Raving to Yuzo Koshiro in a Tokyo club

A friend posted a link to this in a discussion we were having via a message board online, and since I’d never heard of this being possible, thought it deserves some linkage:

For those not in the know, Yuzo Koshiro is an absolute genius when it comes to getting the Mega Drive’s Yamaha YM2612 chip to do some amazing stuff (though to be honest, Koshiro had a habit of making the entire chipset do some amazing stuff). The music for Streets of Rage 2 is probably my favourite of his work, though big ups should go to the amazing work he did creating a symphony out of the Mega Drive for Story of Thor, and for some amazing early work on Revenge of Shinobi.

I always thought back when I was younger that the quality of the audio in Streets of Rage 2 demanded more attention. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, it’s nice to see it was a success πŸ˜€

C64 SID remix – R-Type theme song (beta!)

(Don’t care about my rant below but want to listen to the song? Click here to jump to the audio player :P)

Here’s something a little different – nearly half-way through last year, I thought I’d finally do something I’d been wanting to do for years and years, ever since I stumbled across the C64 Back in Time remixes when they first hit the internet.

One of the tunes on the C64 I absolutely loved was the theme song Chris HΓΌlsbeck did for the R-Type port on the C64 – it started off as this cool bass-line and drum combo and then adds a touch of synth and melody to spice things up before breaking momentarily… and then BAM — he goes into this awesome synth chorus, then rolls it back into the previous melody, rinses and repeats with alternative basslines, breaks again, goes into different variations… just amazing, amazing stuff – complex, stunning, beautiful arrangements on such a humble home computer. For those unawares or maybe just want to take a trip back in time, here’s a clip from YouTube of the C64 title screen running a complete loop of the song:

Anywho, going back to the original story before I got distracted – I wanted to do a cool remix of the opening song. Unfortunately, for some reason I really, really struggle with working on audio sequencing and loop-creation programs. I got my head around a reasonable amount of bog-standard MIDI-sequencing when I was in high school and played around with a basic loops and sequencers (like the early eJay series of stuff, specifically Rave eJay), but as soon as I wanted to get into anything more complex, I always struggled to achieve anything! The best I got was mixing stuff on ReBirth on the fly, because I struggled making anything remotely awesome when I tried to build up patterns myself, I used to always get confused πŸ˜› Then I tried messing around on a demo of Fruity Loops, and I had no idea where to even start πŸ˜› I kinda gave up after that.

So, I finally decided that I’d have a crack anyway – the end result takes a lot of the original SID elements because I absolutely loved them and wanted to preserve them, but I wrapped them around some more contemporary progressive trance bass lines. I made a few drum loops as well, but I still think they could sound a bit more interesting πŸ˜› The end result is still in beta, as there are things I’d like to tighten up – the original export file I created was actually lacking volume and bass, and since I couldn’t be bothered opening up the program, I took the file into Goldwave and worked on the volume and selectively equalised the sound to make it sound a lot beefier than the standard export file I created. There’s a little clipping at the end of the track, and some of the SID sampling needs work, but hey, it’s a beta, and it’s been sitting around on my PC for over 12 months and the only audience have been Wifey and members of my family, so I thought I’d put this one out into the wild. Feel free to leave comments if you’re interested, though I’ve noticed this blog’s not getting too much traffic, which is nice because I don’t the streaming audio to take out my bandwidth πŸ™‚ You might need to turn up the volume a bit as well – I tried maximising the volume further, but it kept on clipping πŸ˜›

Note that the various samples are copyright of their respective owners, this is just a little remix I’ve put together for a bit of fun πŸ™‚


C64 SID/chiptune music podcasts

Aside from the irregular (but entertaining) Retronauts podcast from 1up, I’ve been getting into some C64-themed podcasts over the last couple of months. The one I’ve been listening to the most would be the C64 Take-away (http://c64takeaway.com/), a great podcast hosted by the very enthusiastic Jan (and occasional host Makke). Based in Copenhagen, the boys do a brill job hosting the show, which features original and classic SID tunes as well as plenty of awesome remixes of classic SID tunes from the C64. I first got into the whole C64 remixing stuff when the first “Back in time” C64 remix soundtrack hit the internet. Gotta love the C64 love out there πŸ™‚ Funnily enough, the latest episode I think had some feedback from another fellow Aussie, which was really cool — glad to know I’m not the only one down here following their show!

After listening to a couple of episodes, I started wandering around looking for some similar stuff, though I was leaning more towards just the SID chiptunes side of things, regardless of whether they were from games or original SID compositions. I haven’t had a stack of luck finding good podcasts (though because I’m an idiot, I didn’t bother looking around the links posted on the C64 Take-away blog, which I only looked at while I was preparing this post!), but I thought I’d share some of the nerd love I’ve found out there… all two of them πŸ˜›

I snagged a random episode off the 8bit Mayhem website (http://8bitmayhem.untergrund.net/), and I was hooked!! Ended up grabbing their entire back-catalogue of episodes πŸ˜€ πŸ˜€ πŸ˜€ There’s no hosting or talking between episodes here, nothing but pure SID goodness. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated in nearly 12 months, but the back-catalogue is extensive and worthwhile looking into. I’ve got the whole lot sitting on my PC and have really enjoyed them.

Since then, haven’t stumbled onto too much, but I found an excellent SID-related episode over at Hardread’s website (http://hdpodcast.blogspot.com/) – episode 36 was a C64 SID-only special, and it is absolutely amazing (I’m listening to it as I’m typing this post up). If you’re keen to checkout that episode in particular, their page is here. The rest of their gear is chiptunes and demoscene music – if I got into the Amiga when I was younger I’d probably be all over it, but we never upgraded from the C64 until we got our first PC, a 386DX-40, so the C64 was our all-purpose PC until then πŸ™‚

I don’t know what it is about C64 music made on the SID audio chip – it’s just so awesome. It of course helps that the C64 was absolutely massive in Europe during the 80s and 90s, and Europe being the epicenter of dance music in all its various flavours, has meant it wasn’t just blips and blaps coming out of that chip, it was crazy melodies and awesome synth brilliance. My love of chiptunes, game music and dance music on the whole can probably be linked all the way back to all the brilliant music on the C64, whether it be in-game stuff or the awesome demoscene music that cropped up everywhere.

… might have to go and play the C64 after I’ve finished these posts up – I’ve got one more to go before I finish up!

OMG – C64 SID to MP3 project!!

So I was listening to the most recent podcast from C64 Take-away on the way home from work this week, and found out about an amazing project that’s been happening for the last couple of years – Stone Oakvalley’s Authentic SID Collection (SOASC=), a project where some very talented C64 fans have converted all the songs from The High Voltage SID Collection into MP3 for easy, portable listening!!! According to the SOASC= website (http://www.6581-8580.com/), that’s 154473 files of music recorded from real C64s (encompassing the various chipset revisions 6581R2, 6581R4 & 8580R5). Every song from the HVSC has been recorded on all three of those revisions to ensure nobody misses out on the nostalgia trip…

This is crazy awesome news, as I’ve been doing some SID – MP3 conversion on and off, but only through PC emulator stuff. So the prospect of having so much awesome available for throwing into my iPod playlist is supremely awesome.

The only bummer is that it’s currently offline, though a note on their download page promises there might be an update on this at the end of the month. I can assure you I’ll be there πŸ™‚