gotoandplay wrote:Nice tutorial. There should be more of this kind of stuff out there. There's plenty that exist for famitracker but the more esoteric the tracker is, the less likely there is going to be video tutorials like this. Well done!
This is relieving to hear! I was very curious how a ModPlug tutorial\walkthrough would be received in this day and age, now that FamiTracker effectively does everything an NES musician could ever want. Hopefully the spirit of the composition process is fairly universal, and yes, the specifics of ModPlug in particular are very close to being lost in time. Though, oddly enough, even as a heavy ModPlug user, my methods are bizarre, and probably not normal to begin with. I have basically been using the application in isolation for 14 years, trying to create one specific type of extremely niche music. That's weirder, the more that I think about it...
bitpusher2600 wrote:I just want to say hello, and that I'm enjoying your videos.
I've been wanting to tinker with some NES beats myself, but he'll I struggle doing anything really decent with Little Sound DJ, let alone something as big as a NES tracker. That said, I only knew of FamiTracker, never really heard of ModPlug. If I can ask, why (for you) is this preferable to FamiTracker? Just curious. The tunes you are making sound like proper NES to me.
Great question! One that unfortunately has a long winded answer, I apologize. ModPlug is definitely not better for creating authentic NES music than FamiTracker, but it is more preferable for me mostly due to the fact that it is not built to be authentic. Since it does not adhere rigidly to the NES guidelines, it allows for a lot of bending the rules which make the composition process infinitely more smooth. Though rest assured, the more authentic you want to sound in ModPlug, the more time and effort on your part will have to be spent on achieving that sound. Samples that sound good are just one solution to the problem. There are many other pitfalls that present themselves when you are left without a compiler as a definitive guard rail. But, when you know what they are, you can begin to incorporate them and envision your ideas through them just as if you yourself are the compiler. This can also lead to having a somewhat peculiar sound, for better or worse.
I do find that using LSDJ or FamiTracker have their caveats. They are the most authentic sound, and allow all creative endeavors to remain compilable. For people that are interested in pushing the limits of the soundchips, these are the only true solution. But they often times do not allow you to bend the rules for the sake of speeding up the composition process. And it is the composition process that I like to push, if that makes sense (in other words, I mainly want to hear my ideas through this self imposed protocol). That's where I found I had a lot of trouble using FamiTracker rather than ModPlug. Dealing with pattern structure and memory and limited numbers of columns has often been a bottleneck for my own personal creative process. I think of it almost like encumbrance in a Bethesda game. I want to carry more carrots so that I can eventually do this really dumb thing I have in mind, let's say, but as a result I am often times having to dungeon crawl in my sexy underwear just so I can carry all the carrots back to my house. While adhering to these limitations of the soundchip (or game engine in the case of a Bethesda game) are another aspect to the appeal of making chiptunes, it is not necessarily where my interest are. But I do also really like sounding as close to the original as possible, don't get me wrong.
The more you know about NES sound construction, the more you can manipulate ModPlug in to simulating a reasonable facsimile for the NES sound. This series of videos is kind of meant to illustrate how I went about doing that. Only real h-core NES heads will be able to pick your sound out of a lineup and call it "fakebit". But, for me, even when they do this is a term of endearment for me because I know how much effort I put into creating what is at this stage, a fairly uncommon method for achieving a common sound.
What is art, even, anymore, eh?