Thanks for all of your replies guys; I know that it takes slightly more work to listen to a track than to glance at a picture, and certainly appreciate it.
why are there almost no breaks in these tracks?
more variation in amplitude
The lack of breaks in most tracks and
never varying amplitudes were almost consciously picked defaults (though I'm generally lazy when it comes to dealing with sculpting amplitudes in chiptunes); mostly I wanted to just play around with the most basic setup I could think of. You're right that these can both add enormously to tracks, to even become more important than their melodic/harmonic content sometimes (maybe I'll do some sketches based upon rests and amplitude-variation in the future: might be a lot of fun, and help counter some of the habits I developed in these efforts).
if possible, to work out more melodic flow...
Hmm. Not too sure how to interpret this. If you mean by this that many of the melodies are very short and more motivic than singable, then yeah, I can accept that
(there are one or two that are slightly more extended, though )
recently i've heard some old classic chiptunes from the NES and GameBoy era. i love these tunes
. - one remarkable trick in chiptunes to emulate polyphony is to
use very fast arpeggios.
I think that's a C64 thing more than a gameboy thing. I've never been in a position to be able to try writing c64 stuff, but I'll have to give it a go some time. That said, I'm also a big fan of a lot of old gameboy music (esp. megaman stuff
).
one of to the best, hugest chiptune archive i've found so far is this
http://www.2a03.org/browse.php/2A03. only 6.1 MB, but insanly much content. much of it
is crap, but there are definitely some jewels in there for sure.
You know this collection of c64 stuff?
http://hvsc.c64.org/Will check out the midi art stuff later.
i agree with 0rel. when you can only play one note at a time, the relationship between the notes is really important.
This is something I thought could be really interesting to investigate, to plan things out entirely horizontally and see what sorts of structure and depth I could fit within such a restrictive framework.
our brains look for patterns and structure and thats part of why we like music. lots of people cant relate to genres like jazz or classical because they cant find the structure. i dont know what youre aiming for with your music, right now its sounding a bit to aleatoric for me, most of the songs dont convey any feeling or mood to me.
22 didn't come across as being at all piratey to you?
But sure, many of the songs didn't have much of an obvious expressive range beyond 'retro-ish and monophonic' (though the ones based on various raga scales do somewhat sound orientalist I think). I didn't write any with any particular scenario in mind, I just was putting down whatever content I could stick together.
i made some comments on some of the specific songs
Which are appreciated. Let me try to respond to them now.
3 good patterns, i dont know technical terms but the way you contrasted high notes with low notes was good
I'm reasonably happy with that myself. I guess the contrasts could be seen to create the effect of rests (whose general absence were so rightly mourned by Orel), as well as adding a polyphonic dimension to that track.
6 good patterns and structure, kinda peters out at the end i was hoping it would return back the the beginning part
This isn't too important a point, but most of the tracks were made with looping in mind; some I didn't bother looping in the mp3 track though to keep size down. Track 6 does fizzle out a little towards the very end though definitely, but I personally am satisfied with how it is just before then (from about 30 seconds to 35 seconds). (It's one of my least favourite tracks as it happens).
8 too aleatoric ,
Indeed. I (almost, though not quite) just clicked notes any old place (the pattern I was clicking in did create some audible shapes). As tracks go, I can live with it. But yes: you say you found it alaetoric, and I can understand where you're coming from (but don't personally find it a problem).
this was my opinion of most of them each bit of the song was possibly inspired by the previous part but it deviated to strongly.
Hmm. This is interesting and surprising for me (and the similar comments by Orel). It is possible that if any of these tracks were in a game that they would be repeated enough that people would get a better feel for their internal structure. To my ears, many of the tracks sound almost too simple in their structure (except maybe 5, which is a single melody line, and 8...). But then, I've listened to them plenty of times, so.
I feel tempted to almost idealize this effect. Given that a person is going to listen to a piece of music many times in the course of a game, why not make various structures present in the music reveal themselves slowly over repeated listenings?
beats and patterns, i think thats the main thing
In terms of what felt
meaningful to create, it's track 5 (though I don't like it that much) that feels like the most accomplished of all of them to me, the one that I think, more than all of the other tuning experiments, whose direction I think has a lot of potential, though it lacks a strong sense of rhythm of meter (though there is one there). The idea of writing a many-minutes-long non-repetitous, non-tonal (or at least extensively roving) aria-like triangle-wave melody rather appeals to me at the moment. An 8-bit operatic opus for solo triangle-wave awaits somewhere in my future, no doubt
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