Mars Wind is a project that @in_tense and I worked on. We took our “inspiration” from 80’s tv shows like Miami Vice and Knightrider, old hair rock bands, 80’s pop music and culture, old video games, old demo music/intros, and other fun stuff, hehe.
All tracks were created in Renoise, using only QuadraSID for instruments, drums, etc. (with some extra effects and stuff to make things a little more interesting), a small handful of samples (for tracks like Ninja style), and doctalk.exe (crappy standard windows text2speech interface that comes with the ShitTalker program) for lyrics. It’s not really traditional chip music, but it’s still pretty cool stuff and a lot of our friends seem to really enjoy the sound, so I thought I’d make a proper post about it here as well. Hopefully some of you guys can appreciate it.
Glad you like it. Thanks for the tip. I hadn’t really thought much about trying to get it released properly. It was all just done for fun really, mostly while very drunk, hehe. The mastering isn’t exactly super high quality
But I suppose if more work was done to the tracks to clean them up, if we spent more time fixing the mastering/eq (instead of pouring another vodka), etc., it would be cool to have a proper release. Something to keep in mind for future stuff at least.
Literally the only samples (not digitally generated by us) used are in “Ninja style” and “What the f…”
In “Ninja style” it’s a few random kungfu samples which I don’t even remember where we got them from, haha. I think we just Google’d for “kung fu wav” and used whatever we found. There are so many kungfu movies out there with extremely similar sound fx, and they’re all so old, that I doubt these would ever cause a problem.
In “What the f…” it’s a clip of another drunk session where in_tense was messing around on the mic, hehe. He got a bit too close to the mic and caused some huge feedback, which surprised the hell out of him.
in_tense: what the f**** happened there?!
me: haha, I dunno… don’t get so close!
But apart from that, it’s all Renoise, QuadraSID and doctalk text2speech, baby
I dunno if we could get away with our covers of Knight Rider and Miami Vice though, heh. Probably have to ask permission for those ones.
Yeah, that’s definitely a big part of the appeal for us as well. I just meant fixing the important stuff like phase problems. We didn’t really create this stuