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Trying to make some PoKEY music!


VinsCool

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34 minutes ago, emkay said:

I guess such results come from the "preset" of POKEY Trackers. Particular RMT.

Raster did explain the circumstances , but people don't read them.

It's not a good choice to create "new tunes for Atari/Pokey"  in such a tracker. The "Preset" is not done to suit musicians well.

In EVERY PoKey Tracker musicians should find a preset of instruments that really work for real music. If that is done, a musician might create non "Rollercoaster" music on PoKey  by default ;)

Oh yeah, everything carefully crafted pays off, otherwise it's hard to get good results.
I think preset vibrato is the worst offender of the bunch, good thing frequency tables work great for that purpose as well.

I noticed that you really have to think outside of the box to get good sounds out of RMT, and it feels great when it works :D 

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Alright, another original song made in RMT finished!
As always, .rmt and .xex attached to the post. Don't forget to run them in NTSC!

[Original, Collab w/Spring] Table Manuscrite (Atari PoKEY)

 
A lot of work went into this one, even it may not look like it.
I think pretty much everything works, tuning is mostly good (to the limits of 8 bit, that is), and there are some sounds that are usually not associated to this chip!
And I know there is a lot more I need to figure out too, but this is coming together as I experiment with sounds.

Special thanks to @Spring for helping me with composition ideas in this one :D 

Table Manuscrite Final.rmt Table Manuscrite Final.xex

Edited by VinsCool
I can't English
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34 minutes ago, VinsCool said:

A lot of work went into this one, even it may not look like it.

Well, to me it looks like A LOT of work went into this :)

 

34 minutes ago, VinsCool said:

I can't English

LOL me (n)either.

 

So, is this the first Atari Pokey song that has parts in 13/16 time signature :)

 

Your composition skills have tremendously improved! I have listend to it twice now, and there are some very nice parts, both rhythmically and melodically. Going to listen a third time now ?

Edited by ivop
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Just now, ivop said:

LOL me (n)either.

 

So, is this the first Atari Pokey song that has parts in 13/16 time signature :)

 

Your composition skills have tremendously improved! I have listend to it twice now, and there are some very nice parts, both rhythmically and melodically. Going to listen a third time now ?

Thank you very much!

Yeah the time signature, everything in this song, is all over the place, and that's exactly the intention!
Let's not forget Spring added many ideas in this one as well, so thanks again, Spring!

Glad to see you enjoyed it! I had a lot of fun working on it for the last few days (sporadically, since I was doing other stuff as well, like cleaning Commodore 64s, and waiting for an Atari 800xl that should come in the mail eventually :D )

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2 hours ago, emkay said:

Well, back in school when they made "Parties" it was to expect that something like AC/DC or Iron Maiden was on the agenda...

I wish I'd had school parties like that back in the day. Here it was all the top-40 crap, Stock Aitken Waterman, and the likes. A song by The Cure and we would be lucky. No Nirvana. No Pearl Jam. No Guns N Roses. Iron Maiden on a school party? What kind of school did you go to? ;)

 

2 hours ago, emkay said:

Good causes not to get there , if you understand ;)

Yeah, you don't like the sound of distorted electric guitars, innit?

 

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7 minutes ago, ivop said:

I wish I'd had school parties like that back in the day. Here it was all the top-40 crap, Stock Aitken Waterman, and the likes. A song by The Cure and we would be lucky. No Nirvana. No Pearl Jam. No Guns N Roses. Iron Maiden on a school party? What kind of school did you go to? ;)

 

I guess it's more the time when we went to school.   Late 70s...

 

7 minutes ago, ivop said:

Yeah, you don't like the sound of distorted electric guitars, innit?

 

Actually , yes ;)  

But in Music where the distortion is used to bring fitting impressions in, is ok to me. As long as there is a Synth-Hook in the song, E-Guitar is ok. ;)

Numb- Linkin Park for example sounds great to me.  

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On 12/11/2020 at 10:32 PM, emkay said:

I guess it's more the time when we went to school.   Late 70s...

First Maiden Album is from 1980 ;)  But still, we had no AC/DC on school parties either. Queen was pushing it.

 

Quote

Actually , yes ;)  

But in Music where the distortion is used to bring fitting impressions in, is ok to me. As long as there is a Synth-Hook in the song, E-Guitar is ok. ;)

Numb- Linkin Park for example sounds great to me.  

Ah, the synth hook! :) It's a good song. Also like the collab with Jay-Z. How about One Step Closer (no synths), Crawling (synth hook), In The End? All from the first album. The last one has a piano hook ;) 

Edited by ivop
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1 hour ago, ivop said:

First Maiden Album is from 1980 ;)  But still, we had no AC/DC on school parties either. Queen was pushing it.

 

Late 70s includes early 80s ;)

 

Quote

 How about One Step Closer (no synths), Crawling (synth hook), In The End? All from the first album. The last one has a piano hook ;) 

No. ;)

Let's continue in my thread ;)

 

Edited by emkay
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Hey guys I have some good news!

I got a real Atari 800xl, finally!

I am not yet uploading more music, but I still have been experimenting with sounds, with more modes and combinations, so something will be done eventually, and also ran off hardware to make sure it's all working.

I have been able to produce sawtooth bass, so far, with spotty tuning but can sort of be manipulated, generate pretty cool timbres with other distortions and modes, and also do 16 bit mode with anything, sort of, by manually entering notes as "frequency" values, not terribly efficient workflow in RMT, but that proves that sort of stuff is indeed possible, it just takes really laborious work to get done, hahaha.

I will hopefully come back with more experimental sounds soon, and hopefully be able to make use of that in a pleasant way.

Here I did a very quick and dirty demo for the sawtooth bass I was able to get mostly "in-tune" manually, not great but can be improved, and proves it can be done with some workaround in RMT :D
Sorry for the Twitter link, that was where I originally posted the demo last night, haha XD
 

 

 

IMG_20201215_160057.jpg

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  • 1 month later...

I had been doing quite a bit of experimental sounds lately :) 

I don't really have a finished song (as of right now!) but here's something using very unusual combinations, this sure does some really interesting sounds!
This runs at 50hz, and uses barely any CPU.

I'm also glad to see RMT2LZSS had no problem at all processing it.
I couldn't break it, but I wonder what will happen in the future if I keep pushing the unintended things into it :D 


I'll attach my current in progress version to the post.
 



 

A Permanent Temporary Solution V2.obx

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Nice sounds! 

 

Now, where's Battle Squadron final ? ?

 

19 hours ago, VinsCool said:

I'm also glad to see RMT2LZSS had no problem at all processing it.
I couldn't break it, but I wonder what will happen in the future if I keep pushing the unintended things into it :D 

 

Keep pushing, it'll break in RMT before it breaks RMT2LZSS ?

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5 minutes ago, rensoup said:

Nice sounds! 

 

Now, where's Battle Squadron final ? ?

 

 

Keep pushing, it'll break in RMT before it breaks RMT2LZSS ?

Thank you!

 

Battle Squadron is coming soon, I am almost done with it, I just need to get a couple lead patterns transcribed, and touch up the entire project file, but overall the song is almost finished, and I hope it gives justice to the original compared to the older cover version :D

 

As for pushing, absolutely I will continue, this has to be the most fun part, hahaha.

I haven't been able to break RMT either, it's a surprisingly robust music program, honestly.

 

I think the only thing that was a bit off from the conversion is the VU meter itself, because all the combinations used were very specific, for example channel 2 always used the frequency 02 while the channel 1 modulated itself to create these bass tones, so visually it always looked like channel 2 was outputting the highest frequency, same for channel 3 and 4 when I used the highpass filter, it started on the frequency 00 each time, to then pitch lower and lower in order to produce that surprisingly rich sound out of it.

