Nothing special

[VinsCool]

The joys of tuning fork, things eventually work out nicely  
The bass gains the most from that in my opinion, mixing the Distortion C tones to form a nice scale worked really well in that earworm tune especially. 
In fact, everything about that one sounded perfect in my opinion, even for being so short it was really enjoyable to listen, which is usually pretty difficult to achieve on this chip in my opinion.

I also have a composition I started a few days ago in my thread that shows similar elements with the bass tuning, it sounds really pleasant even for being Distortion C tones bouncing between 2 different timbres, to reach an octave lower.
And the most important: it is in-tune to the melody, Distortion A, hopefully.
Too many people say the chip is out of tune, and that is true in many ways, but that doesn't mean it couldn't sound good using some different combinations  

[emkay]

12 minutes ago, VinsCool said:

Too many people say the chip is out of tune, and that is true in many ways, but that doesn't mean it couldn't sound good using some different combinations  

It sound(ed) out of tune because people took the written words without checking the real thing. 

Really, since 1986 I'm talking about this  to Atari users and was offering cooperation. 

I also talked to Benji Soft... Before I was a member of ABBUC , I was a member of the "Atari Club Colonia". I gave some Disks full with games to them, but that club had no future.... what bad times  ... Yeah... it's a different story. 

 

Btw. I don't think the bass in "where is my tracker" is too off. 

It sounds cool somehow. 

OK. The tune orginally needs stable basses, but the "slap bass" has it's advantages.

Edited May 13, 2021 by emkay

[emkay]

21 minutes ago, VinsCool said:

The joys of tuning fork, things eventually work out nicely  

You still won't get it. do you ?

The 8 Bit resolution is fairly enough, if the tones  have been tuned to the 440Hz rule. IN ALL CASES.

The rest can be done by using the PWM and the careful use of the "Bass Polycounter Orbits".

 

What is missing "for the perfection" is the possibility to hear the changes directly. 

[+MrFish]

49 minutes ago, emkay said:

Well, keep in mind that the bass is very unstable caused by the polycounter generating.

 

Yeah, I'm already aware of this. But my ears don't care about excuses. In the end, it either sounds good or it doesn't.

 

[emkay]

Just now, MrFish said:

 

Yeah, I'm already aware of this. But my ears don't care about excuses. In the end, it either sounds good or it doesn't.

 

In the end it is a matter of taste

[+MrFish]

1 minute ago, emkay said:

In the end it is a matter of taste

My taste is for music that's in tune.

 

[emkay]

1 minute ago, MrFish said:

 

Yeah, I'm already aware of this. But my ears don't care about excuses. In the end, it either sounds good or it doesn't.

 

really, why don't people blame the tune that is used in AtariBlast at 1st? The basses were totally off, but people liked it. 

[ivop]

5 minutes ago, emkay said:

You still won't get it. do you ?

WHAT?!?!  It's still you who doesn't know what tuning really means. Why this stab at Vinscool?

 

5 minutes ago, emkay said:

The 8 Bit resolution is fairly enough, if the tones  have been tuned to the 440Hz rule. IN ALL CASES.

NO! If you use dist C basses, you have to tune your other distortions to the bass! Otherwise, your melody and chords will always be out of tune in regard to the bass, because the tuning of the dist C basses is fixed, and not necessarily 440Hz 12-TET, which you seem to think.

 

Vinscool has proved already that tuning to 443.9Hz on NTSC, and use a diatonic tuning, it sounds way better. Almost indistinguishable from a YM/AY with 16-bit resolution.

 

5 minutes ago, emkay said:

The rest can be done by using the PWM and the careful use of the "Bass Polycounter Orbits".

That sounds like fix it in the mix (audio technician lingo), which is never a good idea if you can fix it in the first place. Which you can, with proper tuning. Vinscool understands that.

 

Do you know the difference between a key (musical theory, not the physical piano key), a scale (major, minor, lydian, arabic, etc...), chord formation (sixth, sevenths, add9, sus2, etc..), and tuning (Pythagorean, diatonic, 12-tet, etc...)? This is not meant to offend you. Really, do you know? If not, read up on it. It will really help in communicating about music, especially concerning the limitations of Pokey, and how to work around them.

