Also: MIDI version, MIDI MP3 version

Someone I knew kept complaining that I don't do enough SquareSoft chiptunes. And I rather wanted to challenge myself with this one. So, some technical commentary:

This is my first chiptune with a DPCM drumloop, which consists of the bass drum and heavy toms. This drumloop repeats itself uninterrupted throughout the song. The full loop is 2.598 seconds long, which is much too long for a single DPCM sample, so I split it up into four separate 0.649 second pieces, and the song keeps rotating them in an A B C D A B C D pattern. When the song was set to the correct tempo, the result was a seamless continuous drumloop. But I'm not entirely satisfied with the audio artifacts that came with converting the samples to DPCM.

The string instruments were adapted to 4/16th pulses, while the oboe was adapted to 2/16th pulses. No huge deal. But the deepest bass strings had to be accommodated in the VRC6 pulse channels, which support one octave lower than the 2A03 pulse channels.

The bongo drums were done in the VRC6 sawtooth channel. I first tried to put them in the 2A03 triangle wave channel, but that has no volume control, meaning I either had to have bongo drums at a constant volume, or cut them abruptly after a certain audible length. I wasn't pleased with either result, so I designed sawtooth bongos with a halflife fade contour calculated by my trusty FamiTracker halflife fade calculator. (I ended up not using the triangle wave channel's sounds at all.) I kept wanting different kinds of halflife fades in FamiTracker instruments, and didn't want to calculate them all manually every time, so I programmed this tool to expedite the calculations based on inputted initial volume and halflife period.

The noise channel is shared by two percussion instruments. Early in the song, it's a trivial maraca, which is easy to simulate in chiptune. But in the song's later percussion solo, the channel also hosts a güiro I carefully designed from analyzing the waveform pattern of a recording of a real güiro. Unfortunately, FamiTracker chiptunes have a maximum detail resolution of 60 Hz (which is typical considering a lot of game music was written to use the visual-blank interrupt for 60 Hz NTSC television screens to advance the musical state in tiny increments), so my güiro doesn't have enough resolution to faithfully reproduce the rapid sequence of clicks a real güiro makes. Still, it was better than nothing, and trying to make a second set of DPCM drum loops to include the original song's güiro didn't necessarily sound any better than this.

Made in FamiTracker using the Konami VRC6 expansion chip.

Click here to download the FTM and NSF files.