Whoa! Neil, this is really crazy! I had no idea all this modulation wank was possible.
holy balls
I'll certainly TRY to use this for something interesting!
Awesome! How difficult would it be to get the modulation speed to follow the pitch of a played note (like where a user could choose an octave or a harmonic and the modulation would play at that relative speed)? Would amplitude modulation also be possible? This is kinda really exciting!
Last edited by Victory Road (Mar 26, 2012 6:01 am)
umm, this is rad.
i can see this being used to make some live performances more interesting by adding a guy whose sole task is to do live manipulation of crazy NES noises.
woah. could use this to produce some totally bonkers ina-grm type stuff.
Awesome! How difficult would it be to get the modulation speed to follow the pitch of a played note (like where a user could choose an octave or a harmonic and the modulation would play at that relative speed)? Would amplitude modulation also be possible? This is kinda really exciting!
The modulation/synth stuff is pretty flexible so that shouldn't be a problem. You can use the same technique to apply amplitude modulation. I did it as part of developing the demo but, perhaps because of the lack of amplitude resolution on the NES, the effects weren't that impressive and in some ways sound very similar to the 'FM' in the demo.
As well as 'FM', a lot of the characteristics of the sound in the demo comes from the fact that you've also got the infamous square-wave click being modulated at audio rate. I've also had it working with the Triangle channel which gives you a totally different sound. Haven't experimented with the noise channel yet though.
Very early days on this (even though it's several months old! )
I originally planned to have a very basic 16-step sequencer for each voice (2 square, triangle, noise) so that you can set several values per step: note, length and a couple of aux values. The aux values would be able to point to any of the parameters in the 'synth'
I did originally plan to have 6 LFOs and 6 Envelopes, the destination of which could be anything: pitch, other LFOs, amplitude etc.
I think that is too many though as the processing to get the sound is INTENSE. The more LFOs etc. that I have, the slower the 'FM' will be and so on.
Cool, keep us all posted! I'm sure I'm not the only person who would dig this as a tonal instrument as well as a general live noise-making tool.
A step sequencer of any sort would be neat too, if you can fit it in there
I know this can't really happen but... man, what if this were a new instrument type in Pulsar?
At least release it for sampler fodder generation I can import these as dmcs.