Making songs with Scream Tracker 3

In this video I create two AdLib songs and play a third one that uses PCM samples. My emphasis here is on using various "commands" that control how the tracks are being played, such as the loop opcode (SBn), the note delay opcode (SDn) and the row-delay opcode (SEn). The note cut opcode (SCn) was also going to be used, but unfortunately ST3 does not honor it in AdLib mode.

Apologies about the few scattered mistakes in this video. It is not easy to create music and to verify that it plays as intended when your emulator is running at 30% realtime speed while recording. That is why I script my videos beforehand. But it is easy to forget things even if you prepare with a script. For the curious, here is the script that I wrote for first song in this video: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/kuvat/youtubemusic/goo2b.txt

I applied mild reverb and chorus filters over the sound in this video, to approximate the same type of sound that I had when I originally composed these songs on Sound Blaster AWE32. The exact commandline to transform the soundtrack was: sox in.wav out.wav vol 0.7 reverb 30 50 50 chorus 0.5 0.7 40 0.4 0.25 2 -t

The keyboard display and the oscilloscope at the bottom of the screen were added by a patch that I wrote into the emulator, automatically during the recording, directly into the recorded video stream. Unfortunately I have accidentally deleted the source code of that feature, so I cannot make it available for download.

The three (or five) songs in this video are:
-- Twisty passages, all alike (Goonies II). The naming is mine, and the original Konami theme only had two instruments + echo.
-- Optimization 2. It is my original composition.
-- Mountain lands, from NES Solar Jetman. Again the original Tradewest/Rare theme only had two instruments + percussion. My version here is thus heavily altered. Also, it begins with a little shoutout to the Super Mario Bros theme by Koji Kondo. The instruments I used for the mountainland song were ripped from Twn's chip tunes; the instruments in the lead-in were ones I generated with QBasic or by taking pieces from DOS4GW.EXE.
-- The tiny ditty that I play on the sample listing screen with the fast-decaying version of PsiFlute is from Star Tropics, by Y. Hirai.

This video is not education nor is it entertainment, but vaguely maybe a little of both.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• adlib
• s3m
• st3
• scream
• tracker
• music

[DerpyEnzyme]

Hah, you make it look so easy :3

Tracking has always been my favorite form of programs to make music in, seems the only ones I enjoy the layout of are ones that aren't compatible with my operating system though.

[Bisqwit]

@DerpyEnzyme Well, it looks easy because it's all hollywood. The tools are real, the behavior of the tools is real, but the actions are scripted, rehearsed and made only to look like a compositing process in nutshell. There are unfortunately some downsides to this procedure: When the performance of the script is imperfect (mistakes happen), it often takes an unrealistically long time to spot them and to catch up.

As for tracking software, have you tried SchismTracker?

[ddpsp]

If you're looking for a modern day tracker, get Renoise.

[DerpyEnzyme]

@Bisqwit Yes, I have used Schism Tracker, wasn't very satisfied with it though, there's some problems with it on my computer and it doesn't automatically ask to create an instrument from samples I load as some documentation of the program suggested it would. Not to mention it's unrealistically slow in full screen on any of my other computers. It is a very accurate port, though. I've been experimenting with Chibitracker recently, I'm starting to like it despite some issues using certain commands.

[ghhhks]

Wow!

[zskate00]

awesome