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emkay

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7 hours ago, zbyti said:

Most horrible tune I ever heard on Atari! You have exceeded your own limits/standards...

 

6 hours ago, Irgendwer said:

I know, you cannot hear it and I never would blame a person in a wheelchair for not walking.

Just don't expect applaud for your helpless tries...

 

 

Come on... admit it at least, "Terra Cresta" sounds good.

 

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10 minutes ago, rensoup said:

Unless he backs up his claims with facts, I don't pay attention anymore... Yeah the "armaggedon man" tune is a trainwreck... but "Terra Cresta", "Noisy Pillars",... sound unlike a lot of Pokey tunes... 

 

Remember when Ivop made his SID player ? Sounded great but was unfortunately a cycle hog... turns out it's possible to get a taste of it a a fraction of the cost and yet a lot of A8 musicians are still using the square wave ?

 

 

 

The thing is that, only if you check the possibilites, you can set the boundaries. 

Others weren't even able to do the noisy pillars tune. 

 

This discussion is not a discussion of the day. It now for decades. 

They don't learn. Well I don't also learn to admit that they don't learn ;)

 

Imagine . This is the most popular Atari tune, recognized by people from outside. Even if PG did a stereo version of it, it wasn't that good. 

 

 

And now imagine the fitting game on the Atari ;)

 

Irgendwer is a special guy though.

He tells you what the Atari can do, how POKEY has to sound and fails at all. 

His new game has a very nice gameplay, but where are the colors, and where is the "in tune" POKEY tune... 

I'm still waiting for some tunes done by him. 

 

Actually, there are far more horrible tunes than the experimental "armageddon man" available on the Atari. AND they have been used in Demos. 

The funny stuff is that the tune isn't really out of tune. Just because filter is used, there is a hardware modulo.  

It doesn't sound nice with the Arpeggios. It's only a try to demonstrate what could be. 

But negative people only act negative.

 

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On 11/15/2020 at 4:45 PM, emkay said:

Here is a 3rd version. 

 

The short and long notes get too different in their "timbre" when the wave start is fixed.

This one let's most of the melodic part run free. 

No gaps between the notes , makes the tune sounding better in tune, but the sounds are not that stable anymore. So it depends on the tune itself which solution is better.

It does indeed sound more in tune, but you miss the punch on every note that the previous two versions had. Perhaps you can fix that by playing the first frame of each note at a higher volume? Or note +12 for the first frame? If the higher octave is not perfectly in tune, that does not matter. It's percussive, like old 70's Yamama organs ;)

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1 hour ago, rensoup said:

Remember when Ivop made his SID player ? Sounded great but was unfortunately a cycle hog...

Yep, that's emulation :) Here's Noisy Pillars tune 1tune 2, and tune 3 on github.

 

1 hour ago, rensoup said:

turns out it's possible to get a taste of it a a fraction of the cost and yet a lot of A8 musicians are still using the square wave ?

I think the tides (waves?) are slowly changing.

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2 hours ago, rensoup said:

I didn't hear it but comparing with the other tunes in AB, I can only I assume it's a big step up (but perhaps you kept a channel for sfx)

 

We did something more unique. 

As you might know that commonly one or two tunes have been used in games, but then it's getting strange by the completly different arrangement or volume used. 

In Atari Blast we had to cut things down to three 8 bit channels, and all tunes should have the same sounding face and volume. 

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On 11/17/2020 at 5:02 AM, rensoup said:

It's more vibrant but damn, Emkay's edit is close...

Sure!

 

I also tried Armageddon man, but Whittaker is known for toggling the gate bit within one frame, so it needs patching of the player to jump out of it and let the emulation routines know that the gate bit has been toggled (i.e. a new note and round of ADSR starts).

 

Besides that, I listened to the sid original, and I think it's horrible ?  The persussion is terrible and makes me cringe (unlike similar, but a lot better percussion by Hubbard), and at 1:38 it's so way out of tune that even @emkay can hear that ;)

 

Edit: I like Whittaker's rendition of Back to Future though!

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31 minutes ago, ivop said:

Sure!

 

I also tried Armageddon man, but Whittaker is known for toggling the gate bit within one frame, so it needs patching of the player to jump out of it and let the emulation routines know that the gate bit has been toggled (i.e. a new note and round of ADSR starts).

 

Besides that, I listened to the sid original, and I think it's horrible ?  The persussion is terrible and makes me cringe (unlike similar, but a lot better percussion by Hubbard), and at 1:38 it's so way out of tune that even @emkay can hear that ;)

 

Edit: I like Whittaker's rendition of Back to Future though!

 

Sometimes I love how people use the word "out of tune" . 

Which chip of theearly 80s is actually sounding in tune?

