synthesizer, Made From A Sega Mega Drive And GEN MDM 

This video is MEGA

Great sounds. Original and quite sample-able.

Why can't you pull the channel switch and twist all the wires together? This might show my ignorance.

SuperElectricmonk I wish it was that simple of a solution! Thanks for the suggestion though!

@@SuperElectricmonk Or plug each channel into a separate guitar effects pedal and daisy chain the pedals. New sounds too.

Check out Simian Mobile Disco they do a lot of this type of stuff.

So we know how human after all created

Welcome to the world of FM!

Hell yeah

Really should!!!

Same

Reminds me of Digitalism :)

Pls do this and sell it to me on Vinyl 🥰

Synth music..ahhh that organic feel that I love so much as well ❤️

check out severed heads

literally

Dude😅

This is a definate win .

ARE YOU WINNING SON

@@ZphyZphyer HELLMYEAH BOI I ALREADY GOTTEN ALL THEVCHAOS EMARALDS GFJEJJRJRFJJ -Son

Probotector (contra) has a superb sound track better than the snes version I think.

@@TheWashableBomb it sucks that most developers didn't make good use of it. For me the snes is way better but there's some stuff on the genesis that wouldn't be possible on the snes, and i'd love more of that.

madcientist making musik.. love it!😀

So..That’s Zonic the Zone Cop’s Universe.

I got shivers when he played around with the modulations

Ridiculously good. I'd probably buy one if it was viable. All those pots a necessity!

me too. xD

Seconded!

Same!

That bit was killer

🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶

Vectorman type beats

Definitely some classic sounds from games I heard among that lot for sure. Sonic FX and some Kid Chameleon sounds among that for sure. When it comes to building that though? Rather him than me 😂😂.

🤣

He's keeping the knob mongers and socketeers alive.

Watch out for those people. Those guys who sell you their knobs. I don't judge but these days you can never be too careful.

@@robertmcmillan3638 Knobs

Yup. Finding that perfect tone and never finding it again until months later after you experiment again

@@rev311mycrown6 Just like the song "You don't know what you've got till it's gone"!!!

lol That's the best part of synthesizers to me... every jam is like a journey into a new sound space.

I'm thinking you might be able to rig something with the likes of LEDs and have a remember button that saves the settings to something like an SD card

fm synthesizers can be straight up mean to you sometimes. the nature of fm makes it unpredictable sometimes.

I'm still breathing

Awesome! Subscribed too!

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4CzyljDJGa0.html

You have to try that game bro

My immediate thought as well

My first thought, too! 🐜

to be honest in the way this is setup yes. when i was playing it yesterday i have them out of sync with the knobs, making it pretty hard to program with an real idea. but i'm gunna sort that out so i can actually use it in a definite way, however being thrown is somewhat more interesting, as i have no idea which one is modulating what, which is kinda cool.

It's very unpredictable at first, but you start to get a feel for FM synthesis after a while. I would have killed for an FM synth with loads of knobs back in the 90's, programming the DX7 was an arse. Trying to reprogram the DX7 while playing a song would have been lunacy.

@@DaisyAjay yeah exaxtly. thats the thing this interface isnt really made for exact sound sculpting its more just for fucking with stuff in a live setting. i kinda amped up my hate for the dx7 programming, it wasnt that bad was it? haha

@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER My friend liked it, she was awesome with the DX7. She was one of those geeks that really understood the maths behind FM. Shame she wasted so much time making 'realistic' sounds.

@@DaisyAjay did your friend ever record any music?

Best comment :D

If Sega was not its own worse enemy (Sega Japan did not like its own Sega America for whatever reason). Sega would be owning Nintendo and Mario been Sonic's bitch. Yet the we all know the cold hard truth of reality.

I think the snes sound chip was simple and easier to use, it's hard to find a shitty song that was poorly programmed on the snes. The genesis on the other hand was inferior but had just as much potential, specially combined with the master system chip, but most games either sound annoying or too loud with it's chip, the only developers i can think that made expert use of them was sega and treasure, most other devs had issues with the sound.

@@Qardo The japanese branch was jealous because the americans were crushing Nintendo, but Sega was still far behind in Japan. So they started vetoing Tom Kalinske's ideas and imploded. I feel bad for Tom, he was a genius and he would have been unstoppable if the ass-tight japanese executives had let him do as he pleased.

@@Blankult Konami also had some good music in their Genesis games.

I AGREE!

He's great isn't he! I love his energy 🤣👍

Daft Punk? Never heard of her

@parallel pickle I kid, I kid! Daft Punk is cool

that face fuckin lol, good catch m8

hell yeah

Polyphonic= Maximum Over Drive

Don't you mean, "That's no Genesis, that's a Revelations!"? *Runs away* :D

Every Meg is an overdrive. Only SNestoids say :"Shut up Meg" as they have the ear of a deaf hamster for. Megadrive fans and FM fans in general will never see a Meg they'll tell to "shut up", they will tell a composer or driver programmer to "stop composing" :P.

*BLAST PROCESSING*

It's amazing what happens when you take the high pass and low pass filters out of the picture

Sick eh?

xD lol

*ecstacy

Hell yeah

and the torture never stops

@michi veritas Original revision motherboards sound great. Unfortunately the majority of genesis mega drives do sound like shit. I have a good one and a bad one, the quality difference is huge.

Infected Mushroom has been a generic EDM live act for over a decade now. The times they used an extensive, analogue set-up for their live performances are long gone, unfortunately. Nowadays it seems their live eq isn't much more than perhaps a Nord G2 and Cubase running on a pc laptop.

@@ThelemicMagick ive noticed infected has recently been lacking that sort of analog quality that i loved so much

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Ebjuiajg6mI.html

More like aphex twin or square pusher.

@@elkmeatenjoyer3409 Squarepusher without the MC 202 but yeah. I can see that. Have you experienced Shobaleader 1?

Hehe

*The whole dubstep

thats a MASSIVE point.

@@iv3995 hehe VST humor

no

Some of them created softwares to help them create music.

@@brorianszk ahem GEMS.

@@Ink_my_WOOMY You're gonna make me puke :D

"That's a great sound mate, wicked good, what do I put into the sound driver to make that?" "... ah fuck!"

@@brorianszk GEMS was actually pretty good, it was one of the few and far between Western sound drivers to support the independent operator mode in the 3rd FM channel. Unfortunately, most GEMS users didn't know how to design their own instruments and just reused the stock presets. But you could actually make your own sounds in it.

There's something out there called the Synthcart. There's also another guy that used two Atari 2600s to make a synth with. However, the Synthcart seems to have canned sounds and nothing like what he made for the Mega Drive

Cyberpunk 2077

hella

Hell(ish) yeah ! Wanna slaughter on dat' shit.

doom genesis demake

Close your eyes and listen. We could be playing shadowrun. Or X-men. Or even pirating a game online from a scene group.

Dozens, even

@@ez45 Definitely some classic Sonic FX and some Kid Chameleon sounds in among that lot for sure.

SPL hahahhahahahhah 😂😂😂

I'd buy it

Lmao and it will go bad within a year or two like most of their stuff does.

LMAO. Truth.

@UnderBridge Rock All the best chefs will tell you "it's not about the ingredients, it's what you do with them"

Haha indeed!!!

thanks very much for the amazing code to get me going on this! i think as far as arduino memory goes i near enough got to the max. its at 75% memory but its still damn impressive how many controls you can squeeze out of that midi controller sketch!!! :D i just need to figure out the poly problem i have, where poly mode sends the cc commands to all 5 of the channels. ill figure it out im sure hahal thanks a lot man!

@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER That's amazing. I haven't seen the code tested to this extent before. Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions.

X-men!

Don't forget Jurassic Park~

explain plz

blue god Wikipedia “switchboard operator”. The dots will connect.

@@monkeyslap check out ANTENES while youre at it

@Brad Viviviyal very interesting you should mention that --- do you know how to do the HOT SLIDE ??? its the new craze.

Lmao

Yessss

Dillinja vibes

Really! We WILL pay for the pots!! A layout like this would make ALL the difference on a hardware FM synth.

If you are into Eurorack, look into the Quad Operator by Humble Audio. Modeled after FM8 in terms of algorithm configuration.

synthark makes a programmer for all the fm synths, i got one for my tx81z, genius bit of kit

Yup, he just created a new market that didn't yet existed yet.

You could hook up a few Novation LaunchControls to a Volca FM...

Took me a minute but he definitely hit on that mojo from the first X-Men game!

Except they shouldn't as most of these don't sound like what you hear in most MD games.

