Ed.: It’s more than nostalgia that drives the dedicated chip musician with their modified Nintendo instruments. As guest writer Vijith Assar learned while interviewing Anamanaguchi, some more elemental love of digital synthesis leads these artists to deal with esoteric hardware and crashing homebrewed software. Vijith covered Anamanaguchi for New York’s Village Voice, but this trio had far more geeking than could fit in the free weekly’s pages. The band’s front man and songwriter, flanked by talented NES hacker bandmates, muses on the technology and artistic process – and on why, yes, the act did have to start with blowing on the cartridges. (Surprised?) -PK

I recently had a chance to chat with Anamanaguchi, who would probably be the boy-band teen idols of the chiptune world if the scene were to tolerate such things. Lead songwriter Pete Berkman opened up about his creative process and the digital speed bumps he hits along the way, and guitarist Ary Warnaar is on another planet when it comes to working with Game Boy synths like LSDJ and Nanoloop, but the most freakish technical bits came from bassist James DeVito. He wrote later to describe in detail the customized hardware he’s cobbling together for use on tour, which so far has involved modding the Nintendo for multiple outputs, each with a bolted-on 1/4″ jack and volume knob, and integrating a tiny high-res screen lifted from a PlayStation. He’s even considering a built-in controller for the next version.

The stock NES has five channels of sound — two square waves (lead), triangle (usually for bass), noise, and DPCM sample channel. Normally, these are all mixed down to one mono output, but by tapping directly into pins 1 and 2 of the CPU, we are able to separate them into two outputs. Pin 1 on the NES CPU (2A03) contains the two square channels, and pin 2 contains the triangle, sample and noise channel. A third output is gained from a proprietary audio expansion, containing two extra square channels and a sawtooth channel. This particular one, VRC6, was designed by Konami and featured only on Japanese Famicom games. However, with development carts we are able to get the expansion audio on our NES. The extra audio chip is in the cartridge itself, and outputted directly through a pin on the cartridge. This pin is tied directly to pin 9 on the expansion port, which is where we tap in to get our third output. Directly off those pins I connected 1µf capacitors @ 50V (negative leg goes to CPU pin, positive goes to output) to protect the chips from any short circuits or power surges when plugging a cable in. From there it’s relatively simple, putting them in line with 50K pots and outputting directly to the 1/4 inch jacks out the back. The screen is all wired internally. 5V power is taken from the regulator within the screen and fed into the NES. In order to avoid problems, I cut out the 7805 regulator in the NES and applied the 5V where it needed to be. Audio and video were soldered directly to where the RCA jacks are attached to provide signal to the screen.

And what then? Well, let’s ask Pete.

Vijith: How do you do write these sequences?

Pete: It’s a [DOS] program called Nerdtracker 2 that apparently writes music in the language that the NES can understand. It’s a really home-brewed program. It was made in 1998 by a bunch of Swedish dudes, and it never got out of beta, and it’s prone to crashing, and it has all these terrible bugs in it, half the features don’t work.

And the decision to mix it with guitars?

Pete: I started messing around with it and sending songs back and forth with a friend of mine, and in the beginning, the music I wrote kind of sounded “videogamey,” but as I continued writing, my actual musical influence kind of started to get in there. And at that point, it made a lot of sense to put it as an instrument in a full live band setting, with guitars and drums and that sort of thing. Right before going to NYU, literally NYU move-in day, I released the Power Supply EP through 8bitpeoples, which I had recorded totally by myself at my house except for one track which we recorded with James. All I had was a shitty mic and a shitty guitar and a shitty amp and just recorded what I knew, without any kind of formal training.

It was made in 1998 by a bunch of Swedish dudes, and it never got out of beta, and it’s prone to crashing, and it has all these terrible bugs in it, half the features don’t work.

Do you write using a guitar or a Nintendo?

Pete: It’s a mixture of both. Certain songs, I’ll get the idea as a melody in my head. The music is pretty melodic, so it’s pretty transferable from instrument to instrument. Anything I write on guitar I can put on the Nintendo, and anything I write on the Nintendo I can usually play on guitar – unless it’s way too fast, which it usually is.

