This 1990 NES Soundtrack Just BLEW Me Away 

TIM IT WAS JUST PICTIONARY

something I’ve noticed about Tim Follins songs is that they all start with “hehe im a little nes song :)” and then play a couple things you Didn’t Think The NES Could Do and then becomes a full-on modern chiptune track

Well... When a jazz musicians says "it's hard to transcribe that" we all should be starting panicking.

I’m so happy that Tim Follin is finally getting the recognition he deserves after all these years.

I redid the Solstice theme with guitars like 15 years ago! Omg what fun that was to work out...I actually had a brief talk with Tim when he came across it shortly after I put it up and he was talking about how my version was actually faster than intended due to US using 60hz power vs 50hz used in UK where he composed all these masterpieces. He also mentioned some of the coding tricks he would do involving phase and weird PWM stuff to literally make sounds those chips were never intended to do. What an absolute genius!

This is a man who realized there is no separation between "real music" and "videogame music" this man was just making music

I love when NES music gets appreciation like. People often relegate early video game music to "bleeps and bloops," as if vgm had no value until the technology developed further, but there are so many amazing crafted melodies and tracks in these early games. It still blows me away what these unsung hero composers managed to accomplish in this era with such constraints. They deserve way more recognition.

Ahhhh, seeing someone’s reaction to a Tim Follin composition is so gratifying! I appreciated the analysis of Solstice because it’s like hearing it with fresh ears 😊

Tim Follin and Software Creations is responsible for a huge amount of the technical depth of NES music. They worked with CAPCOM, they worked with Sunsoft, they worked a bit with Konami, everyone learned from their greatness.

That's Tim Follin for ya. Absolutely insane music design

Thank you for bringing more attention to this legendary composer!

Tim is one of my all time favorite video game composers. As a kid I had “silver surfer” for the nes and that soundtrack is branded into my brain from all the hours spent trying to beat it. It’s a masterpiece. Thank you for making this video!

So, so surreal to find this - recommended because I've been watching Charles for years, such a great, great channel. Btw it's me Tim F. Pretty sure I don't deserve a whole video Charles but thank you so much for this, it's a massive compliment coming from you!

NES Pictionary music director: "OK Mr. Follin, we need you to compose a theme for the NES Pictionary game's title screen... nothing too crazy or anything." Tim Follin, levitating 14 feet above the ground as smoke and flames begin to billow up epically behind him: "Got chu."

I haven't even watched the video yet but I feel confident saying nothing makes me happier than watching Charles Cornell talk about Tim Follin, because Tim and Geoff Follin are both incredible

A true northerner(UK). His Amiga stuff is brutal. The beginning of Led Storm Is one of the most amazing introductions ever.

Tim and Geoff Follin's music is such a fun rabbithole to look into. Time Trax, Rock and Roll Racing, Spider-Man and X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, Plok, Silver Surfer, the list goes on...

For anyone who doesn't know, he made absolutely absurdly impressive stuff using the single-channel, single-bit *buzzer* on the ZX Spectrum. Check out his work on Agent X, for example. Tim's wizardry on full display.

F-Zero had stellar music in that game on the NES, every time I hear it I'm instantly back in the 90's.

Fun fact: there is actually a sample channel on the NES sound chip. Usually it was utilized for percussion from what I've noticed (such as the percussion in many of the themes in SMB3)

The theme to Solstice is amazing. I didn't think NES music could be that complex before hearing it.

A few things about NES sound: The first four of the five sound channels are pretty much fixed tones: The first two are PWM wave channels, the third is a triangle wave, and the fourth is a noise channel. The fifth channel is actually a PCM sample channel, so some games do actually used sampled sounds, such as bongos in SMB3.

This is my first video of yours and I loved that you broke down the Solstice intro. I literally hooked my NES to a home console CD burner so I could listen to this song in my car (through a discman and tape adapter no less) in the 90s

8-bit big band needs to adapt some of these ASAP. I would LOVE to hear Solstice with a full big band🤯

Limitations demand creativity, and the NES music chip brought out some of the best and most creative conpositions.

Commodore 64 music absolutely deserves a look. Three sound channels and that was it, but my god the level of genius on display is mind twisting.

I love every time a new person discovers the wonder of Tim Follin.

Tim Follin is a damn legend. I don't think anyone made the NES sing quite like he did.

Please for the love of god, take a listen to Plok. Even though it’s SNES, The main theme sounds like real instruments, it’s genuinely insane.

i definitely recommend looking at Plok's soundtrack, also made by Tim Follin! it's one of the best soundtracks for the snes

Tim and geoff are legends. The 3rd follin brother, mike, is now an ordained priest and geoff is now a teacher btw.