@@bangerbangerbro actually...yeah...it does, to me. It's more of the "feel" and not "exact". Definitely nostalgic, without a doubt. *Source: I was there in the 90's*

@@bangerbangerbro I got to agree with @TerminalVelocity, I was born in the 90s and even get a wouldn't call it nostalgia but anemoia (nostalgia for a time you've never known) for the 80s sounds, probably one thing to explain why I get such powerful feelings from 80s music is because when I was like 9-10, I was at this guys house all the time and he would blast out Soft Cell, Eurythmics, The Human League and all the other Synthwave artists of the time that you can think of and I would really get into it and enjoy the lovely sounds of it all. Instruments like the Yamaha DX7, the Roland TR-808, the Korg M1, the Moog systems, the LinnDrum all sound great to my ears. I even record with such equipment to this day. The original cartridges of the DX7 had presets with names like Tub Erupt and Tub Bell which were commonly used, the DX7 was commonly used for bells and chimes that you hear in the music of artists such as Whitney Houston and the Brass section of that instrument was very popular too.

@@terminalvelocity4858 Right?

This...

Yes!

Sounds awesooommmmeeee

Agreed! I was hoping he actually published it.

7:15 be a good second part to the overall song

What a game!! Haha I had the megadrive 2 and I loved altered beast. I wish I understood stuff like this

@@mrozmodio1 uP

These synths sound wonderful ❤️

"Geography" must have been before the DX7 came out though (?). But yeah FM bass like this gives me the 242 flashback. Wonder if they used lots of presets or if they did DX7 programming...

Michael Valentin you forgot to add “in a SEXY way”.

Dirtiest and most orgasmic synth.

Doot

Except that bones aren't anything like trumpets to begin with.

That Bible chapter is overrated. I prefer the Megadrive.

Look up Jared dines video with the skeleton guitar

You should be at NAMM 2020 in the Anaheim Convention Center (California USA) this week. Now that's some noise! www.namm.org

Part of it is that the YM2612 chip in most of the model 1 mega drives (and some of the model 2s) has a very "dirty" DAC. The output is super crunchy and distorted with lots of extra harmonics that "shouldn't" be there. The later YM3438 chip fixes a lot of this and the output is a lot brighter and sparklier (but it's still not as clean as like an FM softsynth can be). If you try to replicate YM2612 patches on something like Ableton's Operator or even a DX7 you get something much cleaner sounding.

I thought it was "Polivoks" but yeah it is pretty cool. Apparently they used it in some remake of Doom the video game.

Baddass Beast Bro ✔

One question , do you have to plug in and charge your brain ever night? or is it like the DX7 , just replace the battery once every couple of years

Everybody needs a 303, Norman Cook

Its the same problem we have today with many pieces of hardware - why use practical physical buttons, sliders and dials when you can have finicky touch screens and unresponsive voice control? Oh and don't mind the screen being smaller than a postage stamp!

I came here to say the same damn thing: FM synthesis with hands-on control is clearly more interesting.

@@JaceCavacini AGreed i was gonna say this too!

​@Eggy Noggy not quite thats too much of a generalisation , the amiga had clearer sampled sounds and for tracks that relied heavily on lots of samples it had an edge as the megadrive only had one channel that could produce sampled sound (well the psg could if its 3 channels were combined but i'll stick to the YM2612 for now) . It was also relatively more difficult to get clear sample playback on the megadrive , but it could be done by experienced programmers . However where the amiga came up well short vs the megadrive is the sheer amount of channels the megadrive had , often the same track sounds hollow on the amiga as Megadrive = 5 FM + 1 PCM on YM2612 + 4 PSG channels = 10 channels overall vs 4 Channels on the Amiga . Listen to Mega Turrican on both systems and you will see what i mean . Midnight resistance on both systems again the amiga is much poorer . I'm an amiga fan also , but you need to listen to more megadrive music if you think the amiga is better

@Eggy Noggy I owned both also , an Amiga 1200 and a pal megadrive and i think you have the rose coloured glasses on there , there was NO way the amiga competed graphically with the megadrive or snes with any decent programmer on the console ports. It had no business competing with the megadrive with 80 x 16 colour 32 pixel wide Hardware sprites vs 8 x 4 colour 16 pixel wide sprites on Amiga and 2 Tile supported background layers for 2d games on Genesis vs colour stripped planar layers on the amiga that were not tile mapped either. The genesis has 64 colours on screen , whilst the majority of amiga games had 32 colours onscreen (forgetting the rainbow bands the copper would add to that as really they added nothing to the foreground) . There was the blitter chip in the amiga that helped to offset the weak sprite power it had , but that had to bllit to the background so blitted objects had background colours only and often were blitted at half the frame rate due to DMA etc so objects moved at 25hz etc. It was an older machine 1984-1985 design and by 1987-1990 eg by the time the PCengine / megadrive / snes were out it couldn't compete with them graphically . Look at the SF2 port on the amiga and cringe vs any of those consoles. Mega Turrican (Turrican 3 on amiga) is colour stripped / 2nd background lacking / sonically poorer on the Amiga and that had decent programmers on both Machines (Factor 5). Sonically its up for debate and if the purpose is to create real sounds by sampling them then the amiga wins , however the megadrive had plenty of tracks that are eargasmic to this day due to the creativity and unique sound of FM synthesis and its companion PSG chip . Just go and listen to Gauntlet IV soundtrack or Thunderforce IV , Mega Turrican , Vertyex, Master of monsters , Sonic 3 or one of many of the great genesis soundtracks or listen to what modern day composers like savaged regime can do with the megadrive audio capabilities. The amiga was revolutionary in 1984-1985 .. sonically it competed very well long after - to my ears it bests the snes (a sampler type chip so similar fundamentally to amiga) nearly every time but the megadrive sound is different and great in its own right.

Thumbs up for Moroder. He is the best ever.

Ymo did like this to on 1980

Actually, it was "... oh, yeah... oh, nice." :D Adding: And it, indeed, is nice.

this

That's all it is. Druid Beat. Druids call up demons with that 'beat'

Just gonna leave this here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vKmdOk-i6X4.html

Agreed

yes neurofunk

MacBook

MacBook

MacBook

MacBook

Duuuude that game was sick! You just made me want to play it!

Streets of Rage 4 is out if you missed it.

Made me think of X-Men so f'ing hard.

Doesn't sound much like SoR IMO

@@ryanewalters And Streets of Rage Remake is available on your favorite torrent site (due to the fan project getting a C&D letter from a short-sighted Sega in 2011) as well in case you're in the mood for some classic SOR action with all the levels from all 3 games as well as added things from concept art from the time.

Someone doesn't excercise huh?

Yeah... suuuuure that's what your arms tired from.. 😂😭

That's why this is so awesome. It is exactly what FM synthesis needed, a bunch of knobs to turn, not some tiny 2x16 display that shows a parameter at a time that you change with up/down buttons. And finally someone did it. Plus it has the bonus awesome value of an entire game console glued to it. It's beautiful. I might have just taken the chip out of a dead console and stuck it on a breadboard, but having the entire thing work as-is (additive synthesis of hardware!) makes it art. It's good that Sega liked black; a Nintendo up there just wouldn't have been half as awesome.

8bitwiz - Yep, sourcing the chips would've been an easier and viable option (loads of original & similar clones on ebay) but the aesthetics of a retro console slapped on the front of a synth rack makes it look epic. The only (mild) issue I have is that with the level of control on this synth now, it's too easy to 'lose' a sound you might have made, but it's perfect for just fiddling.

I love him but that wasn't a great explanation of fm!

Go check out #Afrotechmods channel. He makes it very easy to understand...

@@annother3350 Yeah, I find that when you fall far enough down the rabbit hole of something this niche', there is eventually a point at which you can no longer explain something about it to a regular person with normal language. I do a lot of non-music related Arduino projects and I definitely struggle to explain the simpler concepts without using technical jargon that probably sounds like nonsense to a regular person!

@@Jpp-iy4km Sure, and of course, it's unscripted!

Cameron Alexander check out Andrew Huang's recent video on modular synthesis- quite informative.

I always have this discussion. The megadrive is true digital audio, where the snes was rekeyed sounds? And whilst impressive at the time, the megadrive is lossless where the snes is lossy. Therefore, IMO, the Megadrive holds up better today. IF I understood it correctly, I may be wrong.

@@Caluma122 more or less you're right, the megadrive literally has a synthesizer plugged into it where as the snes uses compressed sound files. it's like comparing an mpc to a synthesizer. both are wonderful things with many capabilities but without samples an mpc is nothing. where with a synth you can always create raw sound and edit it to your desire. that's at least the analogy i've created for the two

My friend and I had that debate in 1992 while in 7th grade.

