Chord progressions or melodies pop into my head, then I transpose them into a tracker. I have no formal musical training (or idea what I'm doing most of the time), so my structures and melodies can be pretty spastic and scattered. Luckily for me, that's the way I like it.
178 Feb 24, 2015 3:38 pm
Re: Self-Destructive (Remastered) (2 replies, posted in Releases)
Heavy stuff man. It's got that good ol' creepy, primitive vibe going on that I often crave. I hope the music afforded you some catharsis.
179 Feb 24, 2015 3:30 pm
Re: How do you self-motivate? (44 replies, posted in General Discussion)
I always try to be happy with whatever things I achieve so far.
This is a big one. Taking a look at some old stuff from my humble beginnings as a musician has really helped me put aside my scathing self-criticism for a second and just be happy with the progress I've made. It's good to try to get some perspective on how far you've made it and then try to beat your average growth in the future.
180 Feb 19, 2015 5:02 pm
Re: How do you self-motivate? (44 replies, posted in General Discussion)
That cycle of: "All I want to do is play videogames, life is bullshit."
Sit and play videogames in all your spare time for months on end.
Turn on the console one day, stare and the screen and think "Every day I die a little more."
Get super productive for a couple months until the mental energy is exhausted.
Repeat.
Finding motivation to do music was what broke that cycle for me. In a way, not playing videogames is my motivation to make videogame music. I look at it like this, no one will see your high scores, or that perfect save file of that RPG as worth historical archival. But if you make a cool album people might still be jamming out to it after you're dead. Don't get me wrong, I still love playing games now and again, but I now see it as a downtime activity instead of "what I'm doing with my life".
181 Feb 17, 2015 7:04 pm
Re: Some Songs I Made By Pushing Buttons, EP (8 replies, posted in Releases)
Caves is dope. I feel like it stands head and shoulders over the other songs on the EP, but that's just preference. Well made. A scattered but interesting release.
182 Feb 16, 2015 5:01 am
Re: Fish Hook - Waves [punk/chip/ska] (3 replies, posted in Releases)
Woah,"How To Clean Everything" era Propagandhi meets Against All Authority. (Ska sucks, ska revival isn't cool yada yada....) This is pretty good dudes. Keep up the good work!
183 Feb 14, 2015 9:29 pm
Re: My first track with LSDJ for a game we're currently making (8 replies, posted in Constructive Criticism)
This thread has a link to an awesome patchbook. If you go through and just make all the instruments to see what they do it'll give you a good frame of reference.
LSDJ & You is pretty sweet too.
There's a ton of stuff on youtube, but I'm not sure what the best stuff out there might be. This is where some of the more experienced LSDJbros could probably point you in the right direction.
Another way of figuring out tracking tricks is to take a look at the savs of the pros and reverse engineer their techniques.
(Thanks dudes who include savs with their album downloads!)
184 Feb 14, 2015 4:13 pm
Re: My first track with LSDJ for a game we're currently making (8 replies, posted in Constructive Criticism)
Cheers man, you're out the gate like a beast! As far as CC, the wav channel holds the secrets to your future happiness.
185 Feb 13, 2015 2:50 am
Re: [TI 82/83/83+/84+] Houston... we have a tracker (176 replies, posted in Other Vintage Computers & Consoles)
Thanks for the advice! It seems really snug in there... I tested it in the store for fit before I bought it, but maybe I was just being hopeful. (My default mode.) but having seen the shaving method solve a similar problem I'll give it a shot. :3
Don't worry, I've already lost all my data once when I removed the batteries. Turns out my "BIOS" (not sure what it's called in a calculator, haha) battery was bad, so I lost all the programs. It's all good though, it was just awkward learner noises anyway. What's the typical battery life of a TI-82 running HT? Mine lasted for about four hours... seems kinda slim. Maybe my batteries were old to begin with though.
Anyway, glad to hear HT isn't mothballed! It's a great program and I have this feeling your hard work won't go unappreciated.