I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS JUST HAPPENED. I was listening Time Trax OST on an external player, no search on google no search on my phone NOTHING. I searched for some more info of Tim on my work computer, out of my accounts etc... I just went to youtube for another thing, and saw this video, the caption, I just thought about Tim and I was like "Ok, but whatever this man says I will comment something about Tim Follin.... WOW!! Time Trax is one of best OST I've ever heard from the Mega Drive chips, and it's the same as here, the sound, the composing, the tempos, the chills, the excellent and top quality... CRAZY. THANK YOU TIM FALLIN! This inspired me from the first moment I got hooked with your tunes

One of my favorite things about people is when you tell them they can't do something, they turn around and say, yes I can, and then actually do it. Limitations breed creativity.

Holy shit how have I never heard of this composer. This is pure fire. I had no idea these NES games existed until now. Wow. Just wow.

The other thing that people dont realize that impresses the fuck out of me, is that these old ass games use whats called "Trackers" to program the music, which means, you have to INPUT EVERY NOTE, BY TYPING IT UP, BY FUCKING HAND, to come up with this shit, truly incredible

I was thinking "Well he should hear Tim Folin's stuff... Solstice man..." And then well, the big reveal... 😆 I listened to the start screen music of Solstice more than I played the actual game. 🤔

when you're thinking "Ian Anderson would be proud, all this needs is a flute solo" and then the flute solo comes in...

So glad to see Tim Follin getting more love on the internet! He has something of a disciple, though, too, whose work is every bit his equal -- another self-trained chiptune composer who was inspired by Tim and wound up composing for largely licensed Game Boy games over the years. His name is Alberto Jose Gonzalez, though he sometimes is also credited as Joe McAlby. I absolutely recommend looking up his soundtracks sometime -- particularly the main theme "Metal Beat" from Metal Masters on Game Boy, "Another World" from Smurfs Nightmare (yes, really) on Game Boy, and pretty much anything from the Game Boy Turok games (Turok 2's soundtrack is just amazing across the board, though Gonzalez did the soundtracks to them all and gave each one a bit of a distinct vibe, so you can't go wrong with any of them). Alberto Jose Gonzalez is like the undiscovered successor to Tim Follin, and I'm hoping that as time goes on, people will start to realize just how amazing his music is as well! And with your absolute enthusiasm for the subject, I have a feeling you may be just the man to spread the word. ;)

I used a lot of Tim Follin on my undergraduate radio show. Was always geeking out over how technically insane his music was. Great to see him on here!

RIP. Geoff Follin. :(

Finally, Charles talking about the GOAT, the legendary composer *Tim Follin,* Tim's compositions are 🔥af. You should also check his work on the game Plok! 😁

Glad you're discovering the joys of chiptune music. A lot of it is quite complex compositionally. By the way, chiptune music for these systems exists outside of the context of old games. Look into the demoscene, which is a whole other monster.

I love how you truly enjoy these tracks. So much passion! It makes me want to rewatch it for two reasons: to listen to those tunes and look at how you react to them. :)

Man, I grew up with Solstice. That menu song hit so hard! Talk about a SMACK of nostalgia.

I dabbled in 8 bit music when I was kid on my Commodore 64. The SID chip had 3 voices, so to make any kind of more complex music, there were several tricks: first of course is the rapid fire arpeggiation (hallmark 8 bit sound) allowing you to create a harmonic structure with one voice. The next is to use 1 voice for dual purposes, rapidly switching the waveform, pitch, and ADSR. So you could have a voice playing the bassline and switching every 2 beats to white noise+filter snare, another doing the arpeggiation and kick, and the third doing the solo instrument and cymbals (white noise, quick attack, long release). Fortunately there were a series of nice music editors that made all of the above a lot easier. Some of the greats in the SID world were Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, and Martin Galway to name a few.

his soundtrack for Plok deserves its own 10 part video series

Holy cow, these are SO impressive! I've heard them before either playing these games myself or watching reviews on them, etc. But now I can REALLY appreciate these amazing soundtracks in a whole new way! The absolute creativity in these is so amazing! It definitely supports the whole: limitations breed inovation idea!