 

 

For me it's about the main melody.  Even SID cannot handle it perfectly. That's why so many  Remixes exits . One time they remember of the "original" but they turn the great arrangements into real music. 

 

Found this one lately ;)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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24 minutes ago, emkay said:

Sometimes I love how people use the word "out of tune" . 

Have you any music education? If you been forced (as I am) to continuously playing Bach etudes in your childhood then you could easily recognize how bad detuned music you make sometimes :D 

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55 minutes ago, zbyti said:

Have you any music education? If you been forced (as I am) to continuously playing Bach etudes in your childhood then you could easily recognize how bad detuned music you make sometimes :D 

I had no problems to agree with that, as I'm still acting in this sea of chiptunes  ... it's strange enough ;)

 

But, too often people like chiptunes that were detuned and swear "it is in tune". Particular the tune in level 1 in Hoax... erm.. Wonderboy. 

It's just short and sounds in tune somehow. But the false degree of played notes is like rolling the toe nails more and more with every restart of the tune. Some posts above we found that Jeroen Tel even did some compensation in the tunes to get rid of some flaws of the SID . So it is always good, after x repeats of the tune. 

 

OK. I never had any musical "school" or else. 

But, I'm audiophile. I developed and built Loudspeaker-Boxes  "Hi End" named back in the 80s. I hear wrong notes with ease, but I never learned "why" this is. 

That's why I'm having hard times to do such tunes . I hear it "physically" but "music creation" is only set to POKEY tunes, if you understand. All about music creation I learned from doing experiments with POKEY tunes ;)

 

It works, as some of my projects show. You can do compensation in the tune to make it still interesting after any repeat. And with some help of a good musician, results would be easily there. 

 

"morse corse" .... well. I wonder if Sack_c0s did it intentionally. But the basic notes fit very well, so it was no problem to do that tune. 

On the other side, there is nothing comparable. 

The volume is correct from the start to the end. 

The tuning is properly fitting. 

The tune is rather long. 

The tune changes it's face while playing and keeps still the flow.

...

 

There is no competitor tune yet. 

 

 

And, as you might have recognized. There are some guys only coming, if things are bad. Just for their own negative purpose. 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, emkay said:

OK. I never had any musical "school" or else. 

But, I'm audiophile. I developed and built Loudspeaker-Boxes  "Hi End" named back in the 80s. I hear wrong notes with ease, but I never learned "why" this is. 

Fair enough. But I think it will really help if you acquaint yourself with basic "music school" knowledge. About scales, keys, major, minor. How chords are built. What your 047 arpeggio actually means when you are in a certain key. About chord inversions (049 for example, inversion of a minor chord, where the 9 is the base note). About tuning and intonation. Just intonation (perfect fifths and fourths and major and minor thirds), or well-tempered tuning, made popular by J.S. Bach with Das wohltemperierte Klavier.

 

And if you get all that, we could talk about exotic scales ;)  I escpecially like E-Phrygian, as it's all the white keys on a piano, but your scale starts at E. It's the spooky scale :)  E F E F E F is Jaws. And E F B C E F B C ____ (all 16th notes and pause) is something you hear in thousands of productions. And C-Lydian, where your fourth is half a tone higher, also known as the John Williams scale :D

 

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11 hours ago, ivop said:

Fair enough. But I think it will really help if you acquaint yourself with basic "music school" knowledge. About scales, keys, major, minor. How chords are built. What your 047 arpeggio actually means when you are in a certain key. About chord inversions (049 for example, inversion of a minor chord, where the 9 is the base note). About tuning and intonation. Just intonation (perfect fifths and fourths and major and minor thirds), or well-tempered tuning, made popular by J.S. Bach with Das wohltemperierte Klavier.

 

And if you get all that, we could talk about exotic scales ;)  I escpecially like E-Phrygian, as it's all the white keys on a piano, but your scale starts at E. It's the spooky scale :)  E F E F E F is Jaws. And E F B C E F B C ____ (all 16th notes and pause) is something you hear in thousands of productions. And C-Lydian, where your fourth is half a tone higher, also known as the John Williams scale :D

 

 

It's not exactly what I writing about. 

Yes, there are definitions of harmonics and how to build then unisono (sinfonic) or in chord (symphonic) music.

We had some basic music learning in ground school, where it was shown that those Octaves and Chord building is a definition of music creation: Only one definition! The chance to make a Song to earn money is higher than to try different types of music. 

It's like making games on the C64 to assure some quality without special inventions. 

 

About the "spooky" scale.  The definition of "spooky" for a scale of following notes, is also a teached one.  

If you see a Horror Movie, running a special type of note arrangements, you will ofcourse put them together by learning. 

