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1

The Lobby / Re: <insert interesting subject here>

« on: January 16, 2010, 15:03:54 »

Okay, it's prime time then. Back when games were created to run natively on it by big companies. Well, big back then... it wasn't the multi-million-dollar business it is now ^_^'

Thanks for the welcome, in any case. =)

As for "it's still possible": I believe at least 1 other here is either Dutch or Belgian, judging by the Kabouter Wesley icon he uses... maybe, if one day I want to find myself some of that epic retro gear, I'll poke around a bit. It's very hard to find anything like it without using the internet around here, it seems. I still have an old Gameboy somewhere, I believe it still works too, and my NES sure works without problems, but that's about it. =P

2

Sampling / Re: Adding distortion to samples

« on: January 16, 2010, 14:56:08 »

Thanks for the info =)

I'll stick with just Milky for now, that's plenty to take in at once without the things you mentioned. I saw VSTs being mentioned several times during my google searches, so I think I'll have to look into that later on after I am more familiar with Milky.

By the way, I'm not trying to get Chris' (the Muse bassist) sound down into detail, that's something a bit too tricky. Just do a quick google search on that and you'll find he uses some pretty obscure setup, including a hard to find Japanese distortion pedal, a very expensive but easier to find one and then a cleaner sound mixed together. Plus 'some other pedals he occasionally hits'. So yeah, I won't try and kid myself into thinking I can copy his sound or anything. Just general well sounding distortion and getting 'the feeling' right will do.

3

The Lobby / <insert interesting subject here>

« on: January 16, 2010, 14:09:51 »

OHAI!

... sorry, just came from ICanHasCheezburger and that was the most cheerful opening I could come up with.

I'm new. To this place, to tracking, to creating music digitally, to chiptunes and I'm afraid I am a bit new to life as well, as the Amiga outdates me by too much for me to remember it. I started with a NES at age 5, not counting the *86 machines at age 3 that my granddad took home with him from work (being the chief of storage for a big computer company, he had this privilege).

More about me: Dutch, 23, kinda stereotypical nerd guy (games, computer science student, D&D, you name it... I'm even staffmember for one of the biggest Dutch anime conventions). I know how to use google, but that won't stop me from asking questions if I think others answering it would take just a fraction of the time I'd need to look it up. Similarly, I will try to answer questions if I know the answer and happen to come across the question. Lending a hand hardly ever hurt anybody =)

4

Sampling / Adding distortion to samples

« on: January 16, 2010, 13:55:38 »

Hi, new guy here, sorry if this is completely in the wrong section but I'm new to the terminology and this is about samples, for as far as I know...

I downloaded Milkytracker, messed with it a bit, looked through some tutorials and then started something on my own. For starters, I went and tried copying the bassline from Muse's Hysteria, just to see if I could manage to take what I could hear and reproduce it. I downloaded some .xi format samples (430+ MB) including some guitar sounds, amongst which was a pretty good bassguitar one. However, as those who are familiar with Hysteria, there's a pretty hard distortion on that bass, which this sample does not have.

Now, I could keep looking for samples of bassguitars with distortion already added, but I thought it would be an interesting idea to try and add the distortion in Milkytracker's sample editor.

I wiki'd distortion to learn more about it, and found the image in the section 'Physics of clipping'. As marked in orange, distortion apparently is nothing but cutting off the tips of a smooth wave so that it is flat at the top and bottom. New to me, perhaps to some others reading this as well, so I thought I'd mention this.

So what I did was take the original sample, boosted it's volume along the entire range until it hit the maximum values at top and bottom, and then some more so that the top and bottom were 'flattened' since they couldn't grow higher (about 600% total I think, I did it in steps and the sample started out at pretty low volume). Then I reduced the volume to 20% of that to end up with something very similar to the starting volume, but clipped.

I took the notes from the bassline which I already managed to reproduce, copy this into a new channel and selected the new, 'distorted' bass as instrument for this channel. I then proceeded by first muting one, and then the other, to compare. I found that I prefer having both unmuted at the same time: the undistorted sound boosting the distorted sound but not really removing the familiar distortion effect.


My question here is as follows: is there an even easier way to do all this? Perhaps some sort of effect I missed? And would it be a big problem to combine to two channels into one, that is to say combine the two instruments into one so I get the same sound? The notes in both channels are the exact same anyway so I don't need to have them separately.

Again, I am completely new to everything related to the subject other than knowing how to sing and play some simple musical instruments. The physics behind all of this like linked above is totally new to me, for instance. I never used a tracker before either (I only downloaded Milky earlier this week) and my tries at getting something useful out of FL were... mediocre at best. I'm sure it's an awesome program and all, but if I just want to put some notes together, I don't want to have to look through 30 different screens with settings 0_o So yes, please, don't throw terms at me and expect me to know them all. I know how to use google and I found the manual, but if it's possible to explain something in 10 words, that might save me 10 minutes of looking.

Thanks in advance for any info you might have for me ^_^