Recently, I’ve been getting more into making sounds on the Nintendo that can’t be reproduced by instruments, doing stuff that only the sound chip can do. But more or less I like to create a skeleton of the song on the NES. Ary, on the Game Boy, makes some absolutely ridiculous stuff that’s really fucking weird, like, really just straight-up the weirdest music I’ve ever heard. And the way he does it is not so much thinking musically, but technically. When I came into the 8-bit world, I was definitely the opposite. Any time there’s electronic music, you have people who are thinking technically, and usually that’s music that I’m not very interested in, because it’s kind of cold, usually. I came into the 8 bit world with a very musical background, being in bands growing up and stuff, as opposed to a programming background. But recently I’ve been getting really into making strange sounds on the Nintendo that, like, “Whoa, I didn’t know you could do that with that sound chip.” At the same time, I’m mixing that with that simple pop sensibility.

What I usually like to do is to harmonize everything. Why not? You have two square channels. What else are they going to do but harmonize each other?

James: You don’t have the option of chords, so you might as well harmonize.

Pete: I tend to get bored very easily, which kind of finds its way into the music too. Like, “Oh, here’s an idea. Oh, wait, no, it’s gone now. Now it’s totally different.” In high school, I guess I was diagnosed with ADD — whether that’s bullshit or not, which I think it is, but I’m very capricious, and I tend to jump from thing to thing, in life and in music. But yeah, basically, hyperactivity is something I do.

Basically, hyperactivity is something I do.

How does it actually work? All this time I thought it was a MidiNES, but I recently read a YouTube comment where you said that wasn’t the case.

Pete: Two years ago, I was really upset by the claim that it was MIDI, because it was such a ridiculous process that we don’t do anymore. Back then, you would make the song in Nerdtracker 2, and if you typed in a wrong filename and hit Enter, the program would just crash, and you’d lose everything you had worked on. From there, you’d have to hit Enter to create, like, four different files — temp.ihd, temp.dat, temp.dmc, and temp-dot-some-other-shit. And you’d take all those files and compile them in an NES compiler. That would give you a Nintendo Sound File. And you’d have to do this specifically in Windows 98, because the assembler for XP was fucked up, and it would give you the wrong shit, the wrong hex to burn onto a chip. What you would do from that point is turn it into a binary file, .nsf. The only command is “Play this song at this location in the EPROM’s memory.” And so what you would do from there is you would take that binary file and burn it to a special 28-pin EPROM chip that you would have to order in bulk from some electronics company in New Jersey. And then if you’re lucky, the burning worked. And then if you’re even luckier, all 28 pins are in place in the socket that you soldered into an NES cartridge. And then if you’re even luckier, the NES is willing to play the song in the cartridge — instead of having to blow on it — and then it plays. And that’s the process that we did live, with one chip for each different song, having to flip it out with a guitar pick and replace it with my shaky hands.

James: And the chips aren’t even labeled. So it was this long, complicated process.

Wait, isn’t that last problem your fault?

Pete: Yeah.

James: We’ve come a long way since then.

Pete: Yeah, we have come a long way. That’s why I was… not upset, but adamant about saying what it was. But we’ve got this new system that’s the happiest…

James [unzips case]

Pete: Yeah, we have it here. Instead of burning stuff to a chip, you just take the NSF and put it on a CompactFlash card, and put that in a cartridge that will straight-up just play the song, and has a menu. It’s a 2-gig Flash card, so you can put every song on there, and there’s an on-cartridge browser. And we have a screen hooked up to it, too.

James: The card is usually meant for development, but it also plays the Nintendo sound files that Pete exports, so we can actually just go through it and the file browser has all of our songs listed. (And every game we downloaded from a torrent.)

Ary: He’s currently working on a new Nintendo. They’re going to replace literally every electrical component.

James: Well, not everything. But just make it sound better, like improve the output.

You mean just gutting it and rebuilding it with better parts?

James: It’s more like rebuilding the audio output aspect of it, and certain things like the power supply that adds noise to the signal. It’ll have newer parts, so it’s less likely to explode on stage. With our old setup, if major vibrations were happening to it, it would actually just restart the song.

Pete: Tons of aberrations live.

Ary: And major vibrations happen a lot on stage…

Check out the band for yourself; they’re on tour now.

