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In Milkytracker if you've got a square wave you can make the other Gameboy/NES waves from it.  Say it's 64 bytes long, make the loop 32 bytes big within it (moving the start and end points in so there's an equal amount of wave above and below the middle point),  now drop the instrument by an octave to get the pitch back where it was if you want.  (keep the rest of the sample, don't minimise yet)

To get the other tone timbres just move the the start loop point back so you have unequal amounts of wave above & below the middle line.  That's the principals of pulsewidth modulation and how the Gameboy/NES timbres are generated.  (it's been a few years since I wrote Gameboy games but I think they were 12.5%, 25%, 50%, 75% "duty" for the waveforms)  The Gameboy's third channel uses the same method, you can have your own (32-byte?) waveforms on it.

For "SID" (c64/Amiga) emulation:

Generate a saw-tooth wave, duplicate it to another instrument and reverse the new sample.  Now change the finetune of the second insturment to +8 or above.  Play the same pitched note on two channels and you'll get some automatic pulsewidth modulation.   For more on that you might want to read this tutorial.

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Madison, WI

Re: gear... you don't need it to get started.  Once you've found the sound you're after, then hardware really comes in handy, especially if we're talking handhelds, which are convenient to compose on vs. a notebook.  If you plan on performing, hardware will practically be a necessity.  There's no need to go gear crazy, but let's face it, acquisition is pretty fun if you can afford it.  My advice is to expand slowly, use what you buy, and maybe sell what you thought you'd use but don't.

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New York City

You are a chiptuner? I have a Subaru Impreza that needs chip tuning, send me a mail.




o_O

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Cambridge, MA

Wow, 4mat, That is extremely helpful! Will definitely mess around with that.

Harhar akira, I was trying to keep the title short. I guess I could have used "chiptune artist" instead. >.>

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4mat, I couldn't really get that SID sound out of the saw-tooth waveform trick. All I really got was what seemed like just a 2 note chord tongue.

Care to link to a good example?

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Try eternity.xm out of my archive.  It has the double instrument fine tune, the one in there called 'Blank Page' does the X command trick.

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London, UK
akira^8GB wrote:

You are a chiptuner? I have a Subaru Impreza that needs chip tuning, send me a mail.

same old shit, different place eh akira?

Last edited by Sabrepulse (Feb 15, 2010 12:03 pm)