techniques you've found on your own

[psycopathicteen]

detuning - doubling instruments at a slightly different pitch

frequency sweep detuning - doubling an instrument, one with pitch sweeping the other without

fake reverberation - doubling an instrument only with a little delay to it

[tepples]

detuning - doubling instruments at a slightly different pitch

Also called chorus.

frequency sweep detuning - doubling an instrument, one with pitch sweeping the other without (this one works good for fm synth, not so much with NES, I don't know why)

The "LED FUT" tune in Klax for NES does this.

fake reverberation - doubling an instrument only with a little delay to it

That's two-voice echo, There's also one-voice echo, which works better with staccato. You can hear a two-voice and one-voice echo at the same time in the first 15 seconds of "Sappy" by Neil Voss.


I've been known to simulate the Beatles' auto-double-track effect in a tracker by subtly pitch-sweeping a vocal part back and forth in two channels. When I sweep channel 1 up, I sweep channel 2 down at the same time. This produces an effect not unlike a detune but without the vocals falling out of sync. (For example, Everybody wants to make a stupid Flash but we're broke ass n*gg*z and we ain't got no cash.)

[GradualGames]

This is probably nothing new, but to get any polyrhythm, just multiply the two No.'s of beats together and use that as the basis for the length of a pattern. So, I wanted 4 against 3, so 12 is the basis of my pattern. I ended up making my pattern 48 rows long as a result. I know there are other tricks using frame delays and so forth, but I wanted my song to work with my simple sound driver, too

[Bregalad]

I use some techniques you mentionned but I definitely didn't find them on my own.

What I found on my own is by playing the same part with a square wave and the triangle but without the detune/chrous (but possibly at a different octave), it can sound like another instrument and produce interesting results.

I also found how to simulate multiple channels with the FDS expansion sound, visit the forums at www.2a03.org if you're interested about it.

If you are programing a game and only have 2 melodic voices used, it's good practice to use one third for chrous/echo and sound effects. So that when a sound effect interrupts it, it will be much less noticeable as the main voice will continue playing.

[neilbaldwin]

I invented a technique called Triplet Reverb Oscillation Legato Loudness.

It's better known by it's acronym.

[cpow]

I invented a technique called Triplet Reverb Oscillation Legato Loudness.

It's better known by it's acronym.

SemiTone Unmatched Phase Inverted Delinearization

? Am I on the right track ?

[neilbaldwin]

I invented a technique called Triplet Reverb Oscillation Legato Loudness.

It's better known by it's acronym.

SemiTone Unmatched Phase Inverted Delinearization

? Am I on the right track ?

[Memblers]

AFAICT, I don't think I had found any technique completely on my own. I had already been calling local Amiga BBS's and downloading MODs (with the good old 8-bit Soundblaster Pro, hehe) and trackers before internet was available here, so I had already seen all sorts of tricks.

I can think of techniques I had seen on other platforms that I tried on NES. Some of my NSFs have 3 samples when using bass drum and snare drum samples. The 3rd sample is bass+snare mixed. This is extremely common in MODs when channels are limited, but it doesn't seem done much on NES's DPCM. You can do that with all sorts of samples, it's easiest to do with drum sounds though. There's no reason the NES DPCM has to always be treated as a single channel, other than convenience.

I also noticed a technique used in Star Tropics 2 that effects the triangle channel volume by using $4011. It was pretty strange, and I haven't seen anyone else do that the way they did. I found it while developing my NSF player, it doesn't even show the $4011 reg anymore since it's otherwise pretty uninteresting to watch. But it's supported in my player, heheh (it's very subtle-sounding anyways).

[RushJet1]

0:26-0:33 and 0:45-0:51 whatever this is called, it's really a combination of things that sounds neat

2:33 to 2:40 playing squares at octaves with differing volumes to make new sounds

dpcm triangle

Triange volume / echo using samples for delta counter nonsense

triangle echo using quantization

[tepples]

0:26-0:33 and 0:45-0:51 whatever this is called, it's really a combination of things that sounds neat

That sounds like one-shot arpeggio + single-voice echo.