Vijith Assar is a musician, writer, and computer geek based in New York City. His musical projects have tended toward scores for film, television, and
advertising, and his writing has appeared in the Village Voice, the New York Post, Tape Op, Electronic Musician, and PopMatters, among others. He plays the Chapman Stick and might be going bald because of Reaktor.

You’ve heard the chip hype. But there’s something behind it: vintage digital chips can make wonderful sounds. And I’m thrilled that someone has painstakingly reproduced those sounds in an upcoming package.

Emulating analog circuitry, from amps to classic synths, has been long understood. But we’ve finally reached an age when people begin to appreciate the odd idiosyncrasies of digital technology, too. There hasn’t ever been a comprehensive attempt to emulate each detail of a range of 80s sound chips before – until now. Plogue (makers of the highly underrated Plogue Bidule patching environment) and David Viens have tackled just that as a labor of love, and you’ll be able to use the resulting “chipsounds” library later this spring.

Plogue’s chipsounds recreates the blippy personality of the Commodore 64, the Nintendo NES, the Game Boy, the Atari, the Vic20 – and circuit-bent and abused variations, too. It’s got a powerful artist endorsement from 8 Bit Weapon and Computer Her (pictured here). There are arpeggiators, noise patterns, distortion emulation, custom software, all built on the ARIA synth/sampling engine.

The basic specs:

• 7 chips: TIA, 2A03 PAPU, VIC-I, SN76589AN, AY-3-8910, POKEY, and SID. Haven’t heard of all of those? No worries. But you’ve probably heard the chips. The horribly-named SN76589AN was used in my very first computer, the IBM PCjr, my first game console, the Colecovision (boy did I pick them), and in the TI. The 2A03 is from the original NES. The TIA was in the Atari.
• Tricks, built in: One-shot arpeggiators, rapid waveform changes, envelope resync tricks are all built in – stuff that’s hard to pull off, as the creators note.
• Emulations of psuedo noise patterns, distortion
• Switch on each chip’s limited resolution and pitch values – or switch them off, and create sounds the PCjr couldn’t
• Presets from 8 bit Weapon and ComputeHer

When analog synth emulation came out, we all got something more convenient, but it didn’t necessarily do wonders for the music. Here, I think the situation is very different. Many of the original chip instruments have woefully primitive possibilities for actual composition. (The Game Boy’s wonderful LSDJ and Nanoloop are a notable exception.) Compare that to the software emulations of, say, a Moog modular, which lost a lot of what was great about the original – the interface. You can’t necessarily say that about the AY-3-8910, unless you’re the Ludwig van Beethoven of Assembler. (If you are – we love you.)

And the chip scene has also matured to the point that it’s ready to break out a bit. Getting these emulations on computers can help warp them into music and sound ideas they haven’t discovered before. I believe these sounds are really something special, not just a novelty.

I personally can’t wait to use this.

We have extensive details from a Plogue flyer – you can get it here on CDM, or if you’re on the floor of NAMM, you might get it from the Plogue guys themselves.

Flyer – Front

Flyer – Back

And if you want to hear these sounds making fantastic music, go give the artists a listen:

8 Bit Weapon

Computeher

ARIA is an important announcement; I’ll be catching up on news from Gary Garritan soon.

We’ll have sound samples of this too, as well.

What’s new in the world of music technological creations? It’s stunning how much people are creating in their private workshops and bedrooms. I’m pleased to have the chance to share it virtually here, and Thursday night in person in New York City.

We’re proud that Handmade Music returns to Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward this Thursday, presented by createdigitalmusic.com with XLR8R.com, Make, and Etsy.com and sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon. (Free beer.) It’s a party, a science fair of music tech and instruments, a show-and-tell, and a noise-making jam, for musicians, tech lovers, and the musi-curious.

Free (+ free beer while it lasts)
Thursday, January 15
7:30-10:30pm (drop by for as long as you’d like)
3rd Ward, Brooklyn NY
Facebook event page
Going.com event page
RSVP to handmade (at) 3rdward (dot) com — walk-ups welcome, but it helps us to know how many folks are coming!
Directions to the Space

If you’re in town, you’ll want to be there. For everyone else, we’re working on getting lots of documentation for you of the projects, so stay tuned. (We’ll have to have an all-global virtual Handmade Music Night soon!)

