Michirin's PCE Music Thread

[Michirin9801]

Sounds Very Nintendo .

To me, that's some damn high praise xD

AS for that DBZ cover... Damn I love the classical influences...wonder how well a classical like score would sound on the SNES.   

It would probably sound great! The Dragon Quest soundtracks on the SNES are probably the closest things I know to classical soundtracks on the SNES, and they're amazing!

Very nice.  It's so far improved that I'd never have guessed it was based on a GB game.

Glad to know my goal with this cover was achieved ;3

Have you ever heard a Game Boy song and thought: "This belongs on the PC engine"?

Yeah, Tetris..... but someone pooped on the idea. 

Tetris would definitely sound nice on the PCE, but when I asked that the kinds of songs I had in mind were the ones which take more advantage of the GB soundchip and make good use of the DAC channel, like this soundtrack does!

[turboswimbz]

Sounds Very Nintendo .

To me, that's some damn high praise xD

It was meant as such.  as you know I highly enjoy the SNES and GB sounds. (the N64 and some of the latter systems are not so great in the sound departments.)

[ParanoiaDragon]

Actually, the entirety of the GBA version of Mega Man & Bass sounds a lot like the Turbo.  I wouldn't mind hearing some PCE renditions of some of those songs!

[Michirin9801]

(the N64 and some of the latter systems are not so great in the sound departments.)

You know, I feel that consoles lost their sound-identity on the 5th generation, when everyone moved on to CDs and Hi-Fi samplers with way more channels than they'd ever need... It was in that generation that consoles started all sounding pretty much the same...

I mean, if you're savvy enough and you hear an NES song, a SNES song, a PCE song, a Mega Drive one and/or a Game Boy one, among others, you can tell just by listening to them what system they're from, even if you've never played the game! These older more limited systems all had their own unique sound which was tangibly different form one-another... That's one of the big reasons why I'm such a big fan of the GBA sound, it was pretty much the last game system which had its own sound-identity, if you hear a GBA song you KNOW it's a GBA song, because seriously, what other game system mixes bit-crushed samples with GB chiptunes? None! And when used correctly, this kind of sound can be absolutely delightful~

Actually, the entirety of the GBA version of Mega Man & Bass sounds a lot like the Turbo.  I wouldn't mind hearing some PCE renditions of some of those songs!

And speaking of GBA sound, one thing I don't really like on the system is when devs get lazy and don't even take advantage of the GBA's sampler capabilities, you know, when they just make their entire soundtracks using only the GB soundchip which the GBA carried over for backwards compatibility, and use the direct sound only to play sound effects... That was very much the case with Capcom on the GBA, a lot of their games just sounded like original GB games with MAYBE some sampled drums...

I've played Mega Man & Bass on the GBA, but I haven't gone very far in it, and I don't really remember its soundtrack, but I'll give it a listen sooner or later, if it's good I might consider covering something from it, but don't quote me on that...

[ParanoiaDragon]

I won't hold you to it.  Another soundtrack that I love, that most people complain about, is Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance.  That also has more of a PCE sound to it, some great tunes in that game!  Quite frankly, the Turbo can probably do a much better job at the Harmony of Dissonance tunes.

From Mega Man & Bass, one's I'd love to hear Turbo-ized are:

From Harmony of Dissonance(some of them give me a Legendary Axe 2 feel, though, not as much bass:

[turboswimbz]

That's actually a good point.  I think from that early 2k's on, sound in general has suffered quite a bit.  Everyone takes for granted the music quality CD's, DVD,s and now digital formats have given us, as well as the speaker and sound technology in Cars, TVs and other devices.  We've feel in love with mobile phones and computers which do sound poorly, and so everyone has gotten kinda lazy.  Sound isn't used nearly as effectively in any medium IMO including movies these days and it's a shame.  Some great music, TV, Movie, and Game sound still exist don't get me wrong but as a whole I feel like it's a real step down.  I rarely feel emotion from sound these days.

Getting back on point though a bit.  Sound was just a small part that made 4th generation and earlier consoles different and appealing to me. The experience of a Genesis is different from a SNES is different from the personal computers, even though they contained many of the same games and styles. I think music had a lot to do with that. Today a game on steam feels too similar to a PS4 game to me.  There is no variety, there is no reason (for me at least) to own a PS4 over a computer or Wii or Xbox. (save maybe a few exclusives).

sorry That was a long post but, ehhh I stand by it. Just my 2 cents. 

