#BeepolaFriday

On the creation of AY or Beeper music, including the packages used to do so.
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miguetelo
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by miguetelo »

Very nice work!! I love this song :)
chrrris
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by chrrris »

Another unfinished cover. This is "Bumble Boogie", a boogie woogie classic based on The Flight of the Bumble Bee. Nearly ran out of Friday before I realised and uploaded what I'd got done to YouTube. Perhaps I should rename it #BeepolaEarlyHoursOfSaturdayMorning :lol:
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djWLSh_n3e4[/media]
Not entirely happy with this as I was rushing to get it finished (I failed, obviously!).
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by Nomad »

You are being way to hard on yourself. Sure given enough extra time everything can be made better but producing something to a strict time limit is always going to end in compromises creatively. You probably already have a bunch of ideas/motif for next week, all that extra experience in time management no doubt you will be a bit happier next Friday.

Image

Ok pep talk over..

Image
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R-Tape
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

It's brilliant, redolent of Xecutor*

It's crying out to have a game made for it. Are the beepola files available btw?

*obviously not in the slightest but I do like a running gag.
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stupidget
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by stupidget »

That Kids MGMT track you’ve done is brilliant. I’ve played around with that music app but could never achieve anything to the level of what you’ve done. :D
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by chrrris »

It's really a case of compromising, as the 3 or 4 hours I'm giving myself on a Friday night isn't really long enough to get a finished, polished, result. But at the same time, if I didn't give myself an artificial deadline, I'd spend weeks fannying around on each tune -- or, more likely, just get bored and give up. :D

I'll put the beepola files up somewhere in the next day or two. The only thing I will say is that, if anyone wants to use one in a game, *please* contact me first so I can finish/polish whatever tune you intend to use, and probably also reduce the compiled file size down a fair bit into the bargain. In the state they're currently in, these songs aren't really good enough to go in a game IMHO. They'd need a little bit of brushing up first.
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

Sounding great! This seems to be the kind of thing that the beeper excels at, with those harsh buzzy tones. The monophonic beeper engine Samsynth is reportedly able to produce a sound like a drunken bee, so maybe that would be a good fit! :)
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Alessandro
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by Alessandro »

djnzx48 wrote: Mon Apr 23, 2018 10:55 pm Sounds good! :) If there is any interest in AY music, there's been a recent update to Vortex Tracker that makes it a lot more user-friendly than it used to be. In particular, it now has a sample browser so you no longer have to make all the sounds from scratch!
This is great news, VT has been my AY composing tool for several years by now, and this new edition is really welcome. Pity the newest documentation is only available in Russian, which is pretty much Arabic to me, and Google Translate doesn't always make it more intelligible than that :lol:
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

I know what you mean, it seems like a lot of cool stuff goes on at those Russian forums that we don't really hear about here. I wouldn't have known about the new version of VT if this topic hadn't made me go and look it up.
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by chrrris »

Earlier in the week, I stumbled on the fact that the digital drums in the Phaser1 engine sound a bit like the drum samples from Elastica's "Connection". So I had a crack at that this evening. It has some potential, although obviously unfinished as usual. :D

[media]https://youtu.be/beWSB3P3ld8[/media]
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R-Tape
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

Tis good, I miss the BOOM! That marks when the track really kicks off, too tricky to pull off?

It's a bit like Xecu....no, no it's not. Stop it.
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFridAY

Post by djnzx48 »

Thought I'd post one of mine now :)
I didn't have time to make a new track from scratch, so I decided to take one of my old covers and polish it up a bit. This was one of my first AY tracks that I started back in March 2017, when this meme was still fresh. Trust me, it sounded a lot worse back then than it does now:

[media]https://youtu.be/jSd5vm6c5h8[/media]
Here's the .pt3 file just in case anyone wants to play around with it.
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R-Tape
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

I didn't know the meme until 5 minutes ago but I love this track. The readbacks on that AY Tracker make it look like a demo in its own right.

Top stuff.
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Re: #BeepolaFridAY

Post by chrrris »

djnzx48 wrote: Fri May 11, 2018 10:08 am Thought I'd post one of mine now :)
Nice! That was excellent timing too, as I didn't have time to do one myself this week. :)
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

This week I was actually working on a new track, but I thought it'd be better to leave it for another week as I didn't get time to finish it properly. Instead this is another one that I made earlier in 2017, and it's based on this random internet video I saw.
Spoiler
[media]https://youtu.be/O1zkEasdkBg[/media]
I'm afraid there's no fancy visuals this time around as there's not enough CPU time for them! I would have saved it to tape but I ran into the same problem as described here, so here's a snapshot instead.
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MonkZy
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by MonkZy »

Really good this. Takes me back to a random field, possibly in Wiltshire, in the early 90's. 4-bits seem more than enough. Thanks for posting.
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

Aye this is ace. Your stuff sounds different to the average AY (nice to have a bit of jungle instead of happy hardcore!). How is the synthesised speech done?
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

Thanks R-Tape! Honestly it was so long ago I can't remember how I even did most of this. :lol: The most difficult part was ripping 'clean' samples out of the song so that I just had the pure instruments with no other stuff in the background. The speech is just done like any other sample, but speech samples tend to be longer and so you have to be careful with the amount of memory they use.

Then I think I used this converter to convert the WAV samples to tape and loaded them into SampleTracker. If you look at the video it shows there's only 2048 bytes free, so I had to drop some of the samples as they wouldn't fit in RAM (I can't remember if I used a 48K or 128K machine though). Apparently SampleTracker even supports 8-bit samples, but you need a D/A convertor and it would use up a ton of memory, so it's a bit impractical.

EDIT: The link to wav2tap seems to be down, so I've reuploaded it here. It should probably be archived somewhere more permanent, but I don't know if there could be potential licensing issues.
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R-Tape
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

djnzx48 wrote: Sat May 19, 2018 6:06 am EDIT: The link to wav2tap seems to be down, so I've reuploaded it here. It should probably be archived somewhere more permanent
Cheers, this kind of stuff needs to be given ZXDB IDs at the very least. It'd be nice to preserve the utilities themselves too. It's all about finding the time at the mo.
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

Sorry if this one's a little rushed. It's a cover of the theme song to a '90s PC racing game, Wacky Wheels.
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[media]https://youtu.be/j75-isLnWVU[/media]
wwheels.pt3
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R-Tape
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

It's great, a bit more raw than the original but less like elevator music for it. Love the bit where it 'goes all squiggly' (3.50 and another time before).
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

Thanks! The 'squiggly bit' is one of the most common AY tropes, it crops up in almost every track from the '90s and early 2000s. It seems to have gone out of fashion a bit nowadays though.
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

Phew!! For the first time I've actually managed to complete a track from start to finish in less than a week. It's a TurboSound (2 AY chips) cover of Telephone Line by ELO, a song about R-Tape's poor phone reception while on holiday.
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[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqYu9fQbcAA[/media]
telephone.pt3
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R-Tape
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by R-Tape »

Beautiful! (also love racket at the start)

The AY gives it a Japanese feel, I can’t help but picture it as manga end music, usually involving a couple standing on the shore looking out to sea while the credits roll.
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djnzx48
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Re: #BeepolaFriday

Post by djnzx48 »

Thanks! I'm guessing it's all the harmonies that give it that sound? I tried using just a single chip but I couldn't do it justice, so I thought might as well get my money's worth and make use of all the extra channels.
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