Magical 8bit Vst

[Ramya Bradbury]

Thesample channel sounded like fried dogshit and people barely used it. It was like 1985, and the sample quality was a fraction of what you would get with, say, a CD. So that left composers with only four channels to compose with.

This is my absolute favorite post of yours now. I had no idea you were into chiptune music, where it comes from, and how it's made, but that just makes you a Cool(er) Dude. I make music, just like you, and have made some chiptune of my own. Your 30-second Slow Fawns track on this post fits right into any NES-era game, so kudos.

Very quickly before we begin \u2014 I am never going to charge for my Substack, but I am really enjoying writing on here, and I feel like if I can get a couple hundred subscribers, I might be able to start doing it more regularly (also I am not employed full-time at the moment so every little bit helps). If you feel like contributing, I would really appreciate it. If not, I still appreciate you reading. Thanks.

First, a little housekeeping. Last week, I wrote about my anxieties regarding the state of the podcasting industry. And then on Monday, Spotify laid off 200 people, and shuttered Parcast and Gimlet. Dozens of people I worked with at Gimlet were affected by this layoff, including former Reply All employees. Part of my severance from Spotify was signing a non-disparagement agreement, so please believe I have a lot of feelings I can\u2019t legally express about this, but one that I am willing to express is that this was not an inevitability, and it wasn\u2019t the fault of the people doing the work. Many people who are, in my opinion, the best audio producers to ever do the job are unemployed as of Monday. And it didn\u2019t have to happen. My heart goes out to all of them, and I really hope they (and I) land someplace that can grow deliberately and foster projects that highlight their talents. In the meantime, if you want to pay for this Substack, it\u2019s kinda my only job right now. Alright, on with the show.

That\u2019s kind of a lie. I took two years of guitar lessons from 1991-1993. But I think passively consuming music for hours a week on a loop might have had a more profound effect on my musical brain than music lessons. Nintendo music is borne from limitation (the sound chip only allowed a couple notes to be played simultaneously), but the deceptive simplicity of the music, and the literal simplicity of the sounds themselves made it easy for me to deconstruct the songs I was hearing into constituent parts, and while I may not be able to describe the musical principles being applied to the music, I know how to describe what sounded cool.

Now if you don\u2019t know what a \u201Csquare wave\u201D or a triangle\u201D wave is, think about what you know about sound. Sound travels in waves. The shape of those waves affect the timbre of the sound, and people making electronic music realized they could generate waves with different shapes to make different sounds. Also, waves with simple geometry like a square or a triangle are easy for electronic equipment to generate. So a triangle wave is a soundwave that literally looks like a triangle on an oscilloscope, and a square wave can look like a square or a rectangle.

The next channel is the triangle wave. Triangle waves have a much softer, more resonant sound. On the NES, they were generally used for basslines. Here\u2019s the Super Mario Bros 2 overworld theme with the melody (the square waves) removed.

The last channel is the noise channel. Which is literally what it sounds like. It\u2019s a channel of white noise. If you aren\u2019t a synthesizer nerd or a musician, that might sound totally useless. But if you play some high pitched white noise very quickly, it can be a hi-hat or a snare drum. Take this song from the first stage of Bionic Commando. All those snare drum rolls are just well deployed noise. You can again, hear the two square waves, making the melody, and the triangle wave as a kind of syncopated bass deep in the background.

That\u2019s it! That\u2019s all they had! And you have to keep in mind that EVERY sound on the Nintendo was made on those four channels. Not just the music. Any time the Mario jump sound effect is triggered, it\u2019s stealing a square wave from the music that\u2019s already playing. The block breaking sound effect was made with the noise channel, so it robbed the music of its percussion. And while you can make snare drums and hi hats with the noise channel, to make a really punchy kick drum or toms, you need to use the Triangle or Square wave. Making a triangle wave ratchet down in pitch VERY fast is a good kick drum sound. In short, it\u2019s a miracle that they could use such limited space to make things that sounded like this:

So why am I writing about this? Well, for two a couple reasons. One is that I love this music. To the point where I am a subscriber to The Legacy Music Hour, comedian Brent Weinbach\u2019s podcast about 8 and 16-bit video game music. I find the inventiveness of these compositions, as well as just the quality of the music itself to be really wonderful, and the degree to which these composers could make so much out of so little to be incredibly inspiring.