 

With that being said, finishing Battle Squadron next is the plan, I think I got plenty of experimental songs started for another day, I really do hope I can bring the WIP I posted above to the next level, especially because original music was never my strongest force. :P

 

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Hey Vins

 

How about something completely different. 

Have a listen to this one:

 

 

 

 

It's sometimes unbelievable , what this old chip can do, using all available channels. 

You know, I'm not good ( ;) at  ) creating arrangements. 

Here is a proposal for a 4 channel POKEY version. 

64kHz

channel 1 and 2 playing the lead, but channel 2 is playing one octave higher, while channel one keeps the lowest possible octave. 

Channel 3 and 4 used for bass, fx, and drums. 

Some nifty AUDCTL usage given ;)

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9 hours ago, VinsCool said:

I think the only thing that was a bit off from the conversion is the VU meter itself,

Ah, I'm way too lazy to fix this unless someone knows exactly what audctl modes to look for ?

 

9 hours ago, VinsCool said:

With that being said, finishing Battle Squadron next is the plan, I think I got plenty of experimental songs started for another day, I really do hope I can bring the WIP I posted above to the next level, especially because original music was never my strongest force. :P

That's how MadMax, the ST musician started... I think he only published classic C64 covers for a bunch of years before releasing original tunes but in the end he turned out to be the ST's most iconic musician.

 

Your BS cover is a lot better than kjmann's already nice version?

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8 hours ago, rensoup said:

Ah, I'm way too lazy to fix this unless someone knows exactly what audctl modes to look for ?

Yeah don't worry about it, hahaha.
It's just something worth pointing out, really. Using AUDF values does work perfectly fine under normal means, however, certain combinations could make it look considerably off compared to the sound we hear due to that.
Realistically I think most people won't even care about it, or most tunes wouldn't even do anything weird, I suppose :D 
 

8 hours ago, rensoup said:

That's how MadMax, the ST musician started... I think he only published classic C64 covers for a bunch of years before releasing original tunes but in the end he turned out to be the ST's most iconic musician.

I love his work a lot! A great inspiration as a composer and arranger, soundtracks like Amberstar are in my favourite list.
 

 
 

8 hours ago, rensoup said:

Your BS cover is a lot better than kjmann's already nice version?

Thank you very much!
Unlike the updated version of Actraiser, I didn't actually use his module as a starting point, but made my own new transcription.
I hope I won't leave too many errors behind, or ruin it with too much artistic freedom.
It really was necessary to do it entirely from scratch to be able to get things to work at all, anyway :D 

I'll attach below what I have done currently. As you can see it's still incomplete, but will come together soon.

Battle Squadron 2x V45.obx

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7 hours ago, VinsCool said:

I love his work a lot! A great inspiration as a composer and arranger, soundtracks like Amberstar are in my favourite list.

That one's a bit too medieval for my taste ?, I prefer his demo stuff but a lot of his game tunes like Astaroth & Stormlord are pretty good too!

 

7 hours ago, VinsCool said:

Unlike the updated version of Actraiser, I didn't actually use his module as a starting point, but made my own new transcription.

Yes and again great job! I really like those new spacey sounds... This is a tune I've listened a lot to over the years and I'm enjoying it again on the A8!

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So while I was doing some other stuff, my AVGCART arrived earlier today (thx again tmp for this great product!)

And so I went ahead and tried a bunch of tunes myself and @Spring have done over the last 2 years.

 

Here's some hardware recordings from an NTSC Atari 800xl :3c https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DR9NiLmvA7BjhIIz8N4vHIeDQ8-motgS?usp=sharing 

I'll try to get some PAL tunes as well later, since I also own a PAL 800xl :D 

All the tunes I recorded were converted into executables using RMT2LZSS by rensoup, thanks again for this tool man!
Battle Squadron will have to pass the ultimate test when I actually finish it, hahaha

And with that in mind, love the Atari 8 bit! Good night everyone :P 

Etck1whXYAEuhCn.jpeg

Edited by VinsCool
Added a kitty photo!
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