Here’s a look at the projects. It’s a bit like having an all-DIY, oddball music tech trade show – eat your heart out, NAMM show! (Warning: one slightly not-safe-for-work clip of a mannequin getting felt up.)

Dueling Gestural Interfaces

GCe2 // GestureSynth from Mouse & the Billionaire on Vimeo.

We have not one but two fascinating takes on gestural objects as music controllers. Brian Kerr is bringing his research into new dynamic interfaces for music, drawing upon an academic background in industrial design, as M Bethancourt brings the Gesture-Controller Exploration 2 (GCE-2).

Mouse & the Billionaire (M Bethancourt): GCE-2

M Bethancourt has created a really gorgeous object, so I’m eager to see it in action. Check out the site for research, presentations, ideas for use, and more. And clearly we have to get Mouse & the Billionaire and Brian Kerr together – they’re working on similar lines, so they’ll either learn from each other or break out into a big gestural music battle. (or, ideally, both!)

The Gesture-Controller Exploration is an ongoing study in innovative musical controllers that explores the relationship between movement, physical space and musical performance. The most recent incarnation is the GCE-2 (Gesture-Controller Exploration 2). Dipping, swinging, swaying, tilting, and turning the The GCE-2 sends signals to the computer, informing its sound-making functions. This allows for a more satisfying performance experience, leveraging the power of the computer and helping the electronic musician to use physical means to create and manipulate digital electronic sounds in new and interesting ways.

Link: http://www.mouseandthebillionaire.com/gce 

Brian Kerr: Dynamic Musical Interfaces

Prototype Video 1 from Brian Kerr on Vimeo.
Prototype Video 2 from Brian Kerr on Vimeo.

My blog link: http://dynamicmusicalinterfaces.blogspot.com/

Vimeo link: http://vimeo.com/briankerr

I’m currently completing my industrial design masters thesis at Pratt Institute. My working thesis title is, Dynamic Musical Interfaces. I’ve started to document my first prototype, which is a wireless gestural controller for Max/MSP. One of my main goals with this project is to create an physically expressive performance device for computer music that is engaging for both the performer as well as the audience.

I love that Brian’s design was able to make use of a 3D printer, because I believe someday these will be as commonplace as the Canon multifunction sitting on my desk. Brian writes:

I worked in the parametric 3D CAD program, SolidWorks to design the exterior casing of my controller. After it was built in with this software environment, I converted the file into an STL format and printed it out with a 3D printer. The bottom of the controller has a potentiometer joining the half sphere with the upper section. To stabilize this connection, I built a pair of channels into each of the parts and inserted little plastic ball bearings for support (I’ll add photos of this later).

Mannequin Parts as Instruments

Richie Brown says he’ll have to see how much he can carry with him on the train from New Jersey, but he’s got a stockpile of wonderful technology oddities he’s created. He writes:

I’ve recently come into possession of several mannequin parts which I have used to house several electronic musical instruments. This marries two of my favorite things: surreal humor and blippy bloopy sounds. One project is the Torso Theremin. It is made from a circuit bent cassette tape recorder. I’ve included a video link here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox2xCvWxPwY

Another is a Leg Maraca as seen in this included video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CLKh28t0Sk

I am also working with graphite’s electrical conductivity and resistance value to make drawings that can be played like instruments.

Wearable Leather-and-Snakeskin Controllers and Other Goodies

Rucyl is already a favorite on this site for her terrific creations, like this over-the-shoulder, wearable (if not so animal rights-friendly) snakeskin-and-leather MIDI controller. I believe she’s bringing this along,

See previously: Sexy Computer Nerd: Rucyl Mills’ Wearable, Over-the-Shoulder MIDI Controller

And her new site: http://www.rucyl.com

She’s also working with King Britt, one of my favorite musical peoples, among other collaborations. She writes: “I’ll be releasing a new album in a few months on my own label, as well as some upcoming collaborations with  Xaphryn Follicle, King Britt, DJ Kiva, and Sarah White. I’m also working on an even smaller version of the elektro-07.”