Charles I'm so happy you introducing people to this amazing, but fairly unknown part of the music culture as video game music, and Follin brothers in particular. Thanks man ! You doing an amazing job ! Video game music has so much good tunes and talented composers that SHOULD BE KNOWN !!! Thanks again buddy ! HOORAY !

no, the intention of the arpeggios with the tremolo is to create the illusion of chords! that technique is used in modern chiptune as well!

oh god yeah that solstice intro is INCREDIBLE. god i love to hear arpeggios like those ones at the intro. so so sick

TIM FOLIN!! Thank You! You can do a WHOLE SERIES on his music!

heard a lot of Tim's work on this that i had never heard before. thanks for sharing!!

fun fact, the Treasure Master song is just a cover of the theme song for a TV show called "Starsky and Hutch" and one of Tim's last projects he did was the soundtrack to the PS2 game of Starsky and Hutch! also please be sure in the next video to give credit to Tim's brother Geoff Follin, he pulled allot of weight as well!

One of the major reasons why NES music was so limited and why the songs are usually very short loops is because of memory limitations. Not only is it a banger composition, that Solstice theme song is extremely impressive for how long and complex it is!

It's nice to know who composed those master pieces. My first exposure to Tim's music was through Silver Surfer on NES. Tim's music is fascinating but it appears there's talent everywhere, your ability to play by ear is just as amazing. :)

The phrase “this didn’t have to go this hard” can now be retired, since nothing will ever deserve it as much as this soundtrack.

so glad you discovered this OST! Tim Follin one of the very best. So stoked that they did a limit run vinyl pressing

Man, seeing this made my day. I've been enjoying your videos for a while now, and the comments you were reacting to are from my upload of the Pictionary soundtrack (on my old channel explod2A03)! Seeing you get a laugh out of the comments that flooded my inbox all those years ago was incredible. Where do I begin with Tim Follin? His music is incredible and his mastery of limited sound hardware was incredibly impressive. Another great moment from the Treasure Master soundtrack can be found in the "Microchip" levels, it features two different sections that cross-fade, fading into a newer section that's in a different time signature. It's incredibly jarring and weird, and I literally cannot name a single other NES/ Famicom tune that attempted a similar kind of cross-fade within a single track. It's almost certainly the only time that's happened, most sound engines for NES games probably weren't designed to even handle something like that. And as a drummer, the beat that it transitions to is incredibly sick and entertaining to me as well. I love how the intro to Solstice starts so basic and then erupts with a colorful explosion of sounds. It's almost mocking your expectations, making you think it's going to sound really simple at first. The BGM theme does neat stuff with the noise channel too, where it mimics a triangle (the percussion instrument, not the waveform). Noise is what usually makes your typical drum/ percussion sounds on the NES (though they can be made by other things too), like short snippets of static on an old CRT. However, you can't really make something that sounds like a triangle out of that, right? So to do that he switches to a much lesser-used "periodic noise" setting for the noise channel, which can get "scratchier" and pitchier sounds out of it. The Mega Man 6 intro also used this method to attempt a triangle or something like that, but it was an otherwise incredibly rare sound design technique that almost no one else ever did. Something else worth gushing about in the sound design is how beefy the drums sound. There's a low end to them that you can't get out of just using the noise channel; He doubles up bass drum and snare hits with the triangle channel. But the triangle channel is mostly used for basslines, so how can you have drum sounds and basslines in a single channel at the same time? Well, just have the drums interrupt the bassline! Let's say you have both a kick drum and a note that are both supposed to hit on the downbeat of a measure. They can't actually play at the same time, so it'll attack with a downwards pitch bend for the kick drum sound, and then snap back to and sustain on whatever normal note is actually supposed to be played. This means a lot of the basslines are slightly behind in time in a way, but it's very quick and works pretty seamlessly to our ears. But if you isolate the sound channel and slow it down, it sounds INCREDIBLY jank. It's really neat. I could gush on and on about Tim Follin and video game music in general. I've been enjoying all of your non-VG-related music reactions and breakdowns as well, but seeing these two worlds collide has been great. If you ever have any questions about particular sound design tricks in retro games please reach out, and I would be more than happy to dump all the weirdly impressive and lesser-known retro VGM I can think of on you if you're ever looking for more. :)

So happy to see Tim's music coming back. I played Solstice for the first time in 2013-14(?), that opening track changed my life!

Wow. Im huge fan of retro game music and this pictonary one is a banger! I just found this channel, and I've got a huge smile because I've always been so awed by the composers and how it was completely new territory to have to compose within the limitations.

Tim Follin is the GOAT of NES music. I clearly remember the first time I started Solstice as a child on a Christmas morning. I was so blown away by the title music that I stayed there listening to the whole thing twice before even starting the game. Not only was the music crazy good but I also had never heard such convincing drums and bass sounds coming out of this hardware. It was wizardry which was very fitting Solstice's theme. It's still an all time favorite of mine all those years later and is ingrained into my memory forever!

