Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

On the creation of AY or Beeper music, including the packages used to do so.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Hikaru »

Ast A. Moore wrote: Sun Jan 14, 2018 10:42 am
Hikaru wrote: Sun Jan 14, 2018 8:17 am Sound itself conveys a mood. If you pay attention to it, you will see (hear) that, before there is even a melody or a sense of progression, even the simplest case of having a continuously playing 'sound' of 2~3 notes put together might sound happy, or sad, or scary/awkward/menacing. Or something else entirely.
Only within a particular culture, though. One man’s “happy” is another man’s “awkward.” The jump between a flat 2 and a natural 3 in most contexts annoys me to no end, for example. For many cultures, however, it’s as natural and happy-sounding as the ii-V-I turnaround is for us. Besides, not all cultures use the same 12-TET scale or naturally start to tap their foot to a 4/4 beat.

I'm pretty sure every culture have their notions of 'happy', 'awkward' and everything else in between. You're arguing with something that wasn't in my post.

Ast A. Moore wrote: Sun Jan 14, 2018 10:42 am I never argued against having both. I, myself, have both. That was not, however, what Dave was asking. He just didn’t know where to start and was (probably) having reservations about it because he’d thought “you must know chords and stuff” in order to do music. I offered encouragement by stating that the knowledge of music theory is most certainly not a must.

My point was that it is a more productive approach to try and get the best of both worlds rather than simply hitting random keys and seeing what happens (nothing wrong with that in itself), as well as the fact that it most certainly won't bite even if you try.

- You seem familiar with the concepts yourself, too. Idk really. :lol:

Ast A. Moore wrote: Sun Jan 14, 2018 10:42 am
Hikaru wrote: Sun Jan 14, 2018 8:17 amMusic theory is not some sort of a dogmatic rulebook
As someone who’s taught music for a few decades, I can assure you, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. ;)

“I hear that beat, I jump out of my seat, but I can’t compete . . .”

Now that is just 3deep5me good sir.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by R-Tape »

Thanks all, great posts/PMs here. To sum up my understanding of the points made:

A 'normal' catchy tune follows a variation on a limited pattern, there's nothing forcing you to stick to this but it's maybe the best way in for a beginner.

Not understanding musical notation is not a big hindrance, but why not learn the rudiments.

Tinker, tinker, tinker. As long as you're interested enough and have natural curiosity to try and sculpt your initial random wibblings you might get somewhere. Unfocussed random notes are not enough though, just a starting point. I think sound is much harder than visual art, to go from a childish scribble (nay abstract?) to a wobbly round smiley face is much easier than the musical equivalent, and it's harder to recognise when and how you've done so.

I think I'm getting somewhere with this, but I'm still at the stage that I feel I got lucky that it sounds okay. I've had some success with Jonathan Cauldwell's AY Tracker, which would be a perfect way in but it doesn't do percussion (and it's everyone's favourite piano roll :-p).

This is my best effort so far (from last year), but I reached the point that every time I tried to add or change something I made it worse and I didn't understand why.

I might get in trouble for this but I suspect the impenetrable nature of the trackers is actually holding AY music back. I've read up how the AY chip works and after numerous hours trying I think I'm closer to writing my own AY engine than getting Vortex Tracker to make the simplest of sounds. I can't remember why but I couldn't get WYZ to work, maybe that's one to revisit.

Would anyone be willing to write a short piece on how to make Vortex Tracker do the simplest of AY tunes from scratch? Say assume channel a,b are for notes and c is a drum?

Taking [mention]Wall_Axe[/mention] 's repeating note as a start, where would you go from there? (Or would you go from there?!). More depth, an accompanying channel, more spaces?
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by bob_fossil »

I don't have anything clever to add regarding composition techniques but I wanted R-Tape to know he's not alone in having some some of tracker block. :) When YS put Sound Tracker on one of their covertapes, the initial excitement was soon replaced with confusion and then disappointment as it seemed you had to construct waveforms and then write a song using blocks of letters and numbers.