P.S.  Those Castlevania tracks would be awesome PCE-ized.         

[Michirin9801]

Gotta give it to you ParanoiaDragon, the Megaman & Bass soundtrack is quite a bit better than I remembered ^^
And the Harmony of Dissonance soundtrack isn't bad, it's rather solid composition-wise, it's just that the instruments they've used are mostly sampled from simple waveforms, you know, a type of sound the Turbo can easily reproduce, except they're not very high-quality samples... To be fair though, they're clearly using more channels on HoD's soundtrack than the Turbo has to offer...

[ParanoiaDragon]

Thanks, yeah, I prefer the music in the GBA version of Mega Man & Bass rather than the SNES version.

Harmony of Dissonance does sound like it uses more instruments, though, that makes me think of Impossamole, which also seemed to use more instruments somehow.  I don't know if whoever did the music on that one somehow overlapped multiple sounds on one channel or what, or maybe it's just my imagination.

[Michirin9801]

Harmony of Dissonance does sound like it uses more instruments, though, that makes me think of Impossamole, which also seemed to use more instruments somehow.  I don't know if whoever did the music on that one somehow overlapped multiple sounds on one channel or what, or maybe it's just my imagination.

There are a few tricks to cram more than one "instrument" on a single channel, for example, you can take two different waveforms, half their heights and add the results together, the resulting waveform would be those two waveforms playing the same note together on the same channel at half the volume, but that of course means that they'll also be tuned the same and have the same pan and volume envelope, so they won't exactly sound like two instruments... But that's not all you can do, if you also half the length of one of the waveforms and repeat it you can have the two waveforms playing at an octave apart! Granted, that also means that it will be playing at half the sample rate, but still...

This is better explained in this image I've made a long time ago:

(H stands for Height and L for Length)

And here's an example of me using this trick to put 2 square waves on the same channel and changing the octave of one of them by changing the waveform:

_{► /7/2_octaves_in_1_channel_by_michirin9801-dbpxmmz.wav}

This can be pretty useful if you need two notes an octave apart... It will never sound as good as just putting two instruments an octave apart on two different channels, but since extra channels are at a premium on the PC engine... I think you get the idea...

And no this trick will not do chords, notes can only be offset by an octave, if you want to put a chord on a single channel you'll have to resort to either arpeggios or samples, but I generally dislike arpeggios and samples take up too much CPU time and memory, but speaking of samples, that's another way of playing two instruments on the same channel!

A sample can be basically anything you can fit within the available memory, and Sunsoft's Batman has proved two things on the PCE, that you can loop samples, and that if you use too many samples at once, making an interesting game is barely feasible, (at least at the time and with their code)

So, if you're gonna do sampled percussion for example, you can have not just a sample for each of the drums, hats and cymbals, but also some samples for drums and hats/cymbals playing together, which takes up more memory, but is very much doable! Here's the thing though, the most CPU-friendly frequencies for PCM samples are 7KHz and 16KHz, and hats and cymbals sound rubbish at 7KHz, so most of the games that use sampled drums at 7KHz either don't have hats or do them with white noise, which you can't play together with a sample... I reckon a lot of them do have sampled crashes though... So if you're gonna do them, do them at 16KHz, and pray that the coder doesn't mind having half the CPU time to code the rest of the game >w>';

You could also have sampled chords, but you'd need a different sample not only for the different chord notes, but for the different types of chords, so if you were to do it that way, your compositions would have to be highly pre-meditated...

I'm sure there are more ways to fiddle around with samples, I mean, there's some software-mixing tricks that I'm not gonna get into because I'm not a coder, I'm just an artist, but going back to the wavetable synth now, another trick you can do to fit more than one instrument on the same channel is simply clever timing of the instruments! Basically, you're not gonna play two instruments on the same channel at the same time, but the channel will indeed play two instruments, and alternate between the two at key times, I like to use this trick to do reverb on a single channel, but that only works when I'm playing a lot of notes in quick succession, I can pick the time halfway in between two of the notes to reverberate the note previous to the last one by playing it again at a lower volume and panned differently, like this:

_{► /2/1_channel_reverb_by_michirin9801-dbpxtcg.wav}

I've also used a bit of a more extreme version of this trick in my Hatsune Miku Po Pi Po cover, that song has an instrument that updates at 480Hz as opposed to the usual 60Hz, which is the Kick, but here's the thing, that Kick is playing on the same channel as the Bass!
The way I did is is that for 16 480Hz ticks (2 60Hz ticks) an overdriven sine wave will play and lower its pitch by 4 notes on every 480Hz tick, and on the very next tick after that it switches to the bass if the bass is playing, and switches off the channel if the bass is not playing...
Here's a little sample of it:

_{► /8/po_pi_po_channel_1_by_michirin9801-dbpxuqu.mp3}

[turboswimbz]

thanks, Mich.  for this wonderful look into the some of the process you go through with limited channels and such.  I appreciate the chance to see it and have it explained a bit.

[Michirin9801]

Thought I was done covering music from Valkyrie the Power Beauties? Well think again!

[turboswimbz]

It's very nice, Not my cup of tea but I appreciate it none the less.

[Michirin9801]

It's very nice, Not my cup of tea but I appreciate it none the less.

Oh don't worry, there will be more in the future, with varying styles, so there's bound to be something that you'll like better ^^

[Michirin9801]

Another soundtrack that I'll probably never stop covering is Carat Magical Blocks for the PC-98!
I just REALLY LOVE these songs, they're so cheery and happy-go-lucky, just the way I like it ^^

I hope you like this cover as much as I liked making it ;3

[turboswimbz]

Excellent, So energetic!!!

This is another one that reminds me of the upbeat mix up of PCE/SNES sounds of my childhood.   Not quite as vibrant as the 98 version  (man those 88-89 games had some very cleverly done chiptunes) but amazingly done in the same vein.  I quite like the background bits in this version.

[Michirin9801]

"Michirin covered a song from a mainstream game? What gives?!?!"
Yeah, I just felt like it you know?
It's a good song, and I felt I could do it justice on the PCE... Whether or not I've managed to is up to you...

[Michirin9801]

New cover from an old favourite, hope you like it!

[ParanoiaDragon]

Wow, love it!  I also enjoyed Boomer Kuwanger, but my reply to it must've not gone thru for some reason.

[turboswimbz]

Really cool.  I like it quite a bit.

[Michirin9801]

Here's a song I've covered from a SNES fighting game that's a bit of a 'hidden gem' if you will...
I hope you like it!

Also, glad you like my songs turboswimbz and ParanoiaDragon ^^

[esteban]

Here's a song I've covered from a SNES fighting game that's a bit of a 'hidden gem' if you will...
I hope you like it!

Also, glad you like my songs turboswimbz and ParanoiaDragon ^^

Wow, I never gave this game (or its music) a moment of my attention. Never.

This track is quite nice.

Especially with a subwoofer or chunky headphones to help gimmeee MOAR BASS.

Nice?

I meant to say this track is *tremendous*.

[Michirin9801]

I made another album!
Get it here: https://michirin9801.bandcamp.com/album/best-of-michirin-vol-2

[Gypsy]

Bought it weee.

[esteban]

Bought it weee.

Ditto.



The opening tune (Cyberblock Metal Orange) is my fave, I think.

But the Bomberman 5 (SNES) track remains catchy as hell.

So many great songs....

[Michirin9801]

Bought it weee.

Ditto.



The opening tune (Cyberblock Metal Orange) is my fave, I think.

But the Bomberman 5 (SNES) track remains catchy as hell.

So many great songs....

Thank you very much ^^
Glad you guys like my covers!

[Michirin9801]

I hope you like this!
Merry Christmas!

[Michirin9801]

In order to commemorate the release of the Super Mario Land 2 DX Colour romhack, which you can check out here:

I took it upon myself to covering one of my favourite songs from the game on the PC engine! I hope you like it ^^

[Michirin9801]

Here's some more Miku music on the PC engine, enjoy!

[Gredler]

Lesteban gifted me your album on BandCamp today - thanks sir! Great tunes, fun to listen to - great job!

[roflmao]

I am a huge fan of your work. I picked up your best of vol. 1 about a year ago along with Cybertech Custom Covers and just now picked up Vol. 2.  Your music gets a ton use in the car and at work.