But I also think that it\u2019s instructive. Separating the two part square wave harmonies, the triangle wave basslines and the percussive noise is a great way to learn about music. I still use all of these sounds in music I make today. In fact, while most of the time I\u2019m just using the synths I have kicking around my office, I actually use a free program called Magical 8bit, which emulates the sounds of the Ricoh 2A03. I made this 30 second song using Magical 8bit, and while I definitely used more than four channels, but I tried to keep the spirit of NES melodies. I think I did ok.

If you have even a passing interest in music, I\u2019d strongly recommend downloading it and trying it out. There are some handy tutorials on how to use it on YouTube. And if you need inspiration, here\u2019s a 45 minute YouTube video of some fantastic NES music. And if you have any questions, just reach out and I\u2019ll do what I can to answer them.I will leave you one of my favorite NES compositions, the escape theme from Metroid. If you want to talk about music in the chat, I\u2019d be happy to talk there as well. Happy composing!

I have been playing Tears of the Kingdom nonstop for the past month, so since I don\u2019t have anything new to recommend, I\u2019ll recommend something old: Bionic Commando for the NES, or as it was known in Japan, Hitler no Fukkatsu. You play a cyborg with a robotic grappling arm that has to stop the Nazis from resurrecting Hitler. You think I\u2019m joking?

When they localized it for the US, they changed his named to \u201CMaster D\u201D and the Nazis to \u201CThe Badds,\u201D but you still get to (very graphically) blow Hitler up. And independent of that, the grappling arm mechanic is one of the most kinesthetically pleasing in the history of video games. You can play it for free here.

I have been listening to a lot of catalog music from the 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s lately - catalog music was music that was created essentially in bulk so that television shows and movies could use it for scoring. There was a British guy named Alan Hawkshaw who made some incredible catalog jams, but it has affected this week\u2019s jambox in that most of what has ended up on here (aside from the first two tracks) is very instrumental and incredibly 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s coded. Enjoy.

Magical 8bit Plug 2 is available in 64-bit VST2, VST3, and AU plugin formats for Windows and macOS. Want to go full retro? You can still download the original version from the product page linked below.

Magical 8bit Plug 2 is a software-synthesizer developed by Yokemura@YMCK which generates primitive electronic sounds like the old 8bit game consoles. It can be used as a plug-in for the host applications that support Audio Units or VST.

Magical 8bit Plug 2 can produce the 8bit-specific sounds, namely pseudo triangle and low resolution noise, that are hard to reproduce with ordinary synthesizers. And on top of that it implements precise controls for 8bit-style expressions like pseudo polyphony, duty envelope etc.

Finally, after 5 years, here comes the new version of Magical 8bit Plug!

This version is totally written from scratch based on JUCE Framework. Thanks for this awesome framework I've been able to add more features than previous version and also able to develop the Win-VST version at the same time in a shorter period of time. I cannot be more thankful to JUCE.

What's more, from this version on, Magical 8bit Plug is open-sourced! If you want to add any feature or any fixes you can grab the code and implement by yourself. And hopefully please contribute it back to improve Magical 8bit Plug.

As a method other than the program code to help Magical 8bit Plug we accept donations. This also can be a mighty force to keep my development happening for the future.

I'm sorry again to say that I'll not be able to answer any basic questions like how to install, how to plug it in etc. because my time is quite limited. Of course I'll be open to listen to the bug reports and requests for new features.

Thanks!

PLUGIN WEEK 2023: The early days of the video game industry were a perilous time of boom and bust. After a few years of intense popularity and profits, the industry crashed, hard! The crash became known as the Atari Shock, and in 1983, it looked like video games were going to be fast forgotten in the west.

Thankfully however, Japanese video game and toy company Nintendo were having great success domestically with their 8-bit video game console, the Famicom. Two years later in 1985, rebranded as The Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES for short) this new video game console would take western markets by storm, single-handedly reviving an industry that never looked back and went from strength to strength, becoming the single biggest entertainment industry in the world, eclipsing films, TV and music by the turn of the century.

3a8082e126