 

5 minutes ago, emkay said:

What is missing "for the perfection" is the possibility to hear the changes directly. 

That's true!

 

[ivop]

8 minutes ago, emkay said:

really, why don't people blame the tune that is used in AtariBlast at 1st? The basses were totally off, but people liked it. 

Oh, but we're not all the "people" you refer to. You showed several examples of recent games that had indeed awful music that went all over the place. Even out of tune arpeggios.

 

But that's not the point when Mr. Fish points out one of your tunes is excellent (which it is), and the other is ehm.... not so much

[emkay]

14 minutes ago, ivop said:

 

 

But that's not the point when Mr. Fish points out one of your tunes is excellent (which it is), and the other is ehm.... not so much

As it is not possible to offer all possible tastes in music correctly, It's a good point, if a tune fits "perfectly" to the taste of people. 

 

And that is my goal. Showing to people using "whatever" taste in music , what could be done. 

Edited May 13, 2021 by emkay

[emkay]

39 minutes ago, ivop said:

 

 

Vinscool has proved already that tuning to 443.9Hz on NTSC, and use a diatonic tuning, it sounds way better. Almost indistinguishable from a YM/AY with 16-bit resolution.

 

 

Where?

[ivop]

30 minutes ago, emkay said:

Where?

 

 

[emkay]

@ivop

I know that tune  

The arrangement sounds clean, but I also pointed to the "late FX" in  the tune, and the musical flow doesn't really work.

 

 

 

 

And of course I was about PAL Ataris when I was pointing to the 440Hz . 

For NTSC the 443.9Hz solution is better. the 60Hz replay is also a huge benefit .

 

[emkay]

Due to the fact that Pokey mixes the voices in a simple physical way, it is better to have the basses slightly off, put the other channels to a volume where they mix to the resulting frequency. 

The detuning comes mostly from the randomly appearing peak orbit. It sounds louder than the rest. 

There are methods to put those unwanted peak orbits towards 0% of appearance. 

You might know: Pokey has the "random" polycounters, but they were not really random. 

If you check a tune , you can replay a pattern and listen to the notes on the track/pattern.

Using that for now in RMT gives different results than LZSS with all optimizations. 

 

[VinsCool]

37 minutes ago, emkay said:

And of course I was about PAL Ataris when I was pointing to the 440Hz . 

For NTSC the 443.9Hz solution is better. the 60Hz replay is also a huge benefit .

Using the same data in PAL actually gets really close to 440hz, 439.8hz to be exact. 2 birds 1 stone  
Essentially the same tables I made up work in any region. 50hz and 60hz are refresh rates, they don't do anything on the tuning itself, that is derived from the CPU clock speed.

60hz has the advantage of running slightly faster, which makes sound design a little more smooth, and also makes the playback slightly faster, but that's pretty much the only advantages over 50hz. 
Anything will run mostly the same from my tests on hardware. Tempo and global pitch are the only major differences playing back music.

I've managed to get a Atari 800XL from each region for a reason after all  

34 minutes ago, emkay said:

Due to the fact that Pokey mixes the voices in a simple physical way, it is better to have the basses slightly off, put the other channels to a volume where they mix to the resulting frequency. 

I disagree. Having basses slightly off only makes the imperfections stand out even more.
However, detuning does have use, mainly for making certain sounds, like percussions, not clash with other elements, in which case, I agree with you, I find this really useful.

36 minutes ago, emkay said:

The detuning comes mostly from the randomly appearing peak orbit. It sounds louder than the rest. 

There are methods to put those unwanted peak orbits towards 0% of appearance. 

Detuning is not caused the appearance of waves, but the harmonisation with different frequencies, that will then show in the waveform visualisation.
Even if the visuals look smooth, if things are out of tune, they won't sound very good, that is not something most people make up-- this is just how music works.
There are exceptions, however, so I'll give you the benefit that, yes, in some cases, you probably are correct.

