Hi everyone! I'm really happy about the positive response the song received! This was something I absolutely was not expecting to happen -- especially for doing a so-called 'brostep' song for the first time! Being featured in destructoid especially surprised me. It really opened my eyes, since originally I was fearing that it wasn't going to be as accepted as a legitimate song -- hence I was about to keep the song strictly for future live events. But I'm really happy that even listeners normally critical about dubstep/brostep at least appreciate the technical aspects of the song! All in all, thank you sooooo much for all your support!
I guess I should talk about technical stuff regarding the song, since I've received a whole flurry of questions wondering how the song sounds like the way it is -- mainly how the wubwub bass sounds are made, as well as the snappy drums.
Reese basses:
Most of the reese stuff were done on the squarewave 2A03 channels (there's a few weird effects done on the VRC6 channels too, but mostly they do auxiliary / filler stuff... for example the 'supersaws' on the melodic parts). Without revealing my secret sauce, I will say one essential ingredient: custom software timer. It's a long-established trick to use for chiptunes (I believe LSDJ and Nanoloop's sound engines are based around it, even? Please do correct me if I'm wrong), but until recently hasn't been fully exploited in NES music. That being said, creative programming on the squarewaves opens up a pandora's box of weird tones usually not possible within 60/50Hz refresh.
Aside from being obviously impractical to use in actual games, I think the reason custom timer stuff isn't as popular in NES music is because most NSF players ignore the replay speed on a NSF's header and just force the playroutine to refresh at 60Hz (of course, replay engines like SuperNSF have their own timer code that can bypass all that, but that's another topic). Fortunately, Powerpak's NSF player plays Kyunstep (and most similarly-timed NSFs) in its intended speed totally fine.
Drums:
Yeah, they're a mixture of DPCM and noise channel played together. That was one of the parts I took a rather long time on creating. It's pretty hard to make DPCM drums sound powerful enough in a heavy mix like what is usually done in 'brostep' songs (especially given the muffled nature of delta playback even @ ~32khz max), so it has to be backed by clever noise channel programming. In addition, otherwise unorthodox stuff like pseudo side-chaining on the melodic channels helps bring the drums out. I think it can't be overstated that having good volume control programming synced to drums in dance-based chiptunes can REALLY make a huge difference.
For reference, there's only 3 DPCM samples used in the entire song: A bassdrum and two snares (less snappy snare for Part I, more snappy snare for Part II). DPCM channel doesn't do anything else other than take advantage of non-linear mixing volume control via smooth $4011 register writes.
Mixing:
The song in bandcamp is mixed in post accordingly -- which does help make the overall sound even more aggressive (and that way it can somehow audibly compete with non-chiptune dubstep songs, haha). That being said, it's mainly EQ'ing and compression/limiting on the master; There's no creative post-processing effects applied. All the strange sounds in the song really are from just the 2A03 + VRC6. (Side note: the songs during blipfest were directly fed from my NES consoles with no post-effects applied. And yes, the NES machines are wired to accept expansion audio from the powerpak / Famicom games with such soundchips. )