Heck yeah! Thanks for the track!
(Ooo, it sounds even better on headphones instead of phone speakers with no bass response!)
Thanks for sharing this, both because it sounds awesome, and because I've been wanting to try making a chill techno beat background track for a game and your drum samples will be a big help.🙂
I mean, that wouldn't be a problem if I were to try and use this to figure out some decent-sounding drums, would it?
@JadeLombax Apologies, friend, I rudely forgot to thank u for the compliment; thank u, and thx for listening! The reason my carts can’t be opened and examined normally is bc I feel protective about how the drum sausage is made, so if you’re asking for my permission to copy/paste, then I’d give a polite but firm “no", but I'm happy to answer any tracker questions if you’re interested in hearing my advice?
I'm not very experienced with making music at all and have just done a bit of experimenting with basic chiptune sounds, so custom waveforms seem rather beyond my depth right now, and I was interested in the idea of a starting point to experiment from. Could you point me to any resources that could help me understand waveforms somewhat without requiring prior in-depth knowledge of music creation and trackers?
I got u.
To get the tracker part out of the way, I'm sure you're probably familiar w NerdyTeachers and Gruber's tutorials, but just in case: NerdyTeachers Audio
Also, u should check out Bikibird's series, which gives a programmer-centric approach to sound and music: PICO 8 Music Theory for Programmers. One thing about theory, don't get too caught up in learning it all at once, it's important when you're trying to understand other ppl's music or communicate ideas to other musicians, but your own ear is your best tool.
Biki has been working super hard, and also released PICO DAW recently, which may be easier for u than using the tracker: PICO DAW
For waveforms:
The simplest waveform is the sine wave, and all sound can be expressed by combining sine waves of varying frequency, amplitude, and phase. In wavetable synthesis, we are only concerned with one single waveform cycle, and so generally, the only frequencies involved will be the overtones that mathematically fit into one cycle (ie, the integer-multiples), known as the harmonic series. Adding or removing these frequencies at whichever amplitude will create constructive/destructive wave interference, resulting in the final waveform shape. For example, a sawtooth wave contains the frequency content of the entire harmonic series, while a "true" square wave (50% duty cycle) contains only the odd-integer multiples.
Here's a web-based nice tool to play around with to help understand the concept: Harmonics Explorer
Once you've got that down, Luchak created a good tool that let's you do the same thing, but spits out waveform data u can paste into your cart: Wave Designer
If you're interested in generating waveform data programmatically, see here: Waveform Instrument Encoding. One thing u might do w this knowledge is download some wavetable packs from the internet and create a tool to import them into your cart
Finally, don't be afraid to (first turn your speaker/headphone volume down and) just open the waveform editor and experiment. Don't forget u can use the waveforms as sequence steps in other SFX instruments!
Hope that helps, lmk if u have any questions!
Love it! I even let it loop a few times. I also love the image, it's lovely. I'm saying love too much, haha. 😆
BTW I dunno if you're doing your own minification or using someone else's, but I wanted to point out that you can do slightly better. These two lines are identical in lua:
assets["s"]["caddr"] assets.s.caddr |
Table member deref in lua is just a string lookup under the hood, so if the string you want to look up is static, you can encode the lookup using table member deref.
This saves you 3 chars and 1 token per deref.
@Felice Thx so much, all the love is appreciated! 🥰 Also, always grateful for your input! I’m aware of the dot notation tokens; problem is, it’s old tech debt generated by my build script, it’s been years since I wrote it and I’m afraid to touch it! 😅 ps, I can’t take credit for the art, it’s just a screencap from a Super Sentai episode (see link below cart), whenever I don’t know what to name a song, it just becomes a Sentai reference, which happens a lot 🫣
> it’s been years since I wrote it and I’m afraid to touch it!
God I feel this.
Thanks for the note on the image source, but I figured it was just a screencap and was merely cheering your choice of image and how well it was converted to P8 palette. 🙂
@Felice Ah thanks! Yeah, converting to p8 colorspace def takes a little trial/error and manual touchups!
Thank you for sharing this awesome track! It's been stuck in my ear for a few days now!
Also, thanks for sharing the links to the audio topics – super interesting to get a glimpse into the deep end of the pool :)
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