Now, this should be ideal for me as I'm quite happy using blocks of letters and numbers to write code but for some unknown reason it just doesn't click with me. I'm not particularly gifted artistically either but I've always been able to cobble something together with drawing packages (Art Studio, Deluxe Paint III, Paintshop Pro 5). In a drawing package you can rubber band lines and various different shapes rather than having to type in commands like LOGO to get something on the screen.

The tracker approach - certainly on modern machines - seems a throw back to when you had to do it that way due to the limitations of the hardware back then.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Ast A. Moore »

R-Tape wrote: Sun Jan 14, 2018 12:18 pm To sum up my understanding of the points made:

Tinker, tinker, tinker. As long as you're interested enough and have natural curiosity to try and sculpt your initial random wibblings you might get somewhere. Unfocussed random notes are not enough though, just a starting point.
Yup, that’s the gist of it.

As a general development exercise, I highly recommend the practice of transcribing music. Now, I don’t mean it in the technical term of writing down a piece of music you hear, but as a start, listen to any (preferably familiar) piece of music, and try to focus on a single part or instrument. The melody might seem like an obvious choice, but go beyond that: listen to the bass line, the harmony, the drum kit, or even individual pieces of the drum kit. See if you can hum along with, say, the bass, not the melody.

Then it’s just a matter of converting your humming to a single music track and laying it down with whatever tools you have and know how to use. It’s a good way of learning your tools, too, as you have a concrete goal in mind. The idea is to match whatever sounds the tool can produce to your humming. With practice, you’ll be able to “hear the humming” in your head, and that’s when composing begins. (Most people do it anyway; they just don’t bother committing the “humming” in their heads to paper or disk.) Then you add another track, and another one. Keep changing note pitches and durations until it all just “sounds right.”

Transcribing is one of my favorite exercises. And it, too, doesn’t require a whole lot of knowledge of music theory. It’s mostly a “monkey see, monkey do” kind of task.

By way of example, I’m not classically trained, and I never took classical composition or orchestration classes, yet with just the right amount of determination and a certain degree of familiarity with my tools, I was able to transcribe and create a passable approximation of a piece that should ring a bell to a least some of this forum’s members. It’s far from being identical to the original (and only about 90–95 percent finished), but I think I managed to capture all the important nuances for it to be recognizable. Mind you, all of this was done with a mouse and a standard computer keyboard in a piano roll editor in Logic:

Have a listen.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Wall_Axe »

good rendition of voyager :)
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by hikoki »

Could any ay file be edited with a speccy tracker?
You can find Midi2Ay on WoS. I think it was used for Pietro Bros. You may ask his author how he improved the initial result obtained with Midi2Ay.
Also there are android apps and PC programs that allows creating midi music from your hum. For example, this app is said to work well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... uis.hum_on
Maybe you can find it useful for your compositions as a first step to translate midi to ay.
There is also a program for desktop PC which is free (unlike the phone version) that I mentioned on WoS ( I can look for the name later)

Edit:

see this post where I did a bit of research on tools to work with midi composing : https://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/ ... ent_902473
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by R-Tape »

I'm going to try and learn the basics of musical notation, transcribe something very simple, keep tinkering and hope something clicks, because at the moment I don't feel any closer to a musical eureka. Deciding which way into an AY tracker is another obstacle, at least Beepola and AY tracker are manageable.

I've converted my best efforts to WAV files and shared them on soundcloud. I think the AY track (morningsun) could pass as a congratulations tune on something like Rainbow Islands, but I'm not sure about the beepola track (marsdust), could it pass as experimental or does it just make you wince?

Is it obvious that both are made by someone that doesn't understand music? If not could you explain why in simple terms?
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Seven.FFF »

autosiril by siril is another interesting midi to AY converter.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Wall_Axe »

marsdust sounds really good from the 6 second mark til the 15 second mark,
when that new tone comes in it ruins it


morningsun sounds alright but all the notes are the same type, i dont know the musical terminology,

each note lasts the same amount of time so that is boring
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by R-Tape »

Ta for the feedback.
Wall_Axe wrote: Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:39 am marsdust sounds really good from the 6 second mark til the 15 second mark,
when that new tone comes in it ruins it
So I hit paydirt for 9 seconds? That's progress!

RE the other track - I think the note length is constant in AY Tracker, so I'm going to blame the tools on this one.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Wall_Axe »

oh aye. I didn't like most AY tunes back in the day, the sound tones used didn't really sound good,
marsdust does have a good sound though.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by RMartins »

It was a bit painful to hear, but I endured the full length of both.

If you do not notice or distinguish the dissonant notes, you will have a problem composing any music.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by R-Tape »

RMartins wrote: Mon Jan 15, 2018 7:17 pm It was a bit painful to hear, but I endured the full length of both.

If you do not notice or distinguish the dissonant notes, you will have a problem composing any music.
Now there's a glowing encomium! :lol:

I agree marsdust is wrong (though think it has sections of potential), but morningsun sounds perfectly fine to me, I actually like it!

I think this comes more easily to some than others, in this domain I'm definitely 'others'.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by utz »

Cheers R-Tape, considering they're first attempts, those tracks you posted aren't so bad!

The secret to getting better at music is practise, plain and simple. Of course talent helps, but it's non-essential. Knowing some basic music theory will make things easier, though it's not a strict requirement either. Some people also swear by harmony theory. Personally I think that while it might make you a better/more efficient musician, it takes the fun out of music making. And having seen several people burning out after going heavy on harmony theory hasn't help change that belief either...

Anyway, of course practising writing chiptune music is different from learning a "real" instrument. But it's practising nevertheless. Like others have said, tinkering around is always a good idea. Also, listen to other people's music and try to understand how it is made (Tim Follin would disagree on this one, but then again he's a genius :D)

Some chiptune specific advice. 1) Get away from that notion of "bass goes on ch1, melody on ch2, percussion on ch3". For chiptune, the proper way to go is "put stuff whereever there is space". For example, it is easy to squeeze the bass and kick drum on the same channel. 2) AY editors (and chiptune editors in general) don't simply do percussion*. It's up to you to figure out how to emulate percussive sounds given the AY's arsenal (Hint: A kick can be simulated by applying a fast downward pitch slide to a tone, and almost anything else can be simulated with the noise generator or a combination of noise and tone).

Btw, I can highly recommend this presentation by gasman: https://media.ccc.de/v/SHA2017-175-zero ... n_one_hour

* Beeper is exception to this rule. For technical reasons, beeper routines will often feature a dedicated drum channel.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by R-Tape »

Thanks Utz, great post.

I am currently learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Beepola, and feel like I'm at nursery school.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by OMFG »

Never really had the knowledge back in the day to get a decent tune out of the speccy... or even the BBC Micro's at school.

Only found out recently that AY chip had 3 channels of sound and one of noise, not sure if the hardware implimentation of the Speccy stopped the other 2 sound channels being used... only multi channel sound game I remember was Zombie Zombie (less known sequal to Ant Attack), seem to recall that sent the sound through the TV from what little I saw of it, you had to tweak the TV channel slightly to make the sound clear at which point the picture went slightly off. :lol:

Not my demo... this is an interesting little vid of a synth using 2 AY chips for 6 voices of bleepy goodness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0KcA41SUHI
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Ralf »

not sure if the hardware implimentation of the Speccy stopped the other 2 sound channels being used.
Man, you believe in some terrible superstitions :o Or you are confusing AY with beeper - later models of Zx Spectrum have two different sources of sound.

