[sfx]

I've not had much time lately but thought I'd throw up a WIP that I've been playing with for a few days as a bit of a distraction from...everything. It's one of the longer pieces I've done so far at just a bit under three minutes and probably one of the first that feels like a whole piece rather than just a section or an experiment.

There's a couple rather clunky key changes which stick out like sore thumbs. Still figuring those out. Sometimes they work for me and sometimes they don't and I haven't quite figured out how to turn one that's not working into one that does. But I'm getting there. So far I'm only using 3 of the four channels so I'll probably add some percussion-y and/or other decorations in on that fourth channel at some point. Which might actually help with the key changes? Maybe? Don't know.

I really just started making music of any kind back in late October/early November. I'm pretty musically clueless so it came as something of a surprise when making music turned out to be a thing I really enjoyed in and of itself. I posted a thread (Tell me about how you compose music) to discuss making music in general and got a bunch of great replies. Thanks in particular to @packbat who gave me loads of great advice and resources. Whether I've used them effectively or not is another matter. I'd always be happy to hear from more people about their music making process if anybody feels like hopping over there and adding anything.

I think I agree about the clunkiness - in general, the transitions between sections feel heavy-handed? I'm not sure I can offer much useful analysis - but there's some cool riffs in there, and the sections themselves feel like parts of a coherent whole. Like, really, they're very different but they feel related.

And glad to have been some help earlier!

I like the main bass-line and rhythm lead in the 1st two bars, and for most of the track.

About the melody that comes in at bar 3, and future melodies that use the 0 green instrument: It sounds like you've got it using a harmonic (detune 1). This only works well with certain notes. In particular, ones for which the harmonic note is also in key. The melodies in which you use this instrument have lots of notes where sour harmonics are all over the top, making the whole thing sound messy. Try to minimize the use of the harmonic, or switch it to detune 2, which uses the octave and will always be in key if the main note is.

In general, though, focus less on a complex melody and more on creating a full, cohesive sound. A good Pico-8 song doesn't need any big changes or complicated melodies. It's always tempting, in music or any art, to add more and more notes/things, but the real art is knowing what to take out, and leave only what's necessary.

@packbat "the transitions between sections feel heavy-handed?"

Oh yeah, for sure. The only one that kinda works, I think, is the transition between pattern 10 and 11. I actually started as just an exercise to play around with key changes so I wrote three short parts in three different (parallel) keys. But then I got distracted making each section longer and kind of ignored the key changes which was supposed to be the point. But yeah, I'm quite happy with how it sounds so far although there's definitely still plenty of work that can be done if I don't get distracted by something else first. I get distracted a lot.

@UnitVector Not gonna lie, didn't read the docs, didn't really know what detune actually did, just clicked on it and thought it sounded neat in isolation. The whole thing sounds much better with it off or on detune 2 as you suggested so thanks for that! My ear is definitely not at a point where I can pinpoint stuff like that yet. Like, I knew something wasn't quite right but I wasn't sure what exactly.

As for the complexity: I actually originally wrote this in a DAW and was curious how it would sound in Pico-8 so I copied it over. It came as a bit of a shock—though in hindsight probably shouldn't have—that it took up over half of the SFX. Since it's not for anything I don't really mind but it's for sure an object lesson in keeping things simple in the future if I want to be able to have more than one track. Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated!