hvb

someone somewhere else's something

chiptunes

glitchscapes

video game music

digital fusion


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it's time for your daily dose of SONG! one tracker or DAW video of one of my songs per day, complete with cohost(tm) exclusive commentary about the making of the song. we're nearing the end of the Elemental Harmony songs now... wonder what might be next πŸ‘€

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

today's song is: Sylphids & Gnomids, for the NES's 2A03 chip

this was the very first Elemental Harmony song to come into existence! for the album version though, i added a whole extra section with DPCM-converted piano solo (@1:17) - previously there was no DPCM at all. bits and pieces of the recording are peppered into the rest of the song too, all glitchlike. if you didn't know already, one of my favorite things to do with these old formats is to incorporate lots of complex sampling... so then it follows that DPCM is obviously my favorite channel :D the retriggers, the offsets, the janky repitching.. oh what a delight!

there's a little slice of the melody in this one that owes some credit to the ending theme from the PS2 game Dark Cloud 2. if you know that soundtrack you might recognize it! it goes in a different direction but i realized while i was writing it that a couple bars are quite similar. that's really what the melody wanted to do though, so i leaned into it and let it happen.

i really like the piano solo section with the driving triangle kick and offbeat rhythm. even though i wrote that part later i feel like it's the contrasting payoff to the busier, more cerebral main part. also, since this was pretty early famitracker damitracker for me, i think this might've been one of the first songs where i felt like i was getting a handle on the NES triangle channel. very versatile despite having virtually no volume control!


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in reply to @hvb's post:

heya, thanks! DPCM itself is just a really compressed audio format, not necessarily inherent to trackers, but used in some old soundchips. instead of a stream of tiny, discrete data points that make up a whole audio file (PCM, which is what we usually use), the data points consist of evenly-spaced offset values relative to whatever the previous value was. the NES's soundchip has one channel dedicated to DPCM sample playback, which has a very characteristic crunch and a bit of a high hissing sound to it, due to its low, compressed quality. on the NES specifically, the samples individually can be about a second long, but in this song a bunch of them are strung together in a (mostly) smooth fashion.

a similar form of compression also utilized on a bunch of old soundchips is ADPCM, which is like DPCM except the data points don't have to be evenly spaced out. if you're more into math than me, you can read in depth about 'em on wikipedia :p