Tarzan Boy (SMS version)

Hi Tomy,

Wow! It is an honor to read your comment. You are like one of my all-time favorite musicians, and your ideas have inspired my music in many ways for the last 2 years.

I'm glad that you enjoyed the Tarzan Boy cover. I felt like that there were not enough people making Sega PSG music, and not enough people making chiptune versions of Tarzan Boy, nobody, actually!    So I put two and two together, and here we are. I have a MegaDrive version that is still in progress. Could be awhile, though. I'm wanting to switch over to FM drums, and use the sample channel for something else in that song. Because the original Tarzan Boy song used FM drums, according to my ear. A MegaDrive can do a pretty close imitation.

When I do leads, I really try to make the sounds sing vibrantly, like if it were a human voice. I will offset rhythm sometimes, and make subtle use of pitch-bends and note-offs, and vibrato to make it sound more human and soulful.

Oh, right, the off-beat bassline was a tough choice. I could have altered the bassline instrument to have the big-beat bass note play immediately after the drumsound, but, this was a happy compromise. Maybe I'll do that in the future, though.

With the noise channel drum advice, thanks! I will try that out. It's really easy to do that kind of thing in Deflemask. You can customize an arpeggio where you can sequence the high, mid, low noise in any combination you could possibly want. I did something similar with an NES song that I'm working on, and it really made a realistic sounding snare drum. Although that's a different noise algorithm than Sega. But yeah, I should try that.

Did you know that the Low/Mid/High setting also has a melodic setting? You can basically play an "A" note in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th octave. But that is the ONLY note that will play. And at the same time, all 3 square channels can still do their normal thing. I'm working on a song that will make use of it. So we're talking 4 chord polyphony so long as they are in the key of "A".   Still, there are at least 3 song ideas I have that will work with that.

Anyway, we will have to chat or collaborate sometime. That would be really cool!

Aw yeah, I can't let this one go. I noticed this on your soundcloud, but I don't have an account there. SMS music rocks with the melodic noise! This is a double KO of nostalgia for me, both Tarzan Boy and Master System. I understand that it's easier to make the bass off-beat, but it works, the rhythm is really cool and punchy. I love those tone toms at the beginning, can't help but smile. The square leads are really well done, lot's of awesome bends, full of flavour. Awesome track, I hope to hear more PSG music from you.

For things to improve... your noise channel drums are at the moment a bit "static". Not sure how it's implemented in Deflemask but you know the 3 preset noises, let's call them low, mid & high? A great trick is to combine those together instead of using just one. For example if your snare is just mid noise preset alone, you could make it so that the first frame of that is a low and then instantly change to mid. Or any combination you can think of and whichever sounds best. But this is tricky as you need to track at the highest speed to be able to change frame-by-frame. On VGM Music Maker this is also possible by doing a pitchbend command on the noise channel, then you just can't control the exact result of the combination, but it works better than nothing. Experiment with the noise channel, it's about the best thing of the chip when combined with the third tone channel.