m00dawg
Offline
Texas

@nkogliaz Actually I've had a solution to the problem for a while by using Live's EQ to cut out the high pitches. So really this thread is just trying to figure out why there are there and alternatives other than that. It'd be nice, for instance, to have a portable solution. On that note, I am curious why a real analog low-pass filter wouldn't work? It cuts frequencies above a threshold, no? I know there is a roll-off going on there but it should hit 0 or close to it by the time it gets to the high pitches I'm trying to filter out?

"Filter" is a loaded term because I wasn't thinking of using an actual low-pass filter, with resonance and all that. Really just a regular low-pass, similar to turning down a the treble knob on a mixer. Feel free to correct me here, but using some large input capacitors along the audio chain would basically do what I would want?

boomlinde wrote:

What I can hear, though, is some constant high pitched bus whine, and also some lower frequency zipping noise when using an envelope. The latter noise has some high frequency content, too, which is very obvious and quite annoying. Maybe this is what you are hearing?

I'm definitely hearing high pitched aliasing when playing notes off the squares. I only hear it when actively playing something. The GameBoy does have a high pitched whine in some cases, but that seems to be different from what I am hearing. This sounds like jingling your keys on your keychain, just at a much higher pitch.

infradead
Offline
Tacoma WA

whats the problem?

i like the noise.  i embrace the noise.

go all in the box if you want shit perfect.  otherwise just learn to embrace and work with it..

i've had a set ruined in my opinion because i used a friends prosounded gameboy and didn't have all the noise to work with...

m00dawg
Offline
Texas
infradead wrote:

whats the problem?

i like the noise.  i embrace the noise.

go all in the box if you want shit perfect.  otherwise just learn to embrace and work with it..

i've had a set ruined in my opinion because i used a friends prosounded gameboy and didn't have all the noise to work with...

I think you're missing the point a bit. It's not noise in general that I'm concerned with. Like I said previously, if I wanted high quality chips, I can just generate waveforms on my Virus or using GoldWave (hah those were good times).

Also as mentioned before, the problem is the disharmonious high-pitched noise because that can be distracting to the rest of the song. The buzzes, fuzz, zippers, all that I do want. Just not the high pitched stuff that makes me ears bleed.

nkogliaz
Offline
Europa surfing on the monolith
m00dawg wrote:
infradead wrote:

whats the problem?

i like the noise.  i embrace the noise.

go all in the box if you want shit perfect.  otherwise just learn to embrace and work with it..

i've had a set ruined in my opinion because i used a friends prosounded gameboy and didn't have all the noise to work with...

I think you're missing the point a bit. It's not noise in general that I'm concerned with. Like I said previously, if I wanted high quality chips, I can just generate waveforms on my Virus or using GoldWave (hah those were good times).

Also as mentioned before, the problem is the disharmonious high-pitched noise because that can be distracting to the rest of the song. The buzzes, fuzz, zippers, all that I do want. Just not the high pitched stuff that makes me ears bleed.


I completely fail to follow you at this point...     have you pro-sound modded the game boy in question yet(in any fashion)?  It seems you haven't...

Well, the fact of the matter is, the game boy is a Low Quality chip, and in that in itself, the game boy was never designed to be used as we are using it now, to make music.

I think you might be missing the idea behind chip tuning with a game boy in the first place, if you are even remotely of the mindset of anything to do with a virus synth in comparison to a nintendo game boy (any model for that matter), you might want to re think exactly what you are trying to accomplish here, at this point, I don't think you understand why the game boy is so noisy and why so many artifacts occur within (if you want to gripe about disharmonious tones and pitches, try asking cTrix what he's gone through alone trying to make any kind of coherent melody using the atari 2600, and they are even worse for noise than the game boy when ran through a board)..

I think you may be trying to re-invent the wheel at this point from what I've seen, so all I can say is good luck.   /exits thread

Last edited by nkogliaz (Jul 5, 2011 10:55 am)

m00dawg
Offline
Texas
nkogliaz wrote:

I think you may be trying to re-invent the wheel at this point from what I've seen, so all I can say is good luck.   /exits thread

Sorry didn't mean to pull your strings or anything if I did. I've just mentioned some of this stuff previously in the thread - it's sort of going round and round (o/~ like a record baby right round baby right round o/~).

The TL;DR is:

I haven't done a Pro-Sound yet.
I can fix this in Live with the parametric EQ.
Fixing it using an analog filter might be more fun.

Again, sorry if I pissed you off or anything - totally not my intent! Quite the contrary. Save for one person on this forum, everyone has been super nice and helpful and I very much appreciate all the advice and awesome community at large!

pixls
Offline
Philly, PA, USA

I'd say just try the prosound with an extra jack so that way if it's not what you wanted you still have the normal output

i mean people have said what the prosound mod does, but until you actually hear it on your own device you're not gonna really know if that's what you're looking for, it's not complicated, if you have a soldering iron you can do it yourself pretty easily.

Rouwe
Offline
m00dawg wrote:

Just not the high pitched stuff that makes me ears bleed.

