Same ol’, same ol’

This time ripping the sounds from the SPC files wasn’t new to me, and I won’t go into all the details like last time (if you’re interested, just visit the previous posting).

The New Shit

What was different, however, were the samples present in the files: In F-Zero sound files, basically every sample was loaded with every song, whether used or not. In F-Zero’s case this wasn’t a major problem since the samples were really small, but with Street Fighter 2 this habit began to change a bit: The majority of samples was present in all SPC-files as well, but in the sample-registers 46 and 47, and occasionally 45, were different samples in different arenas, like wood-block and shamisen in the E. Honda’s bathhouse; or sitar in Dhalsim’s temple. In practice this meant listening closely to each song and surveying the sample-number for new samples in familiar places in the register.

Shoryou-! …

Additionally I could also find out which fighters had been in the stage when the SPC file had been dumped from the game, because the sound-samples of the fighters were in them as well — heavily chopped up and four times the speed than they were played in the game; probably another means to save memory. For example, Ryu’s “Hadouken!” cry consists of two separate samples, “Hadou!” and “Ken!”, so that the latter can also be used after the “Shoryou!”-sample for the Shoryouken-move. Seems like it really pays off having played (and listened) to this game 18 years ago or so.

Soundfonting

I did just like I did a few days back, converting the samples to 44.1 kHz, recreating the loops and ASDR-envelopes and putting the new instruments in a soundbank with the Viena soundfont editor.

But the most annoying part in Viena is to construct a GM-compatible drumset, where all the right drum samples are in the right pitch mapped onto the right key. The thing is, that there’s a lot of recycling going on in the SNES-tunes and this over-complicates things in the editor. So for example for the toms you have to add the same sample like six times to the “Drums”-instrument. And in Viena such tasks become a tedious click-orgy.

Progression

Compared to F-Zero there are a lot more real-world instrument samples to find, especially for the drums. The Street Fighter 2 percussion includes:

• A snare drum,
• finally a decent bass (kick) drum,
• a tom-tom,
• a crash cymbal, although with an audible looping point,
• a ride cymbal, used as hi-hats solely in the Sagat stage.
• claves,
• a bongo (used in Blanka’s stage)
• a synth clapping sound for Zangief’s stage (the other analog-sounding drums are just pitched snare and bass drum samples)
• a wood-block sound, also in Honda’s stage.

Yet still: FM synthesized samples are plenty also with this score, but slowly there was a trend emerging of refraining from familiar FM-syth-sounds and towards more realistic, albeit memory-intense, real-instrument samples. It is 1992 we’re talking about, after all.

All things considered, the more samples make the drums much more versatile than those from F-Zero, although I just adore that hearty snare drum there.

Fill ‘em up

Another major difference to the F-Zero is the sheer density in sound-layers. Nintendo’s racing title just used four of the Super Nintendo’s eight simultaneous playback-channels solely for music playback, Street Fighter 2 seven, sometimes all eight! But I guess that’s okay, since the only other sound-samples are punches, groans and special-move shouts and if there’s a very subtle channel pausing for the second Ryu gets punched in the face or Chun-Li yells “Spinning Bird Kick!” so be it.

And the channels are packed! There hardly is any silence in either of them when the music is busy. Even solo-ing only three channels sound like four or five: Capcom’s sound team really packed the tracks with so much stuff that it’s almost a bit too much, in my opinion…

Some Music, eh?

But enough with the the chewing of technical facts and limitations, let’s hear some music! And instead of trying to recreate the tracks we all know by heart, I played a bit with my SNES sound-fonts so far and came up with two new original songs in the style of real old-school SNES music.

This one is my F-Zero tribute, take a listen:

Black Gulch (F-Zero Tribute) by sephcarissa

And the track below is the music to my fictitious stage, also a humble attempt at trying to catch the flair of Street Fighter 2′s score.

Seph’s Stage (Street Fighter 2 Tribute) by sephcarissa

Donwload and Donation

And there are a few of you who are just here for getting their hands on my soundfont, so I thought I give it away for a donation. Have fun! And thanks for listening and reading, y’all!

	Click the Image to download my SNES Street Fighter 2 Soundfont

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PS: If you love the meticulously hand-pixeled arenas as much as I do, you might wanna visit this site!

Creating Games Back Then

So Jot is a game designer, isn’t that great? We had a little chat about how it all began and he was raving about an ancient program by Europress Software called Klik & Play. And boy, how well and dear do I remember that program! I got it as limited shareware with one of the first PC magazines with CD-ROMs, actually from one titled “PC Spiel mit CD-ROM” that literally translates to “PC-Game with CD-ROM” (I even blogged about it!). With this software you could create simple games across various screens, with your own animations, your own game mechanics and your own story. It was like Mario Paint on meth. To me as a 12-year old it was creative heaven.
The limitation of the demo was only in content, you didn’t have as many pre-animated sprites and backgrounds to choose from and your games were limited to only two or three screens¹. But the successive issues of PC-Spiel mit CD-ROM supplied me with games by other homebrew-creators: There was a real-time Worms clone, a game where you had to break out of prison and escape the police or a medieval fighting game. Best of all: I could open those games in K&P and, voilà, I dodged the screen count limitation of the shareware version. As a kid I obviously was pretty handy levering out that kinda stuff. I even went through the hassle to rework some of the original games with better graphics, sounds and animations. As a kid I was also an obvious smart-ass. But it was fun. Like Mario Paint on meth.

The successor of Klik & Play was the Games Factory and ultimately Multiumedia Fusion, the software that Jot is currently using to make his many games.

Pitiri or the importance of being obsessed

About two years ago Jot started working more or less alone on his awesome retro-styled jump ‘n’ run called Pitiri; although ‘retro’ in the sense of 1970′s hairdo and music, not so much ‘retro’ in the sense of chunky pixels in stunning three colors. No, Pitiri is different, yet so comfortably familiar.

When I visited Jot his room’s walls were plastered with designs of levels and enemies and the game-flow itself, hell, they still *are*! It took him many months and hundreds of hours to create the world and narrative of Pitiri. Apart from the intro, some sounds and graphic assets he did everything himself, occasionally having a fistful of friends as unpaid beta-testers. I was lucky and honored to be among them and gave poor Jot a hell of a time with my many pages of bug-reports for a simple single level. I’m a smartass, at least that’s what people keep telling me. Jot also composed and performed every musical piece in the game and, until I learned about that, I could swear I heard some old but good Neil Young song in the beginning.

The game still isn’t finished but what I have seen and experienced so far from Eli’s quest for his abducted brother I can assure you it’s gonna be great! I mean I talked with a robot, traveled in space and could turn myself into fire! Even at the same time, if I wanted to!

The requests

I am a big fan of independent artists, regardless of their medium. So I like to help out Jot occasionally with my ruthless selflessness … ahem. Okay, who am I kidding? I do it for the fame, the money and the girls²!

For example, Jot needed a “playful, computer-styled retro font” so I spent one or two afternoons with my sketchbook in my favorite café and designed him a font I titled Digital Disco despite the fact that there’s already a font by that name, as I learned much later after a quick Google search.

If you’re interested in my font, you can get it here as donation ware, which means you can have it for free but not clicking either the Flattr, the Kachingle or the PayPal Donate button makes Baby Jesus and Baby Moses cry. And nobody wants that, right?

But there was a new request: A couple of days ago my good friend Jot from ilikescifi.com told me about a new game of his in beta, called “Aratatatt” which will be available in the near future on the interwebz (I keep you up to date). It’s a jump and shoot in a post-apocalyptic world populated by evil robots. Since the game was all retro again (the synth-pop and new-wave soundtrack by none other than Jot himself) it featured a level boss. And Jot wanted 8-bit sound for it and asked me if I could supply him with a loopable chiptune that would last a good 40 seconds at least.

That’s what he told me via Steam when we were roaming our individual irradiated wasteland of the Mojave desert of Fallout New Vegas. As I was in a tough fight in Vault 3 with some fiends I got the guideline from Jot: “I’d love it to be just like a great Metroid-like showdown. I want 8-bit metal!”. I walked in the rearmost chamber of the vault with my companions Rex and Cass as I heard another message come in from Jot: “It’d be great in the next two days or so!” Only two days?! I took down Motor Runner with a skilled headshot and exited the game. I had work to do.

The tune

I switched on my Yamaha keyboard and launched the magnificent FamiTracker, a capable tracker that allows anybody interested and nerdy enough to make her or his own NES-compatible chiptunes with it, and hit some notes. It sounded terrible. I took some more time to tweak on my instruments, to come up with a rhythm and melody, hit the keys and — major suckage again. After an hour I was in grave despair and spent the following hour looking for kick and snare drum samples to use in the DPCM channel. Luckily end-boss-8bit-metal has a fairly straight-forward percussion. Really bland.

Then I tried coming up with a melody or at least a rough direction to the sampled drums, using the noise channel for hi-hats. Nada. I was incredibly frustrated until I decided to listen to some game soundtracks in my vast library. I hit gold when I dug up the soundtrack to Legend of Xanadu. The first part in my tune is largely based on the track JEMEUX MOUVAIS in the game, whereas the intro was inspired a little by XARKAS although my lacking proficiency in chiptuning really shows when you compare my tune to these two songs.

So finally I could start with the first part and it sounded really good and I got really far by my standards: 20 seconds. And absolutely no clue how to stretch it to 40 seconds. So I sat there, in front of the computer, the sun already up again. That’s when I went to bed. Luckily I was on a night shift the next day. So when I came back from work around 3 a.m. the next day I sat straight to my Mac and moonlighted color grading on some another project. Whenever I had graded enough shots for a decent render time, I switched to composing on the chiptune until the next batch of shots was ready to be colored. Despite what anybody’s common sense would imply, this back-and-forth of two totally different demands was highly effective and I managed to compose two patterns of nice breaks for the tune. This helped me out another 10 or so seconds but I still wasn’t very close to 40, and again, out of ideas.

That was when I really took the coward’s exit and after half the song I just transposed everything up one note and repeated what I had so far with some minor variations. I played it and took the time. Almost 50 seconds for the loop. I was free! And the sun had already risen again. But I wanted to be sure that it would sound good enough for Jot, so I copied the compiled song onto a CF-card, popped it into the PowerPak and turned on my TV. I wanted to know what it sounded like on a real NES.

It sounded holey, a lot of instruments weren’t playing and I was pissed. I went back to the tracker and tweaked around the omitted sounds in the hope of eradicating the problem. I don’t know what I did but the next time it worked. Like a charm. And it sounded really thick and familiar. Thanks to the system’s bias to let the song more or less completely clip and apply a rather stringent low-pass filter. But it was an analogue and warm clipping and the low-pass only made it less clicky.

As soon as I was done I sent it off to Jot and awaited his reaction. I was really hoping that I didn’t disappoint him too profoundly but a couple of hours I got his feedback: “shit phil it works so fucking well! you gonna love it. shit! thanks.”

Despite all the profanity it’s still the best reaction I ever got to a chiptune of my own. And since it is now officially Jot-approved I thought I might share it with you. You can listen to it here or even download the .NSF-file below. Enjoy! And you might want to click the Flattr or Kachingle button…

Seph Carissa – Showdown. 2010.
Download audio file (seph_carissa_-_showdown.mp3)
No player? Try this.

³
Download .NSF

Level Information:

• This level occupies 50 MB in your memory and has a time limit of 55:27 min.
• This podcast is EXPLICIT because occasionally the dreaded F-word escaped my mouth. It’s a fuckin habit — I’m sorry

If you like it then feel free to click the Flattr button on this site and/or drop me a comment. Thanks!

I was working like crazy for many hours straight on that song, the melancholic and desperate flair I was trying to achieve eventually made images pop up in my head, so I guess I succeeded in creating something evocative. In fact, the images and the feel was so clear that I wrote down a little story.

Ideally you click now the play-button and read the short story below.

I guess it was one of those days where the simple act of waking up exhausted me so much that everything I did felt so mind numbing and tedious like following a paper trail.

But I won’t bore you even more with my gloomy day, just enjoy some music:
Seph Carissa – Papertrail. 2010.
Download audio file (seph_carissa_-_papertrail_v01.mp3)

On a related note I decided to changed my alias as music producing artist from texx sound to Seph Carissa. I’ve been pondering than for quite a while now and waited for the right name to find me. So there it is, texx is gone, Seph takes over. Why? Long story. Too long to tell, so you I suggest you only listen.

