[VGM] (Original) Hoberman Sphere (Stage 1)

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For lack of better ideas I did a little remake of a track I made a while ago for the first stage of a student-project shoot 'em up by the name of "Hoberman Sphere", trying to apply what I've learned since. If the piece might seem a little stale composition-wise, just imagine how the original was. I also tried to give it a chiptune style. I got my start with FamiTracker and making music for the NES' 2A03 soundchip, so I wanted it to reflect the compositional techniques of that style of music. If you're well acquainted with the NES style you will likely: (1) wonder about the lack of creative instrumentation. It's a result of technical stuff. I know duty-cycling, vibrato, arpeggiating, pitch-bending, all the fancy terms, but couldn't quite apply them in an accurate manner. I've written a little more about the hows and whys of that and my experience with Nescaline (the NES soundchip emulator thing) below, so if you're interested... And (2) realize it isn't very faithful to the original hardware. Yes, that's true, I wanted to put style over technical accuracy. After all, if I was going for that, I would have just used FamiTracker.

On SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-165088756/h ... al_sharing

So I had a couple of gripes with Nescaline: I really wanted to try it out, since I have quite fond memories of making music with FamiTracker. Chiptunes used to be the main thing I did, long before I even became aware of LMMS' existance. So even though it had been a while I was sure that years of experience would make this return to the 2A03 an easy one. Well, Nescaline taught me otherwise. Recently I've seen some people complain about the authenticity of some synth emulation plugins, while I for the life of me couldn't hear any difference to the original. I think I've now had the NES equivalent to that experience. As I said, I worked with FamiTracker for at least a decade and as a result one becomes quite acquainted with the way the 2A03 sounds. It doesn't quite sound like this. But it is an emulation after all and it does its job (for which I found no documentation whatsoever anywhere by the way, if anyone knows what Nescaline is and where it came from please let me know).

Besides authentic sound, much like the real 2A03, it's a beast to be wrestled with when you want it to sound good, but in this case especially. I don't think it's really usable without some equalization, at the very least something to chop of these higher frequencies. Once that's done it does a pretty good job though. The square wave channels are pretty good in general, but ever so slightly out of tune the higher the pitch. This is not really accurate to the real thing, which gets very unpleasent very quickly as well, but stays in tune almost to a fault. The triangle-wave channel also sounds quite different in the higher registers - it's a little more messy. I'm not so sure about the Noise channel, it feels a bit too sharp.

Still it's nothing that can't be fixed (and some parts of it might not even be all that noticable to most listeners) and overall I quite enjoyed my return the 2A03. Now I'm actually thinking about maybe writing a tutorial on how to replicate the NES sound with Nescaline - and in LMMS in general, as the DPCM sampling channel isn't even included in Nescaline, though I don't know how much interest there might be in such a thing.
Mampfwurm wrote:
Sun May 15, 2022 2:45 pm
For lack of better ideas I did a little remake of a track I made a while ago for the first stage of a student-project shoot 'em up by the name of "Hoberman Sphere", trying to apply what I've learned since. If the piece might seem a little stale composition-wise, just imagine how the original was. I also tried to give it a chiptune style. I got my start with FamiTracker and making music for the NES' 2A03 soundchip, so I wanted it to reflect the compositional techniques of that style of music. If you're well acquainted with the NES style you will likely: (1) wonder about the lack of creative instrumentation. It's a result of technical stuff. I know duty-cycling, vibrato, arpeggiating, pitch-bending, all the fancy terms, but couldn't quite apply them in an accurate manner. I've written a little more about the hows and whys of that and my experience with Nescaline (the NES soundchip emulator thing) below, so if you're interested... And (2) realize it isn't very faithful to the original hardware. Yes, that's true, I wanted to put style over technical accuracy. After all, if I was going for that, I would have just used FamiTracker.

On SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-165088756/h ... al_sharing

So I had a couple of gripes with Nescaline: I really wanted to try it out, since I have quite fond memories of making music with FamiTracker. Chiptunes used to be the main thing I did, long before I even became aware of LMMS' existance. So even though it had been a while I was sure that years of experience would make this return to the 2A03 an easy one. Well, Nescaline taught me otherwise. Recently I've seen some people complain about the authenticity of some synth emulation plugins, while I for the life of me couldn't hear any difference to the original. I think I've now had the NES equivalent to that experience. As I said, I worked with FamiTracker for at least a decade and as a result one becomes quite acquainted with the way the 2A03 sounds. It doesn't quite sound like this. But it is an emulation after all and it does its job (for which I found no documentation whatsoever anywhere by the way, if anyone knows what Nescaline is and where it came from please let me know).

Besides authentic sound, much like the real 2A03, it's a beast to be wrestled with when you want it to sound good, but in this case especially. I don't think it's really usable without some equalization, at the very least something to chop of these higher frequencies. Once that's done it does a pretty good job though. The square wave channels are pretty good in general, but ever so slightly out of tune the higher the pitch. This is not really accurate to the real thing, which gets very unpleasent very quickly as well, but stays in tune almost to a fault. The triangle-wave channel also sounds quite different in the higher registers - it's a little more messy. I'm not so sure about the Noise channel, it feels a bit too sharp.

Still it's nothing that can't be fixed (and some parts of it might not even be all that noticable to most listeners) and overall I quite enjoyed my return the 2A03. Now I'm actually thinking about maybe writing a tutorial on how to replicate the NES sound with Nescaline - and in LMMS in general, as the DPCM sampling channel isn't even included in Nescaline, though I don't know how much interest there might be in such a thing.
Hi Mampfwurm,

Very nice 8 bit like track. The melody is very good and it's very well mixed. My only suggestion is that the snare is in conflict in some part of the track with the lead on climax parts. You can try to slightly decrease the lead volume and also play with EQ's by applying notch filters in the conflict area. Or applying a filter on low frequencies on the lead when the snare hits to keep it more punchy (usually around 250Hz). Otherwise it's a very good job.

Cheers,
RD
Reiodust wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 10:46 pm
Very nice 8 bit like track. The melody is very good and it's very well mixed.
Well - thanks! It's not quite 8-bit though, considering the drum samples I used. But it's not very accurate to begin with in terms of the number of voices etc., etc. Whatever, it's the 8-bit sound I was after. I'm not so sure about my mixing, but thanks for your feedback. I do have a mixer set up and it does stuff, which is a start (and slightly more than I can say about some of my previous works).
Reiodust wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 10:46 pm
My only suggestion is that the snare is in conflict in some part of the track with the lead on climax parts. You can try to slightly decrease the lead volume and also play with EQ's by applying notch filters in the conflict area. Or applying a filter on low frequencies on the lead when the snare hits to keep it more punchy (usually around 250Hz). Otherwise it's a very good job.
Thanks for such detailled feedback and recommendations! Listening back to it now I totally get what you mean by that. I think were I to try something like this again I would generally try to do more with compressors - or at least use a compressor.