defMON (Page 6 of 28)

iLKke: wow that was some really useful info thx!

So the key to it all is the "hard restart" line.. then the pitch, AF column and changing different waveforms depending on what drum sound I want (also noise ofc).

OT: How can I never heard about that ADSR bug ey? hug for someone who can give me a info link about the bug.

Im in the mode for packing a file and it's asking me what format I wanna do it in.. RAW or Exac.. what is the difference really? (sorry if it has been up already)

d.

Again, I'll try to provide an (over)simplified introduction.

The ADSR bug is, more or less, sounds failing to trigger properly because the ADSR envelope of the previous sound on the same channel didn't clear yet. Sometimes it will drop a note, sometimes it will make it sound different. This is more noticeable if you're triggering notes rapidly and also depends a lot on the ADSR values of the sounds involved.

It's worth noting that if you are patient / experienced enough with ADSR values you can avoid the bug even without using hard restart.
For example some ppl say that setting the A to 1 instead of 0 helps, or setting S to less than F, etc. I just tend to play around.

It still makes the drum sounds punchier.

There are two components to setting up HR, one is resetting the gate bit, and the other is an ADSR envelope to be set up before the sounds actual envelope, we call this one ADHR.

Also note that there needs to pass some time (2 frames I think) after the HR line before you trigger the actual sound, thus the wait in the DL column in those examples I posted.

This delay makes the hardrestarted sounds trigger slightly later than the non-HR ones, so if that is audible in your tune you have to compensate.

As 4mat noted, Goattracker (and some other trackers) will do this for you but then as a tradeoff all HR sounds have to use the same hard restart.

With defMON being so flexible you have many options on how to compensate for this delay.
First you can trigger HRed sounds a line in advance (notice how dM has a line before line 0) or you can set up the sound the line before and then trigger the note later (goto80 does this), or you could build a little delay into all the non-HR sounds as well, or you could make all your HRs as separate commands and then trigger those the line before (I use this one when I can).

Again this is only significant if you can hear the unwanted delay.

Or if you need a really rapid fire machinegun beat you can keep the gate open and use other tricks to mute/control the perceived volume (like setting the waveform to 0 or using really thin pulse widths). This is more like a kill-switch method so you lose almost all the dynamics, sort of like overcompressing to death, but it sidesteps the use of ADSR completely and thus the ADSR bug as well.

To round it off, here's some notes I compiled a while ago from CSDb, looking into SID tunes with siddump, and looking into how different trackers handle it.

dl = delay (in frames)
w = waveform
g = gate bit
ADHR = hard restart envelope
ADSR = envelope for your sound

HARD RESTART
------------

METHODS

    old school
        dl    w    g    adsr
        ----------------
        1    -    0    0000
        0    W    1    ADSR + NOTE

    new school
        dl    w    g    adsr
        ----------------
        1    -    0    ADHR
        0    -    9    ADSR
        0    W    1    ---- + NOTE
        
    hybrid
        dl    w    g    adsr
        ----------------
        1    -    0    0000
        0    -    1    ADSR
        0    W    -    ----
    
    heatbeat
        dl    w    g    adsr
        ----------------        
        0    -    9    ADSR
        0    W    1    ---- + NOTE
        ...
        1    -    0    ----
        0    -    9    ----
        0    W    1    ---- + NOTE
    
EXAMPLE ADHRs VALUES

    0000    hardest
    0F00    most common
    0F18    Drax
    0F20    GRG
    0FF0    Randall/Jammer
    F000    Linus
    FF00    Jeff

OTHER NOTES

    Sustain of F is especially buggy (try E then? :)
    soft restart usually works best with big (>= 8) release values

PULSELOOPER: Yes, iLKkes tips are ace! Everything is going togheter for me when reading his stuff.

Got a pair of krk Rookit monitors and wow what bass u can make

Last edited by d3Ni$e (Sep 7, 2015 12:15 pm)

d3NI$e: Sounds a bit like a flakey keyboard to me. Anyway, if it was indeed something that went wrong with the keyboard reading code, then you can always try pressing SHIFT+X to get into the disk menu. Reason: When going to the disk menu there are a bunch of things under the hood which are resetted/restored, so going to the disk menu and then back to the editor might help. Then again, you said the only thing that worked was going into the sidtab, so I'm not sure if going to the disk menu would have been possible, but anyway...

This is really a cool solution! Like it when you don't need the soldering experience too.

Still using defMON with an old breadbox.. my only problem is that it is too much noise when Im trying to record straight from the TV. Any soulution to my problem?

Yes, don't use the RF port.  Get one of those old DIN video cables and use that, but you'll always have a bit of "sid whine" without the hardware fix that's floating about on the net.  (but that is authentic sid whine )  The other thing with the c64 is noise from the display, try and avoid having any bright coloured text on the screen or border/screen combinations when recording.  Ideally you'd have border/screen black and the screen switched off (with a POKE 53265,65) but depends how you're recording it. (use POKE 53265,155 to get your screen back )

It's been a while since I did anything on the real c64 but as an example of vic noise try:

10 POKE53280,0
20 POKE53281,1
30 PRINT"A";
40 GOTO 30

and have a listen to your output.

Whaat! thats crazy!

DIN-Sync with C64 + defMON?