99% of program using AY play on all 3 channels.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by hikoki »

you can find video tutorials about Vortex Tracker, midi to pt3 conversion, placing music on AGD, etc on David Saphier's youtube channel:
www.youtube.com/user/ChuckBleedinNorris/videos
Last edited by hikoki on Tue Jan 23, 2018 8:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Seven.FFF »

Tagging David here :) [mention]emook[/mention]
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by utz »

Ralf wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2018 5:17 pm
not sure if the hardware implimentation of the Speccy stopped the other 2 sound channels being used.
Man, you believe in some terrible superstitions :o Or you are confusing AY with beeper - later models of Zx Spectrum have two different sources of sound.

99% of program using AY play on all 3 channels.
Well Zombie Zombie certainly uses beeper. One of the first games to do multi-channel beeper, if not the first. Which reminds me - I still haven't investigated if it's using an early version of Mark Alexander's WHAM driver or if the ladies wrote their own. In terms of sound it is very similar, at least.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Joefish »

How do games balance music and sound effects?
My first thought would be to keep the tune to two channels with pitch/volume effects only, no noise. Then use the last channel and the noise generator for sound effects.
But are there games that hijack music channels to play effects then return them to the tune?
Or are there 128K games that still use the beeper for the in-game effects, leaving the tune to play on the AY chip?
I've seen games that cop-out and make you choose either a tune or effects.

P.S. I too am entirely hopeless at music. What I did find that might be useful is some places on the internet provide notation for playing well-known tunes on kiddy xylophones, which obviously have a limited set of notes and don't rely on awkward chords (which I suspect are the real enemy of chiptunes).
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by Nomad »

If you can find them the Schillinger correspondence course is a good way to learn how to compose music. He was famous for being able to give his students techniques that could let them generate music quickly and that still sounded good. A lot of it was based on maths and creating functions that ensured that the music produced was pleasing to the ear but had enough variation to be interesting.

It was used a lot by jobbers in Hollywood who needed to turn in music for the studios and TV consistently. His course was fairly scare because of its cost in today's money he was charging over $230 per lesson for a correspondence course. Still the guy was never poor and always in demand so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillinger_System

I'll see if I can find the course/books there around the house somewhere...
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by R-Tape »

Joefish wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2018 12:15 pm Or are there 128K games that still use the beeper for the in-game effects, leaving the tune to play on the AY chip?
I've seen games that cop-out and make you choose either a tune or effects.
Slubberdegullion 128k keeps the 48k beeper effects and plonks one of my favourite AY tracks on top. It seems the obvious choice but many seem to choose just AY fx - Bedlam wasted an opportunity by opting for AY fx that are passable at best.

I was a bit dissapointed Vallation 128 didn't have AY music, but the AY effects are among the best I've heard.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by MatGubbins »

Cybernoid manages to have a AY tune and squeeze in AY FX. by overwriting the music on one channel.
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Re: Spectrum musicians - how do you do it?

Post by DenisGrachev »

Joefish wrote: Fri Jan 26, 2018 12:15 pm How do games balance music and sound effects?
My first thought would be to keep the tune to two channels with pitch/volume effects only, no noise. Then use the last channel and the noise generator for sound effects.
But are there games that hijack music channels to play effects then return them to the tune?
Or are there 128K games that still use the beeper for the in-game effects, leaving the tune to play on the AY chip?
I've seen games that cop-out and make you choose either a tune or effects.

P.S. I too am entirely hopeless at music. What I did find that might be useful is some places on the internet provide notation for playing well-known tunes on kiddy xylophones, which obviously have a limited set of notes and don't rely on awkward chords (which I suspect are the real enemy of chiptunes).
Latest Crystal Kingdom Dizzy remake use a nice system to mix music + fx on AY chip absolutely perfect! Actually it based on standart pt3 player and shiru's ayfx. Also i'm use a same system based on Eugene Barsky code in my game Twinlight but we are replace a standart pt3 player with a very fast ay player since there is no musch time with dat multicolor.
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