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I've been thinking about Dynamite Heady's soundtrack recently. The composition of some of those tunes just outstanding, and clearly comes from someone who's studied jazz and classical composition (the jazz comes through the most). And although the songs loop, there are so many ideas packed into each tune, it never feels repetitive (listening to it again, the music usually offers something totally different every 8 bars). There's also some masterful programming in there (see last of example for mad jazz improv breakdown. Outstanding stuff). Tonight's A Jazzy Night http://youtu.be/3IuoQpiDu3I Ohnami Konami http://youtu.be/xk_SJBZs4xQ Tower of Puppet http://youtu.be/aGSThT6CYMM Hustle Maruyama (Part 2) http://youtu.be/XpIvywdAsJ8 I encourage people to listen to more, because it's so diverse. Something I noticed in Genesis era games is that the Japanese games always had the best soundtracks. I put this down to a difference of culture - the Japanese give that kind of job everything they've got, whearas westerners might give a videogame their second best, because they're saving the good stuff for their first album.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:25
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Streets of Rage. What I love about the SoR soundtrack is that it doesn't sound like videogame music, it sounds like classic early 90s techno. It's of its time, but given this stuff has had multiple resurgences since then, it's aged fantastically. Raver: http://youtu.be/E5g-QHq925o Fresh Prince poo poo: http://youtu.be/zzJVnfHgaiw Beepop and Rocksteady: http://youtu.be/BrXKVEx-Q-c
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Jul 11, 2014 21:54
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In contrast to the other two games I posted, I'd like to nominate Nights into Dreams on the Sega Saturn. This is classic videogame music - a musical genre in it's own right that wouldn't really exist without the medium. Mario is probably the archetypical example of this kind of music, but Nights completely nails it. Suburban Museum http://youtu.be/RCJMhMtr-AQ Paternal Horn http://youtu.be/P384FoKw_Uw Take The Snow Train http://youtu.be/Aj7IncGK6tI If you only listen to one of those, listen to Suburban Museum. For me at least, it epitomises the unspoiled joy and the fun of childhood. It's just beautiful, and the middle eight at around 1:15 makes me teary every time. Another interesting thing about the Nights soundtrack (and the reason the posted tracks are so long) is that they changed slightly each time you played it (the linked clips attempt to go through all the variations). The changes were somehow linked to the Nightopian creatures that inhabited each level. I left them the gently caress alone because I didn't want the music to change.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:18
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This is the last one for tonight, I promise. In 1996, Sega were making GBS threads themselves about the Sony beating them at their own game, I.e. being the coolest kids on the block. PlayStation was edgy and cool. It even had the freaking Chemical Brothers in their games! Sega's answer was to call UK underground label Suburban Base Records and get them to produce a compilation album of videogame remixes. The result was pretty loving awesome. The artists quite obviously didn't have a loving clue what they were doing and just recorded a bunch of tracks with some videogames samples thrown in. Some of those artists were at their peak though, and some of their best work can be found on this compilation. Remarc - Virtua Cop http://youtu.be/y0s_Y45CoH8 Acorn Arts - Baku Baku http://youtu.be/YN_iVzE4kuI Dunderella - Daytona http://youtu.be/woew1zRe93g There's some Richard Jacques stuff on there too, but he takes it too seriously!
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Jul 11, 2014 22:45
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Sebadoh Gigante posted:There was some discussion earlier in the thread about what makes music sound "gamey" and while I can't really explain, I think the music of Yellow Magic Orchestra produced some very videogame-like tunes in the 80s that likely influenced many 8-bit composers. Rydeen is fantastic. As for what makes music sound gamey, you have to look at its arcade origins. Every machine in an arcade was competing to be heard, so you needed to go with high, strong and distinct melodies. Chords and harmonies would get lost among in the cacophony. No room for subtlety. Any vocals (or any voice in the game for that matter) would be doubled up to oblivion. The simplicity will have been driven by the hardware too - something like a C64 could only pay 3 or 4 sounds at once. You're not going to waste this four voices and chords, you're going to have a bass line, a drum line, and a lead melody.