2:33 to 2:40 playing squares at octaves with differing volumes to make new sounds

I've had this happen by accident when trying to combine two squares at octaves.

dpcm triangle

Amazing. What engine does it use? Are the switches between drum sample and the second triangle channel manually tracked, or does the playback engine automatically detect when a drum sample is over using $4015 reads?

Triange volume / echo using samples for delta counter nonsense

By "nonsense", you mean "volume control", right?

triangle echo using quantization

What I found cool about this one was how it played two overlapping chords in the square waves: two slow arpeggios out of phase with each other.

[Bregalad]

OH MY GOD RushJet1 you really know about special effect don't you ??

@Memblers : I find the DPCM usually sound like crap so playing multiple tones on it probably will make things worse. I think Uforia did this, playing bass + durms on DPCM at one time. It probably wasted a ridiculous amount ROM space for this effect though.

The DPCM triangle is interesting. I wonder how this is possible.

[RushJet1]

That sounds like one-shot arpeggio + single-voice echo.

It basically is, but with the squares at octaves changing duty cycle. Sounds vaguely to me like some kinda orchestra where they play a xylophone or similar instrument at the beginning of each note... kind of.

've had this happen by accident when trying to combine two squares at octaves.

I found this out before I started writing NSFs at all. I was playing around with a pure square wave soundfont on my keyboard, and played at octaves and was like "oh, sounds like a 25% wave." I used that extensively in my SMS music.

Amazing. What engine does it use? Are the switches between drum sample and the second triangle channel manually tracked, or does the playback engine automatically detect when a drum sample is over using $4015 reads?

Uses plain MCK, the switches between the kick/snare and triangle are manually done, but all i had to do was copy / paste and change the note, so it wasn't too hard.

By "nonsense", you mean "volume control", right?

Yep. I used samples because just changing the counter all at once produced a nasty click. Samples ramp the volume up / down slower, so they sound nicer.

What I found cool about this one was how it played two overlapping chords in the square waves: two slow arpeggios out of phase with each other.

I actually first did that effect much earlier, in unwilling antagonist (cossack stages 3-4 from Mega Man 4). This effect originally sounded horrible because of the squares resetting each frame in MCK back then... dunno if this one is corrected (I think it is, NSFPlug may be fooling me though).

Oh some more I thought of:

mega man 9.5 - fitting 15 minutes of music in a 32K file in PPMCK using improvised techniques to do quantization, repeat macros, and strict bankswitching (this is not technically a "special effect" but just a way to do other effects efficiently)

alkali earth - layered saw waves for that eurotrash unce feel

Hawkeye - my actual first use of DPCM bass, but it's a lot less impressive than Sing for Absolution's use of it

turbo - took the idea that people have been doing forever with the triangle wave + noise to do a good snare and tweaked it to sound as realistic as i could

our revolution - I wrote a program called Auto Echo that ..automated single channel echo (before this, for songs of mine such as "cruzzazzay," which had single channel echo for the entire song, it took hours just to make notes echo if there were a lot of them). this is more of a milestone than anything because it made writing music 20x easier. Right at 1:12 you can tell that it was clearly easier to do these because the song starts doing echo and never stops past this point

there's another song I don't have here, but sent to a friend. I might be able to upload that later today-- it uses the FDS as the "noise" channel and uses the noise channel as bass.

there are other things like "that first time i used single channel echo correctly" or other crazy effects, but those I mostly noticed in other songs and copied them.

[tokumaru]

RushJet1, did you compose all of that (except for the Mega Man tracks)? Fuck, you have some great songs!

[RushJet1]

RushJet1, did you compose all of that (except for the Mega Man tracks)? Fuck, you have some great songs!

i composed everything i listed but Unwilling Antagonist, Hawkeye, Sing for Absolution (those are covers)

[Memblers]

Yeah, that is some great stuff RushJet, cool tricks too. The snare sound in turbo is awesome. I tried to make snare sounds, but never really nailed it like that.

No one else has mentioned it yet, but one of the coolest sound tricks ever is one blargg found - NES DMC Saw Wave (does square and triangle as well). With controllable volume! It's a little disappointing that no one seems to be using this yet.