This, and Rob Hubbard (Who made the _"Monty On The Run"_ theme), absolute legends whose work is severely underrated!

Tim Follins was a mad man, in the best way possible. Also, I very much enjoyed your reactions to his incredible jams~ You earned a follower! :)

So glad you talked about Solstice! I was thinking about this exact game when I saw your video pop up in my feed.

So glad to see you highlight Solstice! I enjoyed everything about that game growing up. Reading the little story in the manual (which doesn't really get conveyed in game), exploring the castlegrounds, the atmosphere, and of course, the music. There were days in high school when I would turn on the NES just to listen to that title theme before going to school. Definitely got some notes on this: It was common to use the sample (5th) channel for punchier percussion rather than just the noise channel (unless you're Sunsoft), but Tim never used it at all. He figured out how to add punch with the triangle channel while still maintaining the bassline on that same channel. The bass very briefly drops out on each "snare" and "kick" hit and comes back in, but when you hear it together, you can't tell. Tim was programming this stuff as numbers, thinking only about the intervals and harmonies individually. This allowed him to think more chromatically than he would have done using anything resembling an instrument. He has commented that Solstice should actually be heard at the slower PAL speed. That Treasure Master theme is loosely the Starsky and Hutch theme. And what was one of the last games he worked on before changing careers? Starsky and Hutch. I'm excited for you to dig into his earlier stuff, which is technically absurd and musically awesome, but don't sleep on his later stuff. Plok, Equinox, Gauntlet III, and the gorgeous Dreamcast Ecco the Dolphin game all have incredible music.

Solstice sounds like an 8-bit Yes track, and Treasure Master could easily be a Jethro Tull track. The prog rock influence here is palpable. Incredible. EDIT: WOW. I just did about 30 seconds of digging, and sure enough, Follin credits Yes and Jethro Tull as his two biggest musical inspirations. He captured their sound beautifully!

So excited for you to do more Tim follin! Has to be my favorite videogame composer of all time.

The first Tim Follin tune that blew me away was the one for _Bionic Commando_ on the C=64, back in 1988! Well… maybe not that one track that was just rhythmic but intentionally dissonant clanging and shooting - but the actual _music_ tracks… man! I'm listening to it again right now.

We gotta talk about Plok sometime. The boss theme alone is legendary.

can’t wait until you drop a video about the 1-bit ZX Spectrum music work he did. Absolutely incredible

Tim Follins' Agent X music was epic! Remember my mind being blown when I heard it back in the day. 5 channel music on a beeper.

Bach:"Hold my NES beep thingy!"😅😅😅

The Follin Bros always tear it up! Plok!’s “Akryllic” is one of my favorite songs of all time. Such a gorgeous composition!

Tim worked a lot on the Speccy and the C64 before the NES, and they both had 3-voice sound chips (the SID was awesome, but still just 3 voices). What people learned working with those chips was to arpeggiate the crap out of everything. You can't do much with straightforward chords, you'd be using your entire sound capability just to play a triad. But you can outline a chord on a single voice while another one gets the melody and a third maybe splits its time between countermelody and percussion. Works especially well if you use the chip's sequencer-like capability to alternate between notes at inhuman speeds.

As someone who grew up with this kind of music and has been making it for thirty years now, this was a great watch! The term most commonly used for the technique you describe is "arpeggio" rather than "tremolo", but I can see where tremolo is coming from. Tim is a genius indeed! Not least because like most early video game musicians (at least the ones here in Europe) he had to invent and program all the software techniques himself; there weren't any readily available tools to make this kind of music until later.

One thing that has always surprised me from mr Follins' tracks, apart from the complex compositions, is the drum lines. They sound so solid... it almost feels like it was sampled... in a chip that had no such functions. Is always a nice treat to hear some good Tim Follins tracks.

I had that solstice theme as my alarm for some time, it starts off calm to give me a chance to wake up / get up by myself. And if I try to ignore it, it goes nuts and amps all the way up, gets me pumped and hyped for the day.

so the NES is using 2 square waves, a triangle wave, and a noise channel (plus the optional sample channel). i’d say he was pretty talented to get all the sounds he did out of it. a modern NES composer i like is FearofDark - you should definitely check his stuff out!

Love that more and more people are discovering Tim's incredible music. He's an eternal legend in early video game music. The things he could accomplish on such simple hardware is just nuts. He's created crazy songs on things even more limited that the NES!