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Sep 23, 2014 18:45
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Brilliant example of how to make your machine audible in the rumble of an arcade: Daytona USA Notice how the voice is doubled up, and each syllable is cut up and pasted back together. You may only hear AYYY OHHH AHHHH, but you could always pick that out in an arcade. It's brilliant sound design.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:24
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I've dabled in recreating and remixing videogame music in the past - it's usually pretty easy because technical limitations mean you've only got 4 or 5 tracks of simple melodies and sounds to lay down. Then I tried to do level 1 off SoR 2. There's a lot of clever poo poo going on, half of which I couldn't even figure out. It's more like trying to work out a professionally produced track then a videogame. Not that skilfully coded music necessarily means good music, but in this case they're brilliant tunes as well. I still maintain that, at the time at least, you could drop level 1 at a club and no one would notice.
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Dec 13, 2014 20:21
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Commander Keenan posted:The theme to Space Harrier is my all-time favorite piece of VGM. This is the best video of someone performing it live. Ha, this is great. My favourite rendition of Space Harrier is the C64 one. It's the first one I heard. All the others, even the original arcade, don't seem to live up to the super hero pomp of the melody. http://youtu.be/vYboj9ismR4
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Dec 30, 2014 08:45
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I'd like to talk about the greatest sound chip ever put inside a computer the SID. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID What I love about the C64 is that it looks and sounds different to other 8bit consoles. Show me a NES, Atari 7800, or Master System game and I likely won't be able to tell them apart. The C64 however had a distinct, faded looking pallet, and gorgeous music, a world apart from the dull square wave bleeps and white noise of the other consoles. It offered musicians control over the basic wave forms that was closer to analogue synthesisers than other chips. You had low and band-pass filters, LFOs, arpeggios, ring modulation, and routing between any of those. The trade-off for that level of control was that it could only play 3 sounds at once, forcing writers to get creative with the sound design and composition. The distinctive rapid arpeggios that are all over C64 music were a way round the voice limitation (aside from sounding totally bad-rear end) - you could play chords, because the chip was cycling rapidly through the notes, one at a time. Bear the voice limitation in mind when listening to this - the tune sounds so dense, and it's entirely through clever sound design and composition: Ocean Loader 5 You could also do ring modulation with two of the oscillators (there's a techy explanation, but briefly it allows you to combine wave forms and make weird sounds). Here's a fantastic piece of music using ring modulation to great effect: Oh No! There's so much great music on the C64 over it's 12 year life span and beyond. I highly recommend getting a SID emulator and downloading the High Voltage SID Collection. Literally 10s of thousands of songs, including all the old classic games, and some more up to date demos. Listen to the Rob Hubbard folder of nothing else. Finally, here's a gorgeous SID dub step demo, highlighting the flexibility of the chip - dub step wasn't around until probably 25 years after the SID entered production. Kasmo - Dub step Experience EvilGenius fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 09:41
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While we're on the subject, I realised something about the Sonic 3 sound track as i was replaying it a few weeks back - The tracks that are generally considered to be the MJ ones are Carnival Night, Ice Cap, and Launch Base. The act 2 music on all of those are straight-up rearrangements of act 1, i.e. there's no new elements at all. My theory is that they paid MJ and his producer for 3 tracks and had the in-house composer rearrange MJ's tracks to save having to pay for 6. Either that, or they dropped him before he completed the proper remixes on those acts. It just strikes me as odd how radically reworked all the other act 2 music is , yet Carnival, Ice Cap and Launch Base seem kind of lazy by comparison.
