I’ll give a few examples of instrument settings I like to use. I have specific ways of translating different types of instruments to chiptune, which I’ve devised largely through trial and error. If you just put notes in Famitracker with basic settings and just two or three different instruments without any special effects, chances are your cover will sound very flat. Section 2: How to Translate Instruments to ChiptuneĪ lot of amateurish-sounding chiptune work I’ve seen (including my old stuff) doesn’t bother with translating specific instruments to 8-bit, instead just using very simple waves for everything. While I have seen plenty of phenomenal chiptune work that uses the VRC6 soundchip differently from how I do, I think my setup suits itself very well for translation-style 8-bit covers. Many people use both DPCM samples and noise for percussion, but I find it too much of an annoyance that those samples make the triangle and noise channels quieter, so I typically do without DPCM. I put all percussion in noise except for occasional triangle kicks, and I use triangle almost exclusively for bass (though I often put backing bass parts in other channels, more on that later). VRC6 was used in the Japanese release of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse and a few other games, and while not very common in old video games, the soundchip has caught extensive use by chiptune artists and is frequently used for original chiptune pieces, with Shovel Knight‘s absolutely mind-blowing soundtrack as a notable example.ĭifferent people have different preferences for what to do with which channel, like where to put percussion, bass, and lead parts. Most NES games use the plain old 2A03 soundchip, which allows for only the two pulses, triangle, noise, and DPCM. two more pulse channels with eight options for width, which are multiples of 6.25% ranging from 6.25% up to 50%.two pulse channels with three (technically four) options for width: 12.5%, 25%, 50%.Something else I want to bring up is that the vast majority of my covers (including the one screenshotted above) are made with the VRC6 soundchip, which allows for eight channels: I also sometimes use speed 4 for songs in a swing or triplet rhythm (one line is 1/6 of a beat). My preferred speed for making chiptune covers used to be 6 (one line is one sixteenth note, or 1/4 of a beat), but these days I more often use speed 3 (one line is one thirty-second note, or 1/8 of a beat), which I find to be a good compromise between allowing detailed nuances in my covers and keeping the project files somewhat readable. Tempo is beats per minute, while speed indicates which division of a beat a single line takes up (lower number = faster speed). The first things I want to discuss are speed and tempo. I won’t teach you how to use trackers in this post, because there are plenty of videos online that can teach you that, so basic knowledge of the workings of Famitracker is recommended for reading this post.Īnyway, from this screenshot, there are a few basics I can talk about. Here is a screenshot of what my 8-bit cover project files typically look like:įamitracker, the most commonly used software for emulating the NES soundchip, looks scary to a lot of people-it most certainly looked scary to me before I learned how to use it. So I thought it would be fun to make a blog post list my personal tips and tricks for translating music into chiptune form. A lot of people really enjoy this style of covers I do, and I myself think I have improved by enormous amounts since I started doing chiptune covers in 2016. It’s also because I enjoy transcribing other music much more than making my own music, so in a way these covers are really just transcriptions under constraints. Though I used to be a big fan of chiptune covers of all kinds, I now strongly gravitate towards such translation-based covers because it’s incredibly impressive when the overall feel of a song, whether it be hectic, dramatic, funky, or relaxing, is recreated within the limitations of an NES console (or more often, expansions thereof). I’ve lately come to realize that my style of chiptune covers is very different from what most people doing chiptune on YouTube go for: instead of making a reinterpretation of a song based on simple chiptune instruments, my covers are made on a basis of translating songs to Famitracker as faithfully as I can. If I was a normal person, I would make a video essay about how I make the 8-bit covers of music that I regularly post to my YouTube channel, but I don’t enjoy video editing at all, so I’m going to discuss all this in a blog post instead. Here’s a blog post that’s a departure from the content I usually post here.
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