noelleamelie
Deep Blooper
Posts: 18
Homebrew skills: Musician (Tracker, MML, MIDI)
Fave PCE Shooter: Soldier Blade
Fave PCE Platformer: Rondo of Blood
Fave PCE Game Overall: Rondo of Blood
Fave PCE RPG: Ys IV: Dawn of Ys
Currently Playing: AliceSoft RPGs
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Post by noelleamelie on Nov 28, 2022 21:35:53 GMT
That couldn't be farther from the truth for actual/real chiptunes and chiptune musicians for original hardware. Are there people who ONLY make chip tunes? I’d wager anyone making chip tunes can figure out how to use GarageBand a lot faster than any guy with a music career can figure out how to get some ancient obscure freeware going. Exactly this. I found the transition to using DAWs to be fairly seamless once I found out what one I liked, but I've met so many people who want to do chiptune but can't figure out how a tracker works. I've been at this for six years and in that whole time I've always had friends and other musicians confused how the heck I work in anything but FL or Logic Pro.
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Post by spenoza on Nov 28, 2022 21:50:56 GMT
I think if you start in digital music you're going to gravitate towards a DAW, because that's what's normal for making music using computers these days. But if you start in chiptunes (rather than trying to come to chiptunes later) trackers are largely the standard, because that's how chiptunes are traditionally done. So it's very hard to go from a DAW workflow backwards, much harder than to go from a tracker workflow forward to a DAW workflow. Trackers are designed around a lot of the various limitations of console chiptunes and were used by a lot of pros bitd.
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Post by turboxray on Nov 28, 2022 22:06:15 GMT
That couldn't be farther from the truth for actual/real chiptunes and chiptune musicians for original hardware. Are there people who ONLY make chip tunes? I don't know - do you go around asking detailed questions of every musician you meet? Unclear why it even matters, but yes there are musicians that only care about making chiptunes - just like there are game devs that only care about making retro games, and retro artists that only care about making art in retro system restrictions. Also completely irrelevant. Use Garage band for making stuff that Garage band is for. If you want to make real chiptunes, then use software that makes real chiptune. If you want to make "pretend" chiptunes... I guess have at it (we had the whole early 2000s for that fake stuff.. personally, not a fan). Real chip tunes take a little work, just like real retro game dev takes a little work. Things worth doing take work. If a little ramp up to learn a tool scares you, then maybe it's not for you. Apparently, it's for a lot of other people though (there's a pretty big thriving tracker community that you can learn from, if you were serious about making chiptunes for pretty much any system). Also, this isn't 2000 anymore. There exists chip tune tools that have been written in the past 10, 5, and 2 years ago. If you can't be arsed to figure it out, then I don't know what to tell you. There are a lot of quality of life features we have now for making stuff for retro systems that didn't exist at the time they were popular and new, if you just did a little research, but waiting for something that smells like a modern tool to come along and take all your cares away - pretty much isn't going to happen, or it's going to be really restrictive if it does happen (ala nesmaker).
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Post by turboxray on Nov 28, 2022 22:09:22 GMT
Since custom envelopes aren't working in Squirrel however, I'm using the envelopes that are baked into the engine.
And you already reached out to Arkhan? I don't remember this being an issue, but it has been a number of years since I look at his squirrel output. Is this for HuCard right (which makes a difference)?
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lunoka
Gun-headed
Diving into retrodev
Posts: 55
Homebrew skills: art, music
Fave PCE Shooter: Burning angels
Fave PCE Platformer: Ninja Spirit
Fave PCE Game Overall: Valis 3
Fave PCE RPG: Neutopia
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Post by lunoka on Nov 29, 2022 8:15:04 GMT
I think it's just a matter of generation. If you were born in the 70's or 80's like me, you most likely started music on trackers ( ProTracker on Amiga, FastTracker, ScreamTracker for PC etc. ). Modern DAWs became popular in the early 2000's. I switched at that time on FL Studio. But since I came into retrodev this year, I'm back on trackers ( Deflemask & Furnace ). My main concern actually is to see sound drivers based on those softwares since I tend to think as spenoza about the problem to use code for MML stuff based on licensed work IIRR( aside of the headache of creating MML partitions ... ).