My new track, Vaccine, it a little inspired by recently watching 28 Weeks Later and I wanted to try something longer and more cinematic for a change. So I hope you enjoy it!

Seph Carissa – Vaccine. 2010.
Download audio file (seph_carissa_-_vaccine_v01.mp3)

Today I couldn’t sleep. Maybe the visual overkill of watching Avatar hours before is responsible for it. By the way: A visually and aesthetically stunning movie despite the predictable plot.

After an endless hour of being unable to dream of tall blue people I decided to get up again and do something non-visual on the computer. Since I have quite an obsession with CSI: New York for its cinematography and especially Bill Brown’s music I thought give it another try (and because I already attempted something in that direction earlier.)

I don’t like to repeat myself so I went this time something further away from the symphonic, more towards the electronic genre and even made my first attempt at break-beat at around 0:52.

When listening just picture yourself a typical CSI:NY montage of Sid Hammerback dissecting a corpse with nifty zooms and dolly shots.

texx sound – Investigation / “Who Gave You this Number?”. 2010.
Download audio file (texx_sound_-_investigation.mp3)

So I would like to hear your feedback. And thanks for listening!

You can listen and download the acoustic version of “Soulmate” here.

This song is dedicated to a very important person in my life, Lisa. Further, I was lucky to have won my dear friend Tina for the vocal part; these are the lyrics:

Lyrics

I’m walking, I’m strutting
full of life — complete.
I’m roaming, I’m knowing,
this sanctuary sweet.

And again
I walk this road,
suddenly a cat comes close
and says:
“My soulmate, my soulmate,
finally!”

I watched another couple of CSI: New York episodes to research the cinematography and color grading (both much more subtle compared to the overly-saturated CSI: Miami), but the more episodes I watched the more aware I became of Bill Brown‘s music. It didn’t sound terribly hard to compose still it captured the mood quite well and was terrifically mixed. “Can’t be too hard to do that myself” I pondered two hours ago and gave it a try by scoring an imaginary scene in Bill’s style.

I am quite happy with it, just had to give it an urban beat and more synthesizers instead of an orchestral percussion in the end. Hope you like it too.

EDIT: Didn’t like it how it suddenly ended so I composed a more proper and a little soothing ending. Refresh your cache and take a listen.

texx sound – City Scape Intermission. 2009.
Download audio file (texx_sound_-_city_scape_intermission.mp3)

You ask “What’s new? What’s cool?” and I tell you: A lot: I’ve been in the trenches with Nuke and fought After Effects so there’s a lot of stuff I want to show and tell what I’ve learned in the past weeks, not only about VFX.

I recorded a couple of tracks for my upcoming album (release: summer 2009). The Samson G-Track is a sweet piece of hardware, it combines a condenser microphone and an USB-soundcard. Finally I am able to record my acoustic guitar and piano work without the “help” of my 5€-headset whose microphone buzzes worse than the wasp hive in Donkey Kong Country 2 and rumbles more than my PS2′s Dualshock 2 controller that surrendered yesterday to material fatigue after nearly nine years of heavy duty service. Got me a new one today.

Between all my private creative work I am tackling 87 effect shots for our student short film “MOSKAU” and have only 4 weeks more to go. Luckily I am not alone with that truckload of effects still many shots end up on my todo-list. I am really honing my skills with Nuke right now. One year ago I only considered After Effects as the way to go and even was surprised that neither Double Negative nor Dreamworks ever came back to me after my enthusiastic applications at the fmx/08 conference.

That reminds me: If I was you (and I am 80% certain that I am not) I would keep an eye on this blog because I’ll be covering the fmx/09 in Stuttgart in detail on this very blog, complete with pictures and serious grammatical errors. So if you won’t be able to see it all in Stuttgart yourself, come back on the 5th of April 2009.

That’s all for now folks. I gotta get some sleep before the weekly meeting tomorrow. Which means I am shredding some Guitar Hero songs on extreme. Yes, you read correctly: I am publicly admitting that I am good at that game. On the upside: I got better on a real bass guitar as well.

So it all boils down to that simple phrase for me at the moment: Practice makes less imperfect.