@@charlesbonkley *slow clap* I wasn't born till 94 but the Genesis was my first system xD

@@readifer Youngsters! Shoot, I had to walk upstairs both ways just to play my Genesis!

Hmm. Maybe somewhere there's a converter to sega like tune

That reminds me I gotta listen to some Ezio’s Family be right back

jonny moka fucking lmao dude

and then we shall have the NEW sound lmaoooo

a man of culture i see

I think everything Sam makes should come with a Flux Capacitor embedded into its livery.

haolihfaioefh AAAHH YEEAAH

Plssss

Imagine it playing during a run'n'gun stage.

*Dire Dire Docks starts playing*

I've cringed at the Roland D-50 but, to my knowledge, not the DX-7.

Grew up in the 80s with that awful, ubiquitous DX7 electric piano patch literally everywhere. Can confirm.

@@joeday4293 I grew up in the 80s and still have a soft spot for that sound to this day. To each their own, I guess! (though I agree it did get crazy overused)

@@TheBeatfox Heh. I grew up in the 80s cringing at what a crappy substitute it was for a real Rhodes piano sound. I preferred a real Rhodes then, and I prefer it now.

Dude.. that's exactly what I was gonna post. These exact 2 games... Edit: little bit of kid chameleon near the end

Yes, those two. It reminded me straight away of Chaken dying, but I couldn't remember what it else reminded me of. That cyber hall music before going to other levels is definately similar. The X-Men game had no realistic sound effects but I still liked them and that Wolverine freak out sound was something awesome.

Eternal Champions, Batman the Adventure Game, I recalled a lot of cool games

Also a bit of Hellfire.

I was hearing Mutant League Football

Pretty simple really. The sega's just mounted on the knob controller panel for aesthetics. There's two groups of objects here: Human-to-midi, and midi-to-synth. All of the circuits and knobs you see in this video are in the human-to-midi group. Sam just likes making his own "analog 0-100" knob midi parameter controllers (Versus infinite spin digital encoder knobs as found on the beatstep). The arduino microcomputer analog in reads the many knob states into midi effect channel parameters. Then the midi notes from the keyboard has the midi effects applied to the same midi channel, with the midi-merger. The sega's controller port is being used as a serial input. The midi protocol is then being transmitted over that serial input, where the GenMDM cartridge will decode the midi notes and effects, and structure them for play them back on the yamaha sound chip using the decoded midi parameters applied to the FM operator parameters. So there's two fundamental sections: The sega reading arbitrary midi events, and the knob controller + keyboard producing midi events. The arturia beatstep in front of the keyboard can also sequence midi events. Keyboard + beatstep + big knob controller -> Midi (serial) -> Sega Controller (serial mode) -> GenMDM -> Yamaha Synth -> AV out port -> amp -> speakers. Hope that helps you break things down in your head!

for the knobs at the right of the console you have : 4 operators with one line for each operator. each row is a parameter of the operator , you can see the parameters of the envelope of amplitude, with two values of decay (D1 and D2). under the console you have a knob for the selection of the algorithm with several numbers on the right, at the bottom of the synth you have a description of the algorithms, how the operators are interacting each others (modulation of frequency), on the left this is the selection of the voice. There are two knobs for the LFO : speed and amp.

Isn't it just a YM?

@@vecvan Yes, the Genesis uses a YM2612.

@@TotallyGoodatGames AND the Texas Instruments SN76489 circuit built into the custom video chip, mixed with the YM2612. It's often used for percussion samples while the YM is busy with long-wave synthesis. Take a listen to the Chakan: The Forever Man on a proper VGM player plugin versus something YM specific like tfm. Without the TI drums it feels very different. Or Kid Chameleon's tribal beat in some levels. My other favorite is the YM2149F from the Atari ST, little older than the YM2612, but driven by the same MC68000P8.

“a punk rock bank” I like that concept. 😎

Thunder Force IV, MUSHA, Mega Turrican, Vectorman, Comix Zone, Kid Chameleon, Ecco The Dolphin, Sub Terrania, Red Zone, The Ooze, Xmen 2, Streets of Rage 2, ToeJam and Earl, the list goes on!

Contra Hard Corps is amazing

i dont think they were "going for a 90's feel" the megadrive was literally made in the 90's so it just was like that.

@Nighthawk but it kinda did start the 90s console war when you think about it. Nintendo had to answer Sega with the SNES. So Sega was the cool trendsetter and Nintendo was the kid ripping off their work. Go figure. XD