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Post by SignOfZeta on Nov 30, 2022 14:54:22 GMT
Guys…I’m almost fifty. I didn’t start with DAW. I started with tape. I normally use a solid state Portastudio for my stuff. No computer. I’m only useful for PCE CD music…so…music.
And when I asked about people who only make chip tunes it wasn’t an attack. To me, it seemed like an unlikely scenario since chip tunes isn’t exactly something you learn to do from your parents or in music school. Regardless the number of people who can use a DAW is probably in the tens if not hundreds of millions and massively overwhelming larger than the tracker scene ever was or ever will be. A VST would mainstream chip tunes creation…I guess it doesn’t matter that some people would hate that because nobody is ever going to make the VST anyway. I’d certainly play with it though if it existed.
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Post by spenoza on Nov 30, 2022 15:08:46 GMT
I mean, creating a VST plugin and export process would, I imagine, but a lot more complicated and a lot more work, whereas for trackers designed specifically for chiptune generation, that process is going to be a lot more manageable for a programmer. Especially given the niche nature of homebrew, especially on a smaller system like the PCE, I think that's simply too much an ask. It would be nice to have, but it's yet another case of lack of community resources. We're still at least one committed project (with dedicated musician) away from seeing one of the existing tracker-centric tools under development finally released in some form (according to the developers of those aforementioned tools who are constantly saying they need a viable test case).
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Post by DarkKobold on Nov 30, 2022 16:42:21 GMT
That couldn't be farther from the truth for actual/real chiptunes and chiptune musicians for original hardware. Are there people who ONLY make chip tunes? I’d wager anyone making chip tunes can figure out how to use GarageBand a lot faster than any guy with a music career can figure out how to get some ancient obscure freeware going. Yes. Yes there are. Furnace tracker is brand new, and the open source follow up to Deflemask, which in addition to famitracker, are insanely popular software. Currently, the Deflemask discord has 318 people online, and also has an active forum. Neither of these are ancient or obscure. www.deflemask.com/forum/index.phpThere is so much wrong in this post, I can't even begin to cover it. You honestly should be embarassed by this post.
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Post by spenoza on Nov 30, 2022 20:13:40 GMT
Being a chiptune musician using a tracker is like being the kid starting a garage band: you have an instrument and no formal music education. You just mess around with shit until stuff sounds good. And trackers are actually pretty accessible music-making tools for people without keyboards or musical knowledge.
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Post by DarkKobold on Nov 30, 2022 23:12:04 GMT
Being a chiptune musician using a tracker is like being the kid starting a garage band: you have an instrument and no formal music education. You just mess around with shit until stuff sounds good. And trackers are actually pretty accessible music-making tools for people without keyboards or musical knowledge. That's definitely the case sometimes... But sometimes not. The musician who covered Cleopatra's Curse is a professional music teacher. Deflemask was the premier tool for making chip tunes. Furnace appears to be taking over, due to being free and also open source. There are a lot of issues with Deflemask accurately representing hardware capabilities, and it seems like the furnace devs are taking more seriously than the Defle devs have in the past. Any major homebrew that has used SGDK has used deflemask to generate it's tunes. That's what's compatible with SGDK. GBDK uses hUGEtracker, which is a gameboy specific tracker, but with code generation in mind. Most NES homebrews used famitracker to create soundtracks. In short, trackers are the way chiptunes are made, whether it's a massive professional barely-even-homebrew, or just a couple dudes making a game in a basement. Also, spenoza, this is a huge distraction from the BBD homebrew, and should probably be split into yet another sound engine discussion.
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Post by turboxray on Dec 1, 2022 16:01:29 GMT
Being a chiptune musician using a tracker is like being the kid starting a garage band: you have an instrument and no formal music education. You just mess around with shit until stuff sounds good. And trackers are actually pretty accessible music-making tools for people without keyboards or musical knowledge. You could literally be fumbling around in any music related software, "until stuff sounds good". Trackers don't have some monopoly on this. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of why you would still choose to use a tracker for old sound chips, nowadays. It's not about being some alternative format to MML or "made for coders" or something dumb like that. Trackers are used for musicians to squeeze the most out a retro sound chip. I mean, others use it simply by association and/or influence - and you can typically tell because their music is usually just some notes with envelopes plopped down in the tracker "sheets". They provide thee most powerful approach to crafting the sound of the instrument or channel, that you just don't get at the same level of control with other interfaces for retro sound chips (at least, currently). You can bend and shape the sound that goes above and beyond simply using envelopes (and you can still use them in conjunction). This is especially true for sound chips that aren't full synths, but even those benefit from trackers ability to change sound parameters on a line by line basis. It gives you the most control. That's not to say if you don't use a tracker, then your stuff isn't going to sound good - that's obviously false because we have plenty of chip tunes from original games BITD that sound great. Hell, Air Zonk has great tunes and literally is thee most basic-no-frills-just-enough-to-get-by "sound engine" and it sounds pretty damn good. As far as keyboards (full musical keyboard).. I've used them with trackers that interface with a midi device. There's no reason you can't. That includes recording in real time with a keyboard in a tracker.
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Post by SignOfZeta on Dec 1, 2022 18:10:59 GMT
Are there people who ONLY make chip tunes? I’d wager anyone making chip tunes can figure out how to use GarageBand a lot faster than any guy with a music career can figure out how to get some ancient obscure freeware going. Yes. Yes there are. Furnace tracker is brand new, and the open source follow up to Deflemask, which in addition to famitracker, are insanely popular software. Currently, the Deflemask discord has 318 people online, and also has an active forum. Neither of these are ancient or obscure. www.deflemask.com/forum/index.phpThere is so much wrong in this post, I can't even begin to cover it. You honestly should be embarassed by this post. You have a lot of anger in you. Even a completely toothless topic like this somehow sets you off. I don’t know what your problem is but I was just trying to make small talk. I’m sorry I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’ve now learned that there for sure are people who can tracker like mad but don’t know anything else. I’ve also learned that I probably shouldn’t be around those kinds of people because they are super thin skinned about something and attack at the drop of a dime.
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Post by spenoza on Dec 1, 2022 22:48:13 GMT
Being a chiptune musician using a tracker is like being the kid starting a garage band: you have an instrument and no formal music education. You just mess around with shit until stuff sounds good. And trackers are actually pretty accessible music-making tools for people without keyboards or musical knowledge. That's definitely the case sometimes... But sometimes not.
Yes, I was clearly overgeneralizing. There are actual musicians who pick up instruments and start garage bands. But what I'm talking about the the accessibility of a tracker. A tracker is a tool usable by folks without having a lot of musical familiarity. A good tracker can provide a simple visual layout that matches up to the chip audio capabilities and lets people plot notes without having any knowledge of reading music or even playing an instrument, necessarily. A tracker can be a powerful tool usable by musicians to do cool stuff, too, but the simplicity of the starting interface (based on my limited interactions with older tracker software) is such that it's an approachable tool for non-musicians to dabble in music, in addition to all the other things trackers can do.
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Post by spenoza on Dec 1, 2022 22:49:15 GMT
Can we cool the acrimony in here, please? Is there something in the water that whenever a discussion comes up people will decide randomly to be poor communicators and get pissed at each other?
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Post by spenoza on Dec 1, 2022 22:51:44 GMT
Being a chiptune musician using a tracker is like being the kid starting a garage band: you have an instrument and no formal music education. You just mess around with shit until stuff sounds good. And trackers are actually pretty accessible music-making tools for people without keyboards or musical knowledge. You could literally be fumbling around in any music related software, "until stuff sounds good". Trackers don't have some monopoly on this.
My point is that trackers have an accessibility advantage over many other electronic/digital music tools in that they are more approachable by people without musical experience than traditional DAWs and MIDI setups. Trackers are often a gateway drug for non-musicians who are pulled in to music, especially by video game music. Trackers can be powerful tools for generating music, but they also have an accessible basic interface that can be easier for total noobs to get comfortable with.
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