186 Feb 12, 2015 7:30 pm
Re: [TI 82/83/83+/84+] Houston... we have a tracker (176 replies, posted in Other Vintage Computers & Consoles)
When I first saw this thread a while back I knew I eventually wanted to give HT a shot. Having never fooled around with graphing calculators before, this has proven to be an interesting and informative journey. I finally managed to get all the pieces together last night and get HT up and running. Now comes the troubleshooting phase...
Questions:
On engine one, are channels 1&2 supposed to be able to make noise, or are they there to assign pitch values to the other two active channels (3&4)? The other engines perform as described in the user manual, but engine one seems to have this odd thing where notes don't sound on channels 1 or 2 by themselves, but if there are notes entered in 1 or 2 it slightly changes the pitch of notes entered in channels 3&4. I'm running HT 3 on a TI-82. Everything seems to be functioning properly otherwise. Could it have something to do with panning? The manual describes channels 1&2 as "Left 1" and "Left 2" and I'm (seemingly) getting only channels 3&4 in both headphones. Does engine one have a built in hard-pan for these channels?. I'm using a cell phone adapter 2.5-3.5 jack, is it maybe giving me a doubled mono right channel as "stereo"?
Thanks in advance for what will most likely be a simple fix. (I'm kinda betting on the headphone adapter being the culprit, but hey.)
187 Feb 11, 2015 5:39 pm
Re: Radlib's **FREE** OPL3 LAPTOP GIVEAWAY !! WINNERS CHOSEN !! (62 replies, posted in Trading Post)
I got my copy of The Arrival in the mail yesterday. It's super sweet. I'm gad to have been a part of this project. Congratz and good on ya to everybody who wrote something!
188 Feb 1, 2015 10:27 pm
Re: BennVenns' Lego Block Linkers (23 replies, posted in Trading Post)
Oh duh... I'd better start giving all my different LSDJ.gb files specific names instead of LSDJcopycopycopy.gb. I had the files hopelessly jumbled, but now things are running smoothly.
And yeah, I knew that the com stuff was in there somewhere, but as I only have three usb ports on this wonderful ugly duckling of a laptop I figured It wouldn't be hard to guess...
CM.O troubleshooting team IS GO! Thanks dudes.
189 Feb 1, 2015 10:19 pm
Re: Getting my music on a nintendo cartridge (15 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)
Hey man, welcome to tracking! I'm a proponent of Famitracker all the way. It's got a fun and easy to learn UI and it sounds awesome. The channel specific .wav export is pretty nice, and you can't beat it's NSF export function either.
The console specific tracker programs can create audio files but with the help of emulator code that re-creates the console's hardware with-in PC software. The core of these trackers 'speak' the native code of the target console.
There are software attempts to convert between some consoles and MOD files or Midi files. But these face the limitation of the target system and are a bit like "fitting a square peg in a round hole".
This brings up a few questions I've been meaning to ask, If one has cart copies of Pulsar or Ntraq, what's required to get the song data from the carts and hopefully into NSF format on a PC? Is there some sort of NES card reader out there? After you get the song data, how do you go about compiling it into NSF?
190 Feb 1, 2015 10:05 pm
Re: BennVenns' Lego Block Linkers (23 replies, posted in Trading Post)
So I got my linker working today, and it's awesome. I have a couple of questions that I didn't see answers for anywhere, so I figured I'd give them a shot:
For a sec I was mystified by the Com# function in the utility. (Runtime error 8002, lol.) I just punched in numbers until it worked, but I could see how that might be frustrating for some folks. Maybe bundle a readme/FAQ/setup guide with the Utility setup folder?
Will the patched .sav files play back on any specific Gameboy emulator? They fail ROM checksums in BGB. Any way to unpatch .savs?
What about that standalone ROM you were working on? How does that work as far as an EMS card is concerned - just load both on one page or LSDJ on one page and the Utility ROM on the other?
The new features sound rad man. Looking forward to em'.
192 Jan 20, 2015 9:48 pm
Re: LSDJ Chord Cheat Sheet (26 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)
Many thanks!