Your videos are always so entertaining.

Wow, I haven't thought about Solstice in YEARS! That was one my favorite NES games as a kid back in the day. Of course at the time I didn't even realize the music was INSANE lol

Fun fact, the tremello effect you're pointing out is actually shifting the pulse channel width back and forth like an arpeggio. So the overall frequency stays the same, but the square wave shape changes quickly. It's the classic 'chiptune' sound. Love that you are showing off this sick music 👍

Man discovers chiptunes. YES THAT TREMELO THING IS SPECIFICALLY TO FIT A CHORD IN ONE VOICE. Video game music is an insane crossover of prog rock, dance music, and general electronic music. BTW i love your videos. Keep up the good work.

Speaking of hardware limitations , the guy that made the donkey kong Snes music was crazy

Charles. This is one of my favorite chiptune composers, you've done him great justice. I'm so happy you covered him, I feel like he's a bit on the obscure side considering none of his games were true hits. Of note, the Maniac Mansion soundtrack is quite amazing on NES. Of course the best music in video game history (in my opinion) is PlayStation era Final Fantasy. Cheers my dude, thanks for making my childhood smile

One of my favourite tricks of his is to have the bassline and drum kicks on the same channel (the NES' incredibly stairsteppy triangle wave) and it's completely unnoticeable

video game music from that time was out of this world. I still find links between new songs that I instantly love and the parallels I can draw with C64 music, which is what we had as kids (I actually still have it). Haven't heard these beauties before but Solstice is going on the list! Awesome work Tim Follins!

The song at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="470">7:50</a> sounds like something from 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' by Yes. *it is 'The Remebering', the second track on that album.

Wow. I didn't know about Tim Follin or Pictionary, but the Solstice theme is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. It's nuts.

It's always so nice to discover people doing WAY more than they need to do (in any discipline, not just music) to get the job done. It's also nice when people with the technical knowledge like yourself to show it. Thank you, Charles.

Man it's great to see such excitement from someone discovering Tim Follin's music, especially someone like Charles who can dissasemble and truly appreciate the work involved. I can't wait until Charles discovers the mighty Jochen Hippel and his work with the Amiga. :D

This last few weeks I have seen three videos of people discovering this music I have been loving for years! It's been great!

I think I remember a friend that worked for Nintendo America saying that Tim had a few keyboards that had that sound chip in them in his studio to play with the sounds the chips were capable of. Each keyboard had to be programmed with an available sound, recorded to a standard mixer used by recording studios in order to layer the sound. If something wasn't quite right, he would have to figure out which of the four tracks to change and how to do it. The combination of musical and programming talent that goes into making four tracks sound like sixteen or more is astounding. You have to know how to make the sounds resonate so that they multiply by adding just the right offset and delay. Then be able to program those parameters into the keyboard BEFORE playing the music. The right sound on two keyboards with just the right tweak can amplify and multiply that sound exponentially. Which also means knowing the maths behind the whole thing. I am in awe of all those videogame music programmers, and Tim rises above the rest of them with VERY few that one could call peers.

You seriously should do a video on SNES f-zero soundtrack if you haven’t already. They hired an actual jazz composer, recorded an album, and then did their best to emulate the sound in 16-bit. Nailed it in a lot of ways too. One of the best rabbit holes I ever explored.

I could immediately tell that was a Tim or Geoff track. The Follin brothers are legendary. Tim was also behind the amazing horror game At Dead of Night!

It's so cool to see Tim Follin songs covered on this channel. Should you ever go back to his stuff, to visualise the insanity that is ADSR on old sound chips, you could, show a sine wave as the basic timbre (or tone?) and also show how different wave forms change that tone. You could show a wave shape's effect on certain different musical instruments and compare it to what a sine wave or a tim follin instrument would be like right next to that. There's tons of content that already displays Tim's music and how it would look on an oscilloscope, which could be a great starting point for showing how limited consoles really were back then. Anyways, great video!

That Solstice theme is BEAUTIFUL! It reminds me of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis soundtrack in how it changes although the Fate of Atlantis soundtrack is actually dynamic and changes and crossfades as the game progresses. You may actually want to have a look at that game soundtrack, some nice interpolations on Indy theme and original compositions.

Can’t wait for this guy to find out about Super Castlevania IV…

Oooo someone new found the Follin Bros Musical Rabbit Hole, Nice Welcome to the Club my dude enjoy your Epic Over the Top Bombastic Music!

I've been waiting for this composer to make an appearance on your channel, especially knowing how much Charles loves prog. Shout out to his brother Geoff Follin too.