Game Audio Network Guild

Hey everyone!

The new single from Tom Salta's project, Atlas Plug, featuring a collection of 3 remixes from artists Brent Young, Deprogrammed (Otto Cate) and Kearley has been released at FiXT Music.

Around The World (Remix EP)
1. Around The World
2. Around The World (Brent Young Remix)
3. Around The World (Deprogrammed Edit)
4. Around The World (Kearley Edit)

320kb MP3 Download: $3.75
WAV Download: $4.75

Available now at FiXTstore.com

(Click the logo for Contra-Inspired Anthem music!)

Well, it's not quite Friday, I know, but I decided to at least make a secondary update to this blog to show some things from my past in doing game music in this particular style, namely in showing two tracks that have been favorites, and giving a little perspective some of the techniques that lead up to the creation of those tracks.

My first foray into doing music tracks in this style began while experimenting in Propellerhead's Reason for various purposes (coming up with techniques to teach, for fun, etc.), and one thing I stumbled upon was doing older video game sounds using the synthesizers built into the program.  Thus, with some experimentation, I realized how to do some basic NES-ish sounds, in addition to my introduction to the concept of using a noise generator solely as a means of creating percussive sounds.

 Every example that is shown in this blog were all created within Reason alone. 

To test this, I did a basic transcription/rendering of a very well known theme from the NES era by the great Koji Kondo as a way to test the concept -

The Overworld Theme from The Legend of  Zelda 

After hearing how the results turned out, I then decided to explore specifically the technique of using noise to create a drum track, as the Zelda theme allowed a very rudimentary basis for the concept.  This lead me to a very basic test song that I entitled my Blanc Etude.  Namely, I was practicing in how to manipulate how the noise generator could change in tone and response to get different kinds of hits for different types of drum sounds.

Alongside the noise practice, I was also experimenting with how to recreate the sound of monophonic synths being used to create chords in the music of various NES games, and several Commodore 64 titles out there using nothing but sequencing in MIDI, trying to get juuust the right balance out to make the result convincing. 

About another month or so of practice later, I then put those techniques together into creating my first major track demonstrating these techniques, one simply known as:

The Blue Bomber

The key here was that I was restricting myself to only 4 channels (2 Pulse Wave, 1 Triangle Wave, 1 Noise), all monophonic, and trying to stay strictly in that style for the track in an attempt to be as 'authentic' technique-wise in the process as possible.  The results made me very happy, and it was as fun to write as it is to listen to (even though it was very tedious at some points to pull off some of the nuanced sequencing initially).

I kept on working on this technique in general at times, typically from either doing little simple tracks that didn't lead anywhere, or trying my had at taking tracks that weren't 8-bit style to begin with, and reducing them down to that format. My favorite example of this was one I did of a track from the soundtrack of Killer7 by Masafumi Takada:

Rave On 

At this point, I was getting pretty comfortable with the idea of doing things in a 4 channel sense, and doing drums fully with just monophonic noise.  So a bit later on, when I wanted to do another original track of a reasonable scale, I decided to do things a little differently, especially regarding the drums.  Furthermore, I had read into how various Japanese iterations of games for the NES/Famicom actually had more than just 4 channels of Tone Generators/Oscillators to work with.  One title in particular that stood out to me that had such a feature was the Japanese version of Castlevania 3, or Akumajo Densetsu (Demon Castle Legend), by Konami.

Upon reading into this, I decided to do a bit of a less 'authentic' styled 8-bit track, but one that really tried to capture the sound/feel of the music of that particular franchise in the NES/Famicom era.  I appropriately named this track:

Hunt for Dracula 

The difference in this track, regarding the drums, is that unlike The Blue Bomber, which only used a single noise generator for all the drum sounds, this one featured several tone generators/noise generators that were individually being triggered by a separate device within the workspace.  This allowed for a bit more ease in the sequencing side of things, as I didn't have to draw as much automation to get all the sounds I wanted...but I never was quite as happy with the results as I was with simply using a monophonic noise generator, and simply putting in the work to get all the sounds out I needed.

Otherwise, I really liked how the track turned out, especially in the timbres I got from using different phase settings on the pulse waves to get varying timbres throughout the song.

At any rate, I hope you enjoyed reading over some of my background doing this sort of music, and if you have any particular questions about specific techniques I used for some of these tracks, feel free to ask them in the comment section.  I'll gladly answer as much as I can in the comments section myself, or I might take a bunch of questions, and field them with some examples in a future Famicom Fridays. :)

Thanks, and have a great week, everyone! 

Hey all -

So here's a quick summary of updates from Deprogrammed Studios for June 2008!

More details can be found at: http://blog.deprogrammed.com/

STAFF

Deprogrammed Studios is proud to announce our new partner John Ostrem, who will be handling business for our SW division, in addition to drum tracking services in Austin, TX. We've also brought on several collaborators from around the globe to help expand our catalog.

MUSIC

Nucleus Soundlab asked us to develop a couple of tracks to demo their new release "Viral Outbreak", a sound library based on sounds from the legendary Virus Ti synth. Check out the tracks "Infekted" and "Contagion" at http://nucleus-soundlab.com/viraloutbreak.htm. Reason Refill and VSTi formats and available now!

We've also contributed to several new releases over the last couple of months:

FIXT/Position Production Music Series: Volume 32 - Electronic (Digital + CD - 2008)
Celldweller: Take it and Break it Round 3 - "Switchback" (CD - Release Date TBA)
Transcendence (Score accompanying the book of photography by Alexander23 - 2008)
Harsh Realm: Dual Remix L [Arrhythima/Blood of Another] (CD - 2008)
Deprogrammed Studios Production Music Series: Volume 1 (CD - 2008)

LICENSING/PUBLISHING

The last CD in the list above is our own release, which features 30 tracks that cover multiple genres and moods (action/battle, horror, rock/metal, etc), all of which are available for immediate licensing for film/tv/games/other media.

Our list of publishers is growing rapidly - Stay tuned for more exciting news ahead. =)