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Jan 6, 2015 23:03
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Shameless cross-post from the Musicians' Lounge - here's the first track from heavily videogame influenced SDX project. Think Squarepusher and a C64 thrown into a blender: https://soundcloud.com/sdx7df/SDX
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Feb 6, 2015 10:23
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Commander Keenan posted:Genesis tunes. It's tempting to believe one's love of this music is purely nostalgic, but my god those first two tracks are beautiful and I'd never heard them before. And holy crap, Rob Hubbard did the music for Road Rash? I had no idea. It's funny because I worship his C64 music, but I always found Road Rash showed up the worst of the Genesis sound chip, with robot farting bass and nails on a chalk board leads. Edit: Bonus content - cheesey cop show theme that was nabbed for Rob Hubbard's One Man and His Droid Edit 2: both Ecco the Dolphin games had outstanding music. Majestic, haunting, and downright terrifying in places. Here's a classic piece of horror music - Ecco the Dolphin - Welcome to the Machine EvilGenius fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Feb 17, 2015 |
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Feb 17, 2015 22:10
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I may have a look at this tonight, but there are sound chip emulators and soundtrack files out there. They're all ancient (one's a bloody Winamp plugin, if anyone still uses that). I had one where you could switch the different oscillators on and off and isolate certain tracks.
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Feb 18, 2015 08:40
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I mentioned in an earlier post the limitations of the SID chip in the C64, and how composers worked around its 3 voice limit. Here's a brilliant visualisation of that - an oscilloscope view of what all 3 voices are doing through a Rob Hubbard tune. http://youtu.be/c1iY-7ZhVJM Listen/look at the offbeat synth on the middle oscillator, and the bass line/snare on the bottom one. It's a real juggling act, and he manages to pack so much variation in there. Edit: Christ, the sound design on this one is outstanding. Wind and rain, bells, ghosts, wolves, theramins, heart beats. They even manage to emulate the harmomics on an organ using two of the voices. C64 Tim Follin's "Ghouls'n'Ghosts Intro" http://youtu.be/BEUJd8iQiOE EvilGenius fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 22:54
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Commander Keenan posted:Very cool stuff. The C64 is the definitive system for creative limitation. Incidentally, once you know about it, you start to notice just how many C64 bass lines leave a gap on the 2 and 4 for the snare. Limitation is a huge part of composing that's easy to miss in the digital age. If you've ever tried to do an orchestral piece, simply knowing the range of the instruments you're using makes it an order of magnitude more convincing. You hear it on chip tunes too. If you just stack up a bunch of C64 patches it won't sound like a C64, because a huge part of the sound and composition was its limitations.
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Mar 7, 2015 10:01
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That last one reminded me of some stuff I've got lurking in YouTube favourites after searching for chip tunes. These two bands have more or less the same sound, so it may be an entire genre that I've just scratched the surface off. They both find the common ground between the cheerful melodies of early 90s shoot-em-up themes and melodic punk and turn it into something pretty beautiful. Anamanaguchi - My Skateboard Will Go On: http://youtu.be/iCNfYjZ26ow Slime Girls - Vacation Wasteland (Full Album) Chi…: http://youtu.be/SvfeL9vbfd4 Anamanaguchi - Viridian Genesis: http://youtu.be/SGo8RbY5PPQ Here's some more random stuff I found: Scorcher. A WipeOut wanabe on the Sega Saturn. This was done using the Saturn's impressive internal sound chip. The dev team for the game, including the composers, were mostly plucked from the Amiga demo scene. I just adore this piece in particular. It epitomises the moody techno and big beat of the mid-late 90s. An 8-bit cover of Miles Davis. I think they did the entire album like this. Edit: whoops, I broke the rules with the non-videogame music, sorry. EvilGenius fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 00:18
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Slight derail - does anyone know of a SID emulator where I can solo the voices?
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Mar 13, 2015 11:03
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I can't think of a single reason to have the SoR soundtrack on vinyl, but for some reason I want it. I wonder if they're taken off a real genesis.
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May 22, 2015 11:54
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