You must have very sensitive ears if you can hear that with normal listening. Are you actively listening for those sounds or can you seriously hear it when you listen to the music itself? I think you're being a little obsessive about it and maybe it's just you, but I don't even mind the aliasing.

nkogliaz
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Europa surfing on the monolith

no bad feelings taken man, I just think you might be missing the whole idea of using the game boy. no worries.

ant1
Offline
uhajdafdfdfa

so you are making music with gameboys because you like the sound of gameboys but changing the sound of them so they don't sound like gameboys because you don't like the sound of gameboys smile

on a more constructive note a lowpass might probably take out a lot of stuff you do want as well as stuff you don't want unless it is like 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dB/octave slope.

i would keep doing it in logic unless you are going to PLAY LIVE (probably to audiences who like chip music and are therefore pretty used to the sound of a game boy)

boomlinde
Offline
Sweden
nkogliaz wrote:

no bad feelings taken man, I just think you might be missing the whole idea of using the game boy. no worries.

I think you might be missing the whole idea if you think that there's a single "whole idea of using the game boy;" a portable game console that you are now using to create music. smile

Theta_Frost
Offline
Milwaukee, WI
boomlinde wrote:
nkogliaz wrote:

no bad feelings taken man, I just think you might be missing the whole idea of using the game boy. no worries.

I think you might be missing the whole idea if you think that there's a single "whole idea of using the game boy;" a portable game console that you are now using to create music. smile

That's kind of how I feel about it.  Sure, "it's a gameboy" but we are re-appropriating it for another purpose.  Trying to make it be the best for that purpose, I think is part of our spirit.  Regardless, if its unnecessary or not.

roboctopus
Offline
Madison, Alabama

Have you tried using other gameboys?  I have two.  One sounds pretty terrible--the wave channel sounds awful, samples are unrecognizable, and there's a lot of noise overall.  The other sounds pretty nice to me, not too much noise, wave and samples sound pretty good.  Neither is pro-sounded.  It could be an extra noisy DMG.

nkogliaz
Offline
Europa surfing on the monolith
Theta_Frost wrote:
boomlinde wrote:

I think you might be missing the whole idea if you think that there's a single "whole idea of using the game boy;" a portable game console that you are now using to create music. smile

That's kind of how I feel about it.  Sure, "it's a gameboy" but we are re-appropriating it for another purpose.  Trying to make it be the best for that purpose, I think is part of our spirit.  Regardless, if its unnecessary or not.




Neither of these two quotes have anything to do with what I've stated.

nkogliaz
Offline
Europa surfing on the monolith
Theta_Frost wrote:
boomlinde wrote:

I think you might be missing the whole idea if you think that there's a single "whole idea of using the game boy;" a portable game console that you are now using to create music. smile

That's kind of how I feel about it.  Sure, "it's a gameboy" but we are re-appropriating it for another purpose.  Trying to make it be the best for that purpose, I think is part of our spirit.  Regardless, if its unnecessary or not.




Neither of these two quotes have anything to do with what I've stated, this thread is turning into nonsense now.

vgx
Offline
Brisbane, Australia
boomlinde wrote:
m00dawg wrote:

vgx is probably on the money in regards to the aliasing going on. The characteristics of the spectrum graphs I have produced look strikingly similar to some of the ones I have seen when looking at discussions over downsampling (which causes aliasing).

I still very much doubt it, and I brought out my Game Boy to try it just now. I can tell you right off the bat that my listening conditions aren't the best, but I can't hear _any_ folding or post-nyquist frequency mumbo-jumbo. The harmonics of the square wave, although harsh, are very clear and seem undistorted. The oscillator also sweeps up well into the ultrasound range without any of the folding noise I'd typically identify as an effect of aliasing.

What I can hear, though, is some constant high pitched bus whine, and also some lower frequency zipping noise when using an envelope. The latter noise has some high frequency content, too, which is very obvious and quite annoying. Maybe this is what you are hearing?

Yeah the square waves are closer to analogue oscillators so there shouldn't be any noise related to aliasing there, on closer reading I noticed m00dawg was discussing that, I was talking about the wave (psg wavetable) channel. Sorry to anyone if I was a bit misleading. I am to a certain degree making assumptions, I can hear aliasing or something similar to it on the wave channel on certain settings, I don't notice the same effect on the other channels.

m00dawg
Offline
Texas
vgx wrote:

Yeah the square waves are closer to analogue oscillators so there shouldn't be any noise related to aliasing there, on closer reading I noticed m00dawg was discussing that, I was talking about the wave (psg wavetable) channel. Sorry to anyone if I was a bit misleading. I am to a certain degree making assumptions, I can hear aliasing or something similar to it on the wave channel on certain settings, I don't notice the same effect on the other channels.

It's more pronounced on the WAVE channel but I hear it on the squares too. Hopefully am going to have a Pro-Modded DMG-001 here in a few weeks so I'll try to remember to report back my findings on how that sounds.