Prepared NES

You’ve heard of prepared piano. Notendo, aka Jeff Donaldson, will be in with his prepared Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for a bit of blippy goodness, explaining how it all works.

notendo.com

notendo @ last.fm

Premiere of Music Coverage from Make:TV

Maker Channel 101 Screambody, Laser Harp, Cupcake Cars, TV-B-Gone from make magazine on Vimeo.

Phil Torrone of Make Magazine will be on-hand to talk about how the Make community is adopting TV – both old-school (PBS) and new-school (online). We’ll have screenings of some of the music projects from the Make:TV show that premiered this month. Bring popcorn!

And More

Walk-ins of unusual creations are encouraged. The Make crew usually bring some of their stuff in. Machine+1 has promised “An atmospheric guitar and synth deluge- in the fashion of live looping- using custom, handmade footswitch controllers triggering software.”

There’s usually some surprise I didn’t expect. You really are encouraged to bring out stuff you’re working on, even if it’s not yet awesome / functional. Hopefully we can do some of this sharing and learning increasingly online, as well.

"Atomic" cover by Glomag f. stealthopera @ Blip Festival 2008 in NYC from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

Glomag, here’s an idea for your next set: I stand nonchalantly at your side, edging ever closer until you punch me in the face with one of your air fists. Slapstick gold.

And here’s our friend / CDM drinking buddy Joel Johnson interviewing our other friend 8-bit artist Bubblyfish, for Boing Boing and Offworld.

For more video goodness, Peter Swimm has a whole Blip album up on Vimeo:

Blip Festival 08

Assuming you happen to hate chip music (it’s been known to happen), there’s still plenty to learn from this crew. Sure, you could argue they came up with a gimmick – although I think the essence of marketing is figuring out if there’s a sellable hook in something you already love. But having watched Blip and 8-bit music take off, there are a lot of other, underrated factors:

• They worked together. The 8-bit community in general has done a fantastic job of cross-promotion, supporting each other as fans, going out to get gigs, and advocating the work they do, even before you look at collectives like the awesome 8-bit collective. (That, incidentally, is a great place to start looking at this scene.)
• They have fun. People can bring friends to a Blip gig and be sure their friends will have a good time, whether they’re hard-core fans or not. Now, maybe your music is less “accessible,” but part of what makes this work is that the 8-bit folks do throw good parties, and they share infectious positive energy in what they’re doing, which could be applicable to anything.
• They’re on-message. The 8-bit folks really do have something to say about how technology is used musically, and they say it, via all sorts of different press outlets and the lie. That’s helped add to their longevity, because people believe it’s worth following this music over time. Replace those sentences with something you care about, find some other people who feel the same way, and this is something that can be replicated.
• They’re global. I love New York, which has been a epicenter for this kind of music, but New York can’t begin to sustain these artists on its own. A whole lot of this crew tours, and there’s strong coordination worldwide. Even in New York, it’s a niche genre, which means it needs that international reach to thrive.
• They found parallel fields to connect. Cross the streams! Art, gaming, tech – it turned out that the stuff from the 8-bit crowd mattered to people outside the music world. Result: get out of your own personal bubble.

All of these points sound like a recipe to help unusual music genres do better around the world. I have no doubt that we could have more screaming crowds of people in laptop music, for instance, and that even the world’s hot spots (hello, London, New York, Berlin, Melbourne, and company) would like their scenes to improve. Obviously, the 8-bit scene benefits from timing and their unique field. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them and fight for your own Indietronica Augmented Microtonal Banjo movement.

8-bit audiovisual party Blip Fest started last night here in New York, so it’s only natural we celebrate game systems used for music through the weekend in its honor. (Reminder: come meet up with me and Boing Boing’s Joel Johnson tonight, 6-8p, if you’re going to Blip. Facebook event / CDM post)

Sega Master Bitcrunch

The promising new – and music-savvy, I might add – Boing Boing Offworld gaming blog points to a Sega Master System II that’s been turned into a bitcrush/digital overdrive effect.

It sounds absolutely terrible. You know – in a good way.

Bender / chip artist Sebastian Tomczak created this digital monstrosity. I’d actually like to hear some percussive material through it. It’s a beautiful thing, though – now, Sebastian, you just need to make the game controllers control parameters.

