hvb

someone somewhere else's something

chiptunes

glitchscapes

video game music

digital fusion


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it's that time again... a new ~Daily Song Post~! i didn't mean to wait this long to write more of these, but here we are. if this is your first time seeing these, i share a playback video of one of my songs and write about it here on this Website - how it was made, what i think about it, and whatever else comes to mind. questions and comments are very welcome : )

today's is actually a 4-parter from my new SNES chiptune album - the song that's split into four movements. the youtube embeds are quite large, so i apologize for how bloated this post will inevitably look πŸ˜… i'll try to keep the writeup brief though!

<-- the previous day's song | the next day's song -->

today's song is: what slips through the cracks, part I-IV, for the SNES's soundchip SPC700

[part I - connecting threads]

[part II - ice shelf]

[part III - idle time]

[part IV - golden stardust]

this song came about in two ways, or perhaps two simultaneous directions. the first was the main theme/motif, which is stated clearly at the beginning of both parts I & II and developed extensively in those movements especially. i recorded a bunch of samples supporting that idea on my roli seaboard, and ended up having so much to work with that i split it into several movements. you only get a maximum of ~62KB of sample storage per song, and most of the time it's a lot less because the echo delay effect takes up space too...

the second way was that my friend @great made a fork of C700 (the VST used to make these) which added an extra piece of MIDI functionality. many of the parameters of the SNES soundchip have a range of values from -127 to 127, with the negatives phase-inverting the sound. however, the way to automate them here is via MIDI CCs, which only have a range of 0 to 127, so he added a toggle to switch the value to negative. it behaved strangely in FL however; the +/- sign would get rapidly swapped over and over again. it produced a glitchy sound. i loved it. i took full advantage of it in this piece, and it wouldn't have been possible without his work.

out of all the songs on Distant Islands, this piece most clearly exemplifies my attempt, my mission even, to address the question "just how fucked up can you make a SNES sound, anyway". as a result, i am The Most Proud of how this part of the album turned out! one of the other prominent glitchy effects comes from automating the echo delay time (i.e. how long between echoes), which causes very gnarly, unstable stutters and can even recall past completed delay bounces. the other really wacky thing i did here was utilize a weird plugin designed for FL Studio named "BENDY", which attempts to replicate an FL 1st-party plugin feature: "slide notes" that can control pitch bend, note volume, panning and more. it... doesn't do a very good job, and comes with its own glitchiness. however, i noticed that the glitchiness gets recorded by C700 when it renders SNES ROMs, so i decided to take advantage of that, too. >:) in particular, the noise textures in part II come from feeding garbage MIDI data to C700 through BENDY (as well as C700 itself being memory overloaded).

movements I and II were both explorations of the same motif from different angles - in the first, the theme is stated in samples of whole phrases as single entities & manipulated that way, while in the second, it's more traditionally written using a sinewave synth over the top of whole phrases of chords. movement IV, similarly ambient, was actually written before III, and is what made me realize i wanted a movement that had greater rhythmic focus. so part III was inspired by the likes of steve reich and giant claw - dense clusters repeated rhythmically. though the original theme is woven into these two as well, they have their own separate motif that gets played around with (stated most clearly at the beginning of IV).

as a fun unrelated fact, my PC crashed as i was proofreading this the first time; so this is my second shot at writing all this. hope you enjoyed reading and especially listening!!


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