NEW! song! a PC-98 chiptune freshly premiered at the @infloresce event unless you are a very studious listener of newly submitted BotB Winter Chip tunes this year.
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today's song is: Memory Flash, for YM2608 (PC-98)
a while back i teased that i had come up with a cool idea for a new PC-98 song that i was really excited about! and this is it! i didn't start punching down notes into the tracker for a long time after saying that, but the idea marinated the whole time and repeatedly showed up when i would sit down to play the piano, so in sort of an inevitable way it percolated for a while. i just knew it was going to turn out well; it was one of those ideas that felt especially personal somehow. you know how it is, maybe, hopefully, probably.
the initial piano sketch covered about the first half of the song, more or less; just a basic outline of the chords and melodies, which already undergo some development. the rest i figured i would weather while i tracked, and this turned out to be a good strategy. there's a lot that happens in the 2nd half of the song that i didn't exactly plan for, but i knew more development would be possible off the ideas i'd already come up with. you'll hear some different takes on the main melodic riff throughout.
like i did with Mitosis, i spent quite a while tweaking the instruments to have lots of glitchy FM macros (automation) and some panning tricks. most of the patches themselves originally came from PC-98 games in both cases; i've still not completely gone through the "big rip of all patches from PC-98 games" but i'd say i'm maybe 3/4ths through it and saved a few hundred that i thought were cool/unique/useful to me with semi-helpful names. (whenever i finish that, i'd like to release them as a pack, though their usefulness is i suppose subjective, heheh) i also recorded the samples on my new seaboard! i did this before even choosing FM instruments, and like with Mitosis (where i recorded similarly w/ the lumi keys) i just tried to record a varied set of potentially useful sounds; some intervals, some arpeggios, and a couple melodic bits. i ended up using them all throughout the song!
overall i'd say i was going for a "glitchy post-rock" vibe with this, which might be part of why i felt so excited - when i have ideas for songs like that, they are pretty consistently some of my favorite works of mine, so i guess maybe that's one of my core important sonic signatures. sentimental but also cerebral; big and sprawling but also curled up on a couch next to you. something like that.