Sebastian has been seen round these parts before making drum machines with the Arduino, Processing apps for mobile phones, and controllers out of water bowls. (Sebastian, I would have missed this if not for Offworld – believe it or not, readers, I actually don’t know everything you do as you do it.)

8-bit Multi-Effects

Sebastian isn’t the only one using vintage hardware as effects. Animalstyle, aka Joey Mariano, who played CDM’s (not-all-chiptune) HOPE hacker con performance in July and is playing Blip now, has his own rig. 8-bit fuzz pedal + Game Boy foot controller + 8-bit sounds + guitar = chippy goodness.

Blip Films

Meanwhile, if you’re curious what’s going down at Blip, CDM’s friends at music documentarian 2 Player Productions are sharing clips of their “dailies” with us as they’re posted. Check in later in the weekend for more, but in the meantime, here’s a quick clip of Greenleaf from the “Night Before Blip” open mic night on Wednesday:

Greenleaf @ "Night Before Blip" open mic in NYC, 12.03.08 from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

It begs the question: what’s beneath that burlap bag? Some sort of hideous deformity, a la a Batman villain?

Enjoy the weekend, everyone.

Logic’s Environment, a modular layer in the program for creating custom configurations, isn’t well known to many Logic users. But if you can get used to its slightly unusual interface, it’s capable of some really powerful stuff. You know, important music stuff. Like connecting Logic to your Nintendo NES game system. Jonathan Flugel writes:

The MIDINES evironment was created based on this chart:
http://www.wayfar.net/0xf00000_midi_chart.php

The environment allows for control of the 5 channels of synth/audio that the NES [supports]

Here are the 5 parts:
1-2 – Pulse Synthesizer waves
3-4 – Triangle/Square waves
5- sample channel

Since this is also my primary template for a Logic session there are other goodies I left in there:

1. NYC compression bus channel
2. 3 bus channels that I got from Hybrid (electronic group) for simple drum processing
3. MPC groove templates taken from an MPC 60
4. Ableton Live and Reason ReWire objects

There you have it: Logic + NES + MPC + Live + Reason. If that’s not a digital dream studio, I don’t know what is.

In case you want to give this file a look:
MIDINES.zip
That’s the MIDINES, Logic 8 file (if anyone has a MIDINES but Logic 7, let us know and we can share the Logic 7 file.)

Alex Mauer tips us off with inside information on the work of … Alex Mauer.

Alex Mauer, creator of the first Nintendo cart music album, has already come out with his second cart. The new album features more songs (10) and larger graphics (full screen stills). Songs on the new album were composed by Alex Mauer and Phlogiston (a norweigan composer). The cost is $25 including shipping, and it can be ordered from his website – headlessbarbie.com. For a preview check out the youtube videoclips at his site.

ps – vegavox (first nintendo cartridge) is currently sold out! over 125 copies sold

Prediction: the music of Phlogiston will soon be heard in an upcoming Timbaland production of the newly washed-up Britney Spears. Samples, and “video” (okay, 8-bit stills):

headlessbarbie.com

Renowned Nintendo composer Koji Kondo also presented at this year’s GDC, and we’re on the lookout for reports. If you’ve got any, please pass them along.

The best way to get 8-bit sounds is to employ a real NES system or Game Boy for fifteen bucks and go to town — nothing else sounds quite the same. But for the next best thing, and the ability to do evil things to those sounds within a serious host, this free plug-in from Japan that will do the job:

YCMK Magical 8bit Plug [ Official Site ]

Totally free, totally cross-platform (Windows VST, Mac AU). Via Adrian Anders and the CDM forums, where we’re trying to figure out why it’s crashing someone’s installation of Ableton Live. Not Universal: Note that this plug-in is not Intel-native (nor any of the other examples listed here, as far as I know), so you’ll need to go elsewhere for 8-bit sounds on an Intel Mac, ironically enough. Also, as several readers note over on TUAW, GarageBand has its own Atari Sings patch, though I don’t think it clips as realistically as this does for a true NES sound. (Makes sense that it doesn’t, since those patches are built with Logic’s synths.)

