How Do You Make This Kind of Music?

[Darkicon]

Hello, I was wondering how you make this kind of music. You hear it these days in most trainers for games.

Here is a 1:00 sample of one I recorded from a trainer:

http://www.guild-world.com/dsfdsdf.mp3

Thanks.

[heater]

Well, when I was 10 years old my father bought me a Philips Electronics kit. One of the things you could make with that was a "electronic organ". Basically a transistor oscillator with a bunch of springy bits of metal as keys connected to a resistor divider chain to set the pitch. It worked fine but I could not help but wonder how it would sound powered by the un-smoothed power supply of my model train set instead of batteries. Well, it was great, even if it drove my mother nuts. I was well on the road to making that kind of music, apart from the total lack of talent of course.

Years later, in technical school, a friend of mine could play tunes with that kind of sound just by tweaking the dial on a signal generator during physics experiments.

Could it be that what you need is a Moog and some multi-track recording ? Perhaps throw in some variable notch filter "wah wah" effects.

[pinkmouse]

Google The BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

[XEAGLEKEEPER]

I had a Korg Synthesizer that would produce these sounds using VCO's and DCO's

[Duo]

That sounds entirely to me to be generated by subtractive/additive synthesis of multi-waveform generators in a few voices.

It's a little more complex than what a nintendo entertainment system chip does, but works in the same way. Or think of the sound chip in a commodore 64, again, the same idea. Most of that music I find is generated using code through a µPC (processor) to drive a synth chip or two.

Or look at the Ad-lib sound card, using the Yamaha OPL2 synth chip. It could probably make this music.

[Consul]

Ah, the return of 8-bit music.

Many of the effects you're hearing in that piece are the result of extremely fast sequencing of two different tones. This is an effect that came about from Commodore 64 days, when you only had three voices on a synth chip (which had an analog filter, by the way), but you could kinda-sorta simulate two-note chords by cycling as rapidly as possible between two different pitches played by a single voice.

How do you make this kind of music? Well, you have to be familiar with the limitations of the old SID chip and then think your compositions out in terms of those limitations. That piece you posted actually goes beyond the limitations, but still uses many of the effects that came about from people trying to work around those same limitations.

I just used the word "limitations" way too many times.

The SID chip had a three digital oscillators, each with four waveforms: Sine, Saw, Square, and Noise. You could ring- and noise-modulate between two voices (you lost an available voice when doing either). It had one on-board analog filter, a 4-pole low/high/bandpass with resonance, that all three voices went through.

Man, talk about limitations.

[bubbamc119]

Check the Midibox SID synthesizer and sound clips here;

http://www.ucapps.de/

here's an especially nice one;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ludo_d/...7594068987444/

Is that good workmanship or what?

I'm building one - I don't have a choice. I grew up with the c64 and the sounds they're still pulling out of that SID chip to this day is amazing. I owe it to my box of c64's in the shed instead of throwing them out.