godinpants wrote:
lsdj manual wrote:

On the noise channel, S works like a shape filter. The first digit alters pitch,
the second digit alters the noise modulation. The command is relative, meaning that the pitch/noise modulation values will be added to the currently used values.

The track was done in LSDJ.

As far as how it works, I always find it works if you try and make single drum hits with your mouth (this is also helpful for pulse stuff too). Then slow it down while you do it and think about what you are doing to make that sound. You'll find that you're also filtering by opening and closing your mouth, but, think about how you are pitching the sound vocally. Also think about the envelope you are creating. Then play around and see how it sounds if you start pitching it differently - what happens if you just "sweep" it up? What if you increase the length of time you sweep up before going down again?
Then you can apply this knowledge to your noise channel instrumentation.


YES!!! This. Absolutely. He speaks truth!!! The mouth thing is the way to do it! Each drum hit is two or three different sounds really fast. I usually build a nice table that ends up being a lot of the big hits. For snares, I like to start with a mid-range LOUD (F!) really tonal noise for the impact, then switch it to a much quieter higher pitched white noise that fades off quickly for that nice beefy "K!-tshhh..."
Also, I usuall pan the hell out of snare hits and kicks. Use a table and try O:LR for the initial impact followed by O:-R, O:L-, O:LR... Do this fast enough, and it sounds like a delay and really helps them stand out in the mix.

Yeah, you can get JUST the stereo stuff through inversion, but that's all lumped mono instead of L/R... I discovered that first and thought "... there's something to this... I just don't... know... What it is..." hah
I don't think I was able to isolate just the mono stuff this way though... cus if you invert one channel to get the stereo stuff, then part of that stereo stuff has been inverted, so if you try inverting THAT to remove it to isolate the mono, then it ends up putting it back in cus its been inverted twice so the inverted inversion in your inversion heard you like inversion dog and all that.

Syn: Sorry, there is no magic waveform that applies to all recordings. The noise you are using to cancel it must be recorded simultaneously as it is always a little bit different, as kedromelon said.
Zef: Yes, that would work as well if your song is mono.
Victory Road: By all means let me know if there's an easier way! haha PLEASE! smile

I should note that your Center mono recordings will lose any panning effects that you achieved through the use of the M command, but after recording this way, you can pan wherever you want, so who cares? Do be careful about this when recording, though- since you'll be pushing your song to one side you might want to make your M's the same value on both channels when you record the mono stuff.

Here. A full disclosure of this process, with some sample audio:
http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/6976/ … inversion/

I find it difficult to believe that no one has thought of this before, but I couldn't find a thread on this, so here goes.
I had been having great difficulty mixing vocals/other instruments with my tracks. I refused to give up my hard-programmed stereo effects, but using the phantom center created by mixing with stereo recordings meant there was no room for anything else in the mix. I decided what I really needed was an LCR mix- 3 mono tracks- left right and center. In setting about to do this, I also found a way to easily eliminate the noise floor without using any special plugins- just a bit of LSDJ work and patience. With this, I'm now mixing my next album with an average of 8-10 channels of layered audio from my GBA SP and the noise floor is still not noticeable.

Here's a demo:
http://soundcloud.com/evilwezil/game-bo … uction-lcr

There is much for me to teach you, but first, know ye this: ... The following WILL NOT REALLY WORK on a DMG... sorry.
(NOTE: I judge this having tested it with a backlit DMG. Someone else is welcome to try with a unmodded one.)
I use a GBA SP. Thanks to the assistance of the one and only KoolSkull, I am confident that this will also work on a GBC.
Here's where everyone says, "But wait! Those are the noisiest gameboys of all!" Shut up. Pull up a chair... oh?... well go get a second one.