Anyway, here’s what it sounds like, emulating the compositional style of classical NES tunes of yore:

[audio:magical8bitPlugSample.mp3]

The authentic sound comes from the choice of 8-bit waveforms, limited to square, triangle, pulse, and noise waveforms, plus envelope shape. This version is simple, sounds just right, and does the job, and the price is certainly right. Here’s one beginner and one advanced example of how you might use this.

Beginner Tutorial: Add Nintendo Love to GarageBand

First off, here’s how to insert this as an effect in GarageBand, giving any Mac free access to an NES sequencer. (Actually, I’m labeling this beginner, but for advanced users who’ve never used GarageBand, it’s not at all intuitive!) You’ll need to first install the plug-in file (the Mac file has a .component extension); drop it in your Library > Audio > Plug-Ins > Components folder. Then, in GarageBand:

1. Create a new track.

2. Click Software Instrument in the New Track window. Click the disclosure triangle next to “Details…” to open advanced options for this Software Instrument track.

3. Choose “Magical 8bit Plug” as your Generator. GarageBand won’t yet let you edit the options for the plug-in, because you need to save this as a preset.

4. Choose a category. There’s no “Vintage Game Consoles” category, so I chose Synth Leads. Click the “Save Instrument…” button at the bottom of the dialog, and choose a catchy name for your instrument.

5. Now that you’ve saved, you can edit the options for the instrument. Click the pencil icon next to “Manual” to open up the editor for the plug-in.

6. The track is active, so you can try adjusting the settings in this dialog, paying particular attention to the “OscKind” setting for choosing different waveforms. The results will actually sound far better than an 8-bit sound should, because by default Apple has some of their high-quality effects turned on. You can relish the delays and reverbs, or go back and uncheck some of those for a pure, dry sound.

Silly “Advanced” Example

Just to demonstrate how much you can abuse something like this, I’ve rendered a couple of bars of a pattern in Ableton Live dry (sounds like an NES), then with various effects presets from Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig 2:

[audio:8bitexample.mp3]

Guitar Rig works really well as an effects package, and can easily be inserted into a track, giving you some evil sounds that emulate running your Game Boy through a giant chain of stomp boxes and amps. The results are utterly ridiculous. Mostly I want to fire up the real thing and play with that. But this plug-in will be very helpful for the occasional 8-bit touch. One idea: try mixing the noise patch with a fuller drum sound, so you alternate 8-bit hats/snares (or whatever that’s supposed to sound like) with other drums.

I’ll see if this finds its way into some real musical projects of my own, but in the meantime, let us know how it works for you here.

Alternative Options

There are many other options for creating chiptune style music. A few of our favorite plug-in versions: (thanks to W. Brent Latta, our resident gaming music editor, for suggestions)

Triforce, free plug-in from Tweakbench with all the 8-bit fixin’s (Windows only)

Chip32 is unique in that it features editable wavetables (as opposed to the fixed wavetables in the YMCK plug) and a fantastically retro interface:
Chip32 (Windows version, Japanese page but you can figure it out)
Apulsoft Chip32 Mac port (scroll down — or grab some of those other free Mac goodies)

Chip32 and Triforce are completely free, but for a commercial option, you might check out Reaktor’s Oki Computer. Brent notes that it was created “by Timothy Lamb of Trash80 fame – he did some of the music for the game Darwinia. Oki Computer started out as a user-created Ensemble for Reaktor, and then NI later picked it up and had him do an offical version for Reaktor 5.” And, of course, that means if you don’t like any of these options, you could use an environment like Reaktor, Max/MSP, or Pd to build your own.

Intel Mac Users

An updated version of this plug-in is now available with Universal binaries for compatibility with Intel Macs.

Previously:

Mobile Music: Tracker for Nintendo DS, DS Homebrew Music Roundup

Analog Industries Gets a MidiNES Nintendo Music Cart

Avoid Generation NEX; Get a Real NES for 8-bit Music

Prototype Nintendo Music Keyboard from 1984

See also the CDM forums, where you can discuss using real 8-bit systems:

Retro, Gaming, and Oddities Forum

]]> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2006/07/10/8-bit-nintendo-sounds-as-a-free-windowsmac-plug-in-add-an-nes-to-garageband-stompbox-nes-fx/feed/ 78