Spectrum Computing

I thought I'd get gently back into a bit of Speccy stuff by doing a #BeepolaFriday thingy on my twitter a/c. The idea is that I'll do a Speccy beeper cover version every Friday and publish it - regardless of whether it's finished or not. First one is a cover of MGMT's "Kids".

Dunno if this is of interest to anyone or not - might well be a complete flop. I guess we'll see how it goes.
[media]https://youtu.be/EOhmyNjvuRs[/media]

If any other Speccy musos fancy joining in, please do. Not limited to beepola, of course - other editors are available!

Very, very cool. I reckon it's a homage to Xecutor in the first place.

That is some sweet tracking goodness chrrris. Nice idea about beepolaFriday.

Cheers gents. Yes, I can hear the similarity to Xecutor, R-Tape. And that came first -- maybe MGMT ripped it off

Excellent work! Looking forward to many more #BeepolaFridays

Great! It sounds great, specially the drums.
Looking forward for more!

Nice work! So will AY music be allowed in future? And is this limited to only covers?

Good work! I usually favour AY music over the beeper (don't let Mr. BEEP read this), but this was pleasant to the ears.

My memory isn't what it used to be. My 4116 chips made me think of Terra Cresta, not Xecutor when the beat started.

I'm really rubbish at doing AY music -- tried several times with decidedly sub-par results -- so I will be sticking to doing beeper tunes, but if anyone else wants to join in with Friday AY tunes, or beeper tunes made with other editors then that'd be great. If so, perhaps we need to come up with a broader hashtag. #BeepolaFriday may have been a bit limiting

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!

Very nice work!! I love this song

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
[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!).

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.



Ok pep talk over..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

[media]https://youtu.be/beWSB3P3ld8[/media]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5tD1j4Zo-k[/media]

[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.