i missed yesterday's song post OOPS, however i will now post about it! it's actually a ~premiere~! wow
<-- the previous day's song | the next day's song -->
today's song is: the moon is made of water, for the SNES's soundchip SPC700
i wrote this one for Super Famicompo 4, which just wrapped up! so this is a never-before-heard cool SNES song... i spent quite a while on it. it is delightfully complex. the samples are home-grown and i did even more playing around with echo and volume automation than usual! how much can this chip handle? quite a lot, apparently!
first off, the piano samples were recorded on my phone by me playing some pretty phrases of music on my upright piano. the original, non-spliced-up tune is relatively similar to how it's presented in the beginning. i downsampled, looped and crossfaded them all in OpenMPT so as to fit comfortably within 64KB. the rest of the samples are a sinewave and some TR-808 drums; i distorted the kick a bit to give it more punch (it originally clipped the chip's volume a little harder, but it was unwieldy to manage consistently). i wanted to work with whole sampled piano parts so that i could play around with extra channels echoing the parts in glitchy ways while still staying within the 8-polyphony restriction. pitch modulation is used all over the place too!
i spent a long time playing around with all the echo delay filters and feedback and such... you can't automate them into negative values because of how MIDI CCs work but i did my best to replicate the 8 filter values you get from raising only one slider in C700, to make the effect as striking as possible (along with lowering the Main volume so as to hear only the Echo portion). i had the idea to go deeper into that really because the 0ms echo delay setting was a necessity for how much space my samples took up, but it was a super fun experiment.
one thing i thought was neat in the last section is that you get a sort of static-y crackling sound from overlapping bits of volume automation, which is not at all what i expected, but a pretty neat sound. it's sorta like a record scratching but not as loud and aggressive.
the video gets a little out of sync - sorry - there's some really slight lag over time from just how much data is being fed to the chip. this seems to be the case on both emulator and real hardware! the recording is from an emulator because i didn't have a working SNES flashcart at the time of prepping these videos, but i've recorded it since, and it sounds just as wonderful, blessedly. i'm so glad all this stuff works on hardware, the emulation must be super accurate!