39 minutes ago, emkay said:

You might know: Pokey has the "random" polycounters, but they were not really random. 

If you check a tune , you can replay a pattern and listen to the notes on the track/pattern.

Using that for now in RMT gives different results than LZSS with all optimizations. 

Yeah that's pseudo random from what I could tell. they can be predicted, but full manipulation involves more coding than using a music tracker.
Best that can be done is to predict when they happen, so playbacks will usually be nearly 100% identical each time they are running.

That is also why I was able to record sound from hardware in 4 separate recordings and everything aligned perfectly to the full playback with all 4 channels enabled, with noise/buzzy bass waveforms being identical each time.
This is something akin to RNG manipulation, if you catch my drift.
I have to add that I absolutely love the "random" nature of Distortion C buzzy basses, which is the reason I purposefully make them "random", you may have noticed that in the new version of Ode to Schnism video.  

 

By the way, if you "reset" the the registers in RMT, by pressing ESC, things will almost always be 100% predictible, and this is also what helped me develop my filter technique recently.

The same kind of behaviour does apply to polycounters too, just not as easy to "manipulate", but that's getting a little too far in the ramble territory to claim anything, I am not yet that advanced to really know, hehe.

 

 

[ivop]

8 hours ago, emkay said:

Due to the fact that Pokey mixes the voices in a simple physical way, it is better to have the basses slightly off, put the other channels to a volume where they mix to the resulting frequency. 

The detuning comes mostly from the randomly appearing peak orbit. It sounds louder than the rest. 

There are methods to put those unwanted peak orbits towards 0% of appearance. 

You might know: Pokey has the "random" polycounters, but they were not really random. 

If you check a tune , you can replay a pattern and listen to the notes on the track/pattern.

Using that for now in RMT gives different results than LZSS with all optimizations.

You are mixing up volume, timbre and frequency (i.e. tuning).

 

8 hours ago, emkay said:

@ivop

I know that tune  

The arrangement sounds clean, but I also pointed to the "late FX" in  the tune, and the musical flow doesn't really work.

I like what you call late FX, and the musical flow is tremendous, and I have gotten used to the modulation. That is modulation in the music theory sense, i.e.going from one key to another. Not like how one channel modulates another one.

 

8 hours ago, emkay said:

And of course I was about PAL Ataris when I was pointing to the 440Hz . 

For NTSC the 443.9Hz solution is better. the 60Hz replay is also a huge benefit .

My point was not the 443.9Hz solution. It's obvious that PAL needs another frequency for the A note that everything is based on. My point is that theory has finally putten in practice, and that a mixture of the diatonic major and diatonic minor scale work a lot better than the 12-TET tables that were in the magazines and books. That's for the key of A major now (plus related keys, like F# minor). In the end, we need 12 tables, one for each semitone in an octave. After that, you only need to figure out in which key your song is, and use that specific table.

[emkay]

 

 

[emkay]

 

 

[rensoup]

Trumpets in bubble bobble ? 

 

Interesting sounds for sure!

[emkay]

It's about something in the tune

 

 

[EnderDude]

Just to reiterate my comment on that video, I'm surprised that for the past 41 years this machine was available to the public, only recently have we discovered techniques on how to get "controlled" pwm with the filter, along with trumpet-like sounds, etc. It makes me wonder if anyone actually came up with techniques like this before, or if all of this is genuinely a relatively new thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[emkay]

18 minutes ago, EnderDude said:

Just to reiterate my comment on that video, I'm surprised that for the past 41 years this machine was available to the public, only recently have we discovered techniques on how to get "controlled" pwm with the filter, along with trumpet-like sounds, etc. It makes me wonder if anyone actually came up with techniques like this before, or if all of this is genuinely a relatively new thing.

  

 

 I only know myself

[emkay]

It's just that I had to learn about creating music, and the software in the beginnings was rather faulty .

Every progress in the software , ended up in better sound.

 

Here is some old stuff ...

 

 

[emkay]

20 hours ago, emkay said:

It's about something in the tune

 

 

No one?

[emkay]

hm...dygi.obx