Tribute to Kiss - Made with C64 sounds only + vocals
Kiss’ song, “I was made for loving you” was all over the radio when it was released in 1979 and it was part of the soundtrack of my misspent youth at “Leisureland”, my local pinball parlour (arcade). I was eight at the time.
Two years later, in '81, Taito released Qix, an arcade game that quickly made its way to Leisureland. I would pump 20c after 20c through this game and my anxiety levels would rise and rise. I was made for loving you was still getting its fair share of play on the jukebox at the parlour.
The audio in this game was atmospheric and centred around ‘dirty drone’ types of sounds that shifted pitch to accentuate the tension in the gameplay via ever slightly additive harmonics.
It was the sounds in this game that made your blood-pressure rise. It’s a good first example of how computer game sound & music greatly help render an atmosphere for the game experience. Particularly, I like the grittiness of the Qix sounds and thought that this is the essence I need to capture for a hard rocking Bitpop version. Have a listen to the type of sounds I’m talking about below. It’s kinda the backbone of how I’m approaching this song.
Sound design:
The ostensible thought for a MOS6581 SID chip musician would be to use a nice ring modulator triangle wave as carrier and a sawtooth wave as signal. I tried it with my zBLEXv6 music driver and it worked. I then had the notion of removing the ring modulation and just ‘frequency mash’ a-la faux FM Synthesis style. It actually works better this way in creating a better tuned grittiness. So, the SID chip pretends to be an OPL2/3 chip sorta kinda.
A bit nerdier:
Qix uses an m6802 CPU with eight of its output lines directed to a D/A convertor. So simply, it was a sampler or since the samples are so small, a wavetable synthesiser with the CPU doing the wave processing and mixing. 1Mhz was ample to do that when that chip was dedicated to solely sound generation as a support CPU within that games architecture.
From poking around the hex dump of the game and via the MAME emulator, I suspect that the audio engineer was using the same additive style synthesis technique. I’ve been reading through the m6802 patent information and to my understanding there was no ring modulator unless the m6802 was coded to do that effect. It could have been done that way but the simpler route is to not code it and rely on a slight detune.
Enjoy,
Gavin
Keep up the great work!
Keep up the great work!