Hi all. I'm a new member here.I sort of have an obsession with cheesy sampled sound, so for me, the SPC700 and admusicK are fun to have just to try to make music with. I'm nowhere ready for finishing music ports, but I am working on it. As I played around, I've observed some things which aren't really related, but I thought I'd put them all down in one post for people to comment on and help me work with if they are able.
First, I'm using AddMusicK 1.0.4 and the Winamp Alpha SPC input plug-in 3.3.4. I really should make sure those are up to date, but I downloaded them within the last 6 months.
First thing I am going to ask about is so-called proper endings. When making a track with AddmusicK that does not loop, some silence seems to be added to the end of an SPC, even with one channel with a constant stream of notes. Even the default SMW ported tracks seem to do this. I've not seen mention of this often, so don't know quite what to do about it. Trying the tags in the txt file to restrict the length only do so much, as it just tells the player how long to play the song for, regardless if there is anything after the specified length. The silence at the end is faded out, not removed from the data. There is also about a half second of silence at the beginning of files. However, in SPC rips, there are no such silences anywhere, not even in the SMW SPC set.
Is this silence at the ends of the track something which I can get rid of? I wouldn't try to get rid of it if I was doing an SMW port, but some people use AddmusicK just to make SPC covers and don't care about how SMW will handle the data. I've been thinking of trying projects like that, and for this purpose I would prefer to do anything I can to optimize it.
Second point: pitch bending and legato. From my understanding, if I want to do fancy slides and slurs, I would have to use the pitch bending commands (& or $dd) to bend between notes, along with the legato toggle command ($f4 $01) so that notes won't be rekeyed. If I want to rekey a note, for example in between measures just to introduce some variety into the articulation, I would first have to turn legato off in the middle of the last note to disable it properly. So a simple penta scale might look like this.
Without legato:
l8 c d e f g f e d c4.
With legato and some articulation:
l8 $f4 $01 c d e f16 $f4 $01 ^16 $f4 $01 g f e d16 $f4 $01 ^16 c4.
It sounds like a lot of work to rekey one note. If that's just how it is, I'm not complaining, just making sure I'm not missing something.
Also, in regards to pitch bend, I haven't yet figured out a way to pitch bend in between notes, for exampel in guitars. The closest you can get is to slowly slide between notes. Is this correct?
Last question, for now anyway. I know it's not popular, but pitch modulation among channels seems to be supported, and while it often sounds gritty and or unpleasant, I've heard it used in ways which intrigue me, for example in Waterworld. I am unable to find much info on it though. I assume one channel would contain a source sound and the other would contain the waveform that would modulate the source's pitch. At present I imagine this as crude FM synthesis or something with a modulator and carrier. I'd like to experiment with it, but don't know anything about details of its operation, and am only guessing. All the AddMusicK readme says is that when using this command, the hex parameters specify which channels to enable pitch modulation on, bitwise (7654321-). Channel 0 cannot have pitch modulation. I'm not nearly as inclined in the techy side of this as I'd like to be, and so am not sure what is meant by bitwise. Does it literally mean numbers like 1, 2, 3, and so on for the 7 channels? What would be a typical setup for this effect?
Thanks for reading and helping out! No need to respond to everything at once, I just wanted to put everything together in one post. Have a great day!
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
First, I'm using AddMusicK 1.0.4 and the Winamp Alpha SPC input plug-in 3.3.4. I really should make sure those are up to date, but I downloaded them within the last 6 months.
First thing I am going to ask about is so-called proper endings. When making a track with AddmusicK that does not loop, some silence seems to be added to the end of an SPC, even with one channel with a constant stream of notes. Even the default SMW ported tracks seem to do this. I've not seen mention of this often, so don't know quite what to do about it. Trying the tags in the txt file to restrict the length only do so much, as it just tells the player how long to play the song for, regardless if there is anything after the specified length. The silence at the end is faded out, not removed from the data. There is also about a half second of silence at the beginning of files. However, in SPC rips, there are no such silences anywhere, not even in the SMW SPC set.
Is this silence at the ends of the track something which I can get rid of? I wouldn't try to get rid of it if I was doing an SMW port, but some people use AddmusicK just to make SPC covers and don't care about how SMW will handle the data. I've been thinking of trying projects like that, and for this purpose I would prefer to do anything I can to optimize it.
Second point: pitch bending and legato. From my understanding, if I want to do fancy slides and slurs, I would have to use the pitch bending commands (& or $dd) to bend between notes, along with the legato toggle command ($f4 $01) so that notes won't be rekeyed. If I want to rekey a note, for example in between measures just to introduce some variety into the articulation, I would first have to turn legato off in the middle of the last note to disable it properly. So a simple penta scale might look like this.
Without legato:
l8 c d e f g f e d c4.
With legato and some articulation:
l8 $f4 $01 c d e f16 $f4 $01 ^16 $f4 $01 g f e d16 $f4 $01 ^16 c4.
It sounds like a lot of work to rekey one note. If that's just how it is, I'm not complaining, just making sure I'm not missing something.
Also, in regards to pitch bend, I haven't yet figured out a way to pitch bend in between notes, for exampel in guitars. The closest you can get is to slowly slide between notes. Is this correct?
Last question, for now anyway. I know it's not popular, but pitch modulation among channels seems to be supported, and while it often sounds gritty and or unpleasant, I've heard it used in ways which intrigue me, for example in Waterworld. I am unable to find much info on it though. I assume one channel would contain a source sound and the other would contain the waveform that would modulate the source's pitch. At present I imagine this as crude FM synthesis or something with a modulator and carrier. I'd like to experiment with it, but don't know anything about details of its operation, and am only guessing. All the AddMusicK readme says is that when using this command, the hex parameters specify which channels to enable pitch modulation on, bitwise (7654321-). Channel 0 cannot have pitch modulation. I'm not nearly as inclined in the techy side of this as I'd like to be, and so am not sure what is meant by bitwise. Does it literally mean numbers like 1, 2, 3, and so on for the 7 channels? What would be a typical setup for this effect?
Thanks for reading and helping out! No need to respond to everything at once, I just wanted to put everything together in one post. Have a great day!
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!