If you're a small child and older people tell you about ghosts, they always do the "woowoowoowooo" sound. So the child learns the "woowoowoowooo" is something spooky. 

I remember, when my older brother and I was walking in the night as smaller kids. Every single slide noise made him fear. I always had to calm him down. 

Possibly that's why "spooky" doesn't hit me ;)

 

But the Scale that is taught , is not a scale for all possible music. Also the harmonic scale doesn't always end up in good sounding music. 

 

The learned music also changes from generation to generation. 

Modern "Number 1" Hits barely use the correct harmonics. It's just that there are some accepted amount of correct notes were used, the rest is detune from that. 

Well, every great Musician of his time claimed that the new music is a degeneration of music. But for this one particular case means only that the music is not the same of what he learned. 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, emkay said:

About the "spooky" scale.  The definition of "spooky" for a scale of following notes, is also a teached one.

That's not entirely true. Certain combinations of notes are known to cause similar emotions to people all over the world. Even Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc... chose their key specifically to match the emotion of the work. Most simple example is major/minor keys. Major keys sound happy, minor keys sound sad, to some extend.

 

7 hours ago, emkay said:

Modern "Number 1" Hits barely use the correct harmonics. It's just that there are some accepted amount of correct notes were used, the rest is detune from that. 

The earlier mentioned Well-Tempered tuning is to blame. Ever since Bach made it popular (he did not invent it BTW), it has been used for more and more compositions, and the last two centuries 99% off all the work that has been written uses this tuning. The idea of this tuning is that you do not have to retune your piano or organ when you change keys. That means that except for the ground tone and all it's octaves, all notes are slightly out of tune. Some are too high, some are too low. But the out of tunedness is small and we are used to it.

 

But if you tune a piano with just tuning, for example to the key of C major, playing a song in C major sounds much smoother than the well-tempered tuning equivalent. Play a song in D on that same piano and it's a trainwreck. Pre-Bach, they had to have several instruments, all tuned to a different key. The well-tempered tuning solved that. But at a price.

 

7 hours ago, emkay said:

We had some basic music learning in ground school, where it was shown that those Octaves and Chord building is a definition of music creation: Only one definition! The chance to make a Song to earn money is higher than to try different types of music. 

Well, I guess it's mandatory to first understand this way of creating music (i.e. well-tempered tuning, diatonic scales), before you go to exotic scales and microtonal music, etc...

 

Edited by ivop
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On 11/18/2020 at 6:37 PM, ivop said:

I also tried Armageddon man, but Whittaker is known for toggling the gate bit within one frame, so it needs patching of the player to jump out of it and let the emulation routines know that the gate bit has been toggled (i.e. a new note and round of ADSR starts).

 

Besides that, I listened to the sid original, and I think it's horrible ?  The persussion is terrible and makes me cringe (unlike similar, but a lot better percussion by Hubbard), and at 1:38 it's so way out of tune that even @emkay can hear that ;)

I kind of like the C64 version, I didn't think it was out of tune, I don't  know anything about music theory though so all this talk is flying above my head!

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32 minutes ago, rensoup said:

I kind of like the C64 version, I didn't think it was out of tune, I don't  know anything about music theory though so all this talk is flying above my head!

I didn't mean the whole song is out of tune. Just the part at 1:38. And that I don't like the percussion sounds :) But it's all a matter of taste. It seems Whittaker just used some high frequencies, and Hubbard chose them to match the key of the song, even though that high up Pokey is way out of tune. For a short period of time (one or maybe two frames) that's good enough.

 

Emkay's drum track is way better IMHO. It's "just" the arpeggios that have to be fixed ;)

 

Edited by ivop
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20 minutes ago, zbyti said:

some best C64 musicians at the beginning of their careers "murdered his own cats" in public :D maybe @emkay must murder bunch of cats too before he became famous musician? ;) 

Final_Countdown.sid 11.12 kB · 2 downloads

Hmm, the intro is not that good, his drum sounds needed working on, and both the melody and the bass line are not "correct", in the sense that it's not what Europe played.

 

But, all in all, I think it's not that bad for an early work. It has all the ingredients that later JT tunes had, too. The way it builds up, his own arrangement, different timbres for different voices, his own solo(!), etc.... It's an exercise that eventually led to JT_42.sid :)

 

JT_42.sid

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1 hour ago, rensoup said:

I kind of like the C64 version, I didn't think it was out of tune, I don't  know anything about music theory though so all this talk is flying above my head!

 

The tune isn't out of tune. Out of tune is when the music doesn't fit. Well, SID cannot replay all "synth" stuff in tune, caused by the 3 channels.   But, I'm pretty sure, it's not what ivop means. 

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