For those who do not know, almighty science tells us that if two sounds are played simultaneously, but one of them is inverted, whatever waveforms were identical in both sounds will be nullified. Any waveforms going up will be met by an identical waveform going down. These mirror images will cancel one another out. The background hum produced my the GBC and the GBA SP is almost completely identical in both the left and the right channels. So, if you isolate the noise on one channel, and the part of the song you want to record on the other, you can invert the noise right out. (The background noise of the DMG I tested was different enough in each channel to make this not really worth the effort)

IF YOUR SONG HAS NO STEREO EFFECTS:
Your task is simple. Open your song. Go into your instruments and set all of their output from "O: LR" to "O: L-"
Now your entire song is coming out of the left channel, and the only thing coming out of the right channel is background hum.
Record both channels. Now, in order for this to work, both channels must be recorded at EXACTLY the same input volume. Resist the urge to turn up the gains on your inputs. Keep them all the way down. This is the only way to ensure that your recordings will be exactly the same on each side.
You now have  one channel of music and one channel of background noise. Invert one of the channels. (Every DAW has an invert function. If you don't know where it is, find it and make friends with it.)
Now play back both channels panned to 0. You will notice that when you mute and unmute the noise recording that its presence is REMOVING noise, not adding it.
Now bounce that shit together in mono, and the noise is gone.

IF YOUR SONG HAS STEREO EFFECTS:
Hunker down. This is gonna take a while. (Still totes worth it, bro.)
Same idea, but... x3. In essence, you are going to make an LCR of your song. You are going to record JUST what plays in the center. Then you record JUST what plays on the left. Then you record JUST what plays on the right. By the end of it you will have 3 CLEAN mono recordings.
Go through your entire song- phrases, tables, and instruments, changing every instance of "O: L-" or "O: -R" to "O: - -" This will mute all of your panning effects.
Now go back through the song and change every instance of  "O: LR" to "O: L-"
You now have the mono parts of the song isolated onto the left channel, and only background noise is coming out of the right. Record and process them as instructed in the previous section. This will give you a clean, mono recording of your center stuff.... "C"

Now reload the original song and do the opposite- Mute all the mono parts of your song by changing all instances of "O: LR" to "O: - -"
I HIGHLY recommend you save a copy of this stereo-effects-only version of the song at this point.
Now go and mute all the "O:L-" and record just the stuff on the right. Record both channels and invert as instructed. This will give you a clean mono recording of all your right stuff. "R"
Re-load the stereo-only copy of the song and mute all the "O: -R". Now you're recording just the stuff on the left. Record both channels and invert as instructed. This will give you a clean mono recording of all your left stuff. "L"

You now have a clean, mono LCR of your song. Sync the three recordings and pan accordingly.
(I done hear of a lot of people using midi sync to ensure that their playback stays the same each time... I don't... I'm guessing that's another shitty thing about the DMG? All I know is my SP recordings are exactly the same length each time I play a song.)

Sound like a lot of work? Meh. Not nearly as inconvenient as programming an entire song onto an outdated handheld gaming console. You can do it. When most of my O commands are done in the instruments and tables, it doesn't take very long to change out... When i do a bunch of O commands in the phrases and I have to go through the entire song repeatedly.... yeah it takes a bit.

LAYERING AND MIXING:
With the noise floor all but removed, you can record it all separately and pan each channel. You now also have the freedom to pan the C of your instruments off-center while keeping the L and R hard left and hard right- the way god meant them to be! You can go as crazy as you like recording things separately, but an easy place to start is recording the Center portion of each channel separately, and recording the L's all at once and the R's all at once. This way you can pan the Centers of each channel to a different space and keep the L's and R's hard left and hard right.
I record a lot of the channels' stereo effects separately from one another, but I'm insane... so there's that.
The problem I was having with mixing gameboy recordings before was the issue of the phantom center- Everything that SOUNDED mono was actually being produced by equal amounts of sound being played left and right. This means that the sound wasn't occupying just the center, it was occupying EVERYTHING. This is why I was finding it impossible to mix my gameboy stuff with ANYTHING else. But with this LCR method, the center channel is an actual factual mono recording that leaves room for other additional instruments without making everything sound like mud when it all hits the limiter.

There. You may now record your channels separately and cleanly, leave room for vocals or additional instrumentation, and keep all your badass stereo effects. You are welcome. Spread the learnin'.

38

(49 replies, posted in General Discussion)

I generally have a very hard time going back and finishing writing songs I started earlier. Either I get the song structured from start to finish in one sitting, or there's little hope for it. With this in mind, I try to make sure that I get the song skeleton all written out from start to finish before I go back into it and just tweak the programming and perfect the instruments and flesh it out and whatnot.
It's harder to do both at the same time- this is why there are composers AND arrangers. Focus on the composition first. This can be done in one sitting. Then go back and arrange afterwards.
Also, drink nice whiskey in large quantities.

39

(32 replies, posted in General Discussion)

danimal cannon wrote:
Derris-Kharlan wrote:

wow.

I work at a french cafe/gourmet food store as the resident cheese monger. I have recently become a Foley walker on my days off from that. I am currently working on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sakyg8srKU . When I miraculously manage to have free time from either of those things, I make 8-bit music.
...I am confident that no human being has walked this earth that has done all three of those things before.

New tip I discovered:
Sidechain your noise gate to an EQ set to liberally kill all of the bad hum range with a pretty wide Q. This way the noise gate doesn't respond to that garbage- only actual notes, allowing you to set it lower, making damn sure you don't lose any important stuff.
... the more you knowwww...

Did an album of this type of shite some years back:
http://evilwezil.bandcamp.com/album/chronophobe
Track time signatures:
3:  3/4 (speeds up until 4/4 with triplets)
5:  5/4
6:  6/4 (Yes. 6/4. Not a waltz.)
7:  7/4
9:  9/8
11: 4/4, 7/4, 13/4
12: Isometric
14: ?

Also, a 15-minute isometric single song relaxfest:
http://soundcloud.com/evilwezil/evilwez … -in-motion

I like oddfun.

YEEEAAAAAHHH been waitin' on this a while! WHOOHOO!!

Update: The jury is no longer out. It is back. This works incredibly. I tried it on a DMG with mediocre results. I tried it on my SP- it removes 90% of all noise. I'll probably post a sample and make a thread on this... So yeah. This is the way. Especially if you're recording channels separately. Pan everything to the left channel, record stereo. Invert the right channel, and mono it out. If you want to keep your panning effects, go back and record JUST the hard panned stuff and mix that back together. The only issue I can see is that you lose whatever M command panning effects you do, but its well- WELL worth it.

Okay....
So...
I'm doing something completely insane right this very moment... and it's... kind of working.
Bear with me here... this is going to take some explaining, but I swear this will make sense.
I've been having difficulties mixing my GB tracks with other instruments, specifically working with panorama. I was recording all the GB tracks separately and mixing them together in post, and realizing that panning four channels of stereo audio is awful, terrible, and all but impossible since you're not working with a real actual mono center, but a phantom center produced by two audio signals taking up all kinds of unnecessary space in the panorama, leaving little room for my other crap, and mudding everything up once I hit the limiter at the end.
I didn't want to mono my tracks out because I program with a LOT of stereo effects to create space and definition and I love how wide that sounds. What I decided I really needed was to isolate the stereo effects and leave them wide, and have a true mono track of the center stuff that I can pan around. This led to discovering something pertinent to this topic...
Step 1:
I made a new copy of the song with ONLY hard panned notes playing. I changed all instances of "O:LR" to "O:--" so the notes still played, they just had no output. I left all the "O:L-" and O:-R". (It only took a couple minutes since most of my panning is in tables and instruments.) Recorded that.

Step 2:
I made a new copy of the song with ONLY the mono notes playing. I changed all "O:L-" and O:-R" to "O:--" Here's where it gets wacky.
I changed all "O:LR" to "O:L-" so everything that used to appear in the phantom center is now mono coming out of the left channel. Why?
Now, when I record the mono section of my songs, I have one channel of music on the left, and one channel of NOISE ONLY on the right... See where this is going?

Setp 3:
I Inverted the right channel of the recording, then and fed them both together. It canceled the hum. GONE. The white noise remains, but that pesky hum is 100% eradicated, so there's no need to for me to notch filter anything ever again. I also inverted one of the channels of the stereo effects recording- the hum remains on that as I don't want to mono them out, but inverting one side does remove a bit of noise from from the phantom center.

So now I have my stereo effects isolated and panned hard left and right as they should be with a hum-free MONO recording underneath it which I am free to pan around easily... The jury's still out as to whether or not it was worth the effort, but it was at the very least an interesting find... *Frankenstein cackle* *lightning*

NOISE GATE y'all. You're right on the money with your Tight Q notch filtering for the really bad frequencies, but then AFTER that, GATE that shit!!!
The quietest sound that the gameboy is capable of producing is still pretty loud by relative terms. So, find the quietest sound in your song and set the gate threshold just beneath that volume, and set the attack and release for as close to zero as possible. So, if it ever drops beneath that point, the gate kills the lonely noise floor. Like you say, the noise floor only becomes apparent in the quieter, emptier sections, so I find this helps clean that up substantially.
(This won't be that noticeable or seem that important until you push the whole thing through compression and limiting at the end. I've found the limiting tends bring up all those quiet sections, and that's when you really start to notice the noise floor in those empty bits.)
Remember to gate after the notch filtering, though. Sometimes you can hear the noise come and then disappear with the notes if you don't notch those specific hums out enough. Hope that helps!

47

(189 replies, posted in General Discussion)

I heart limitation. No joke. It's what turned my mediocre music into something I actually bother to let other people hear.
I grew up on Modplug tracker. No channel restrictions. I would write a phrase, add another phrase on top of it, and keep adding and adding until it was so dense that to change the chord progression or direction of any piece of the song would have meant changing 20 channels of data and was just too difficult to bother. So my songs didn't go anywhere. Just a series of repetitive loops that phased in and out and bored the hell out of me. (I detest repetitive music passionately.)
When I forced myself into hardware limitations, I found my music actually going somewhere, changing and progressing instead of being a stagnant mush of electro tripe.
Of course, you can apply this same idea to writing music WITHOUT those limitations, but the channel limitations are GREAT practice.
The key, as I understand it, is writing the outline of the entire song from start to finish, and going back AFTER the song is fully conceived, THEN arranging it and adding instrumentation and harmony and density. Build the skeleton then add the meat and skin. If I get caught up in the arrangement before the composition is finished, then the arrangement becomes my focus, and the music tends to be more about things mixing in and out than about the song progressing/changing/being interesting.
So, yes. Working within the limitations of the hardware REALLY brought my music into focus.

48

(24 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

I ususally do all my writing on my SP, since its small, convenient, and has a rechargeable battery (which usually craps out after about an hour these days hmm unfortunately).
For my first album, I wrote it all on an SP then recorded it off my DMG cus I wanted to be *legit* or whatnot.
Then, my programming got more and more neurotic and detailed and I started using more and more tables and panning and insanity. And when I switched the cart over to the DMG to record it, I discovered that the DMG processor literally couldn't keep up with some of the stuff I was doing and dropped tempo and glitched out in the heavier sections. So there's no going back for me- even if I wanted. The DMG simply can't keep up.
Is the bass slightly chunkier on a DMG? Yeah a little. But that's why EQ exists.
The SP is moderately noisier, but you can turn the backlight off and that helps a lot. Also, notch filters. The noise it makes isn't broadband it's always a few VERY specific frequencies that you can filter out if you're patient.
I'll also say this in regards to the noise- GATE THAT SHIT. Whatever gameboy you're using, it has a VERY limited dynamic range. The quietest sound that any of the channels is capable of producing is still really relatively loud. So if you set a noise gate just below that volume and set the attack and release for as close to zero as possible, it'll kill the noise in all the silent places, which is where it matters. Be sure to do this BEFORE you apply whatever compression/limiting you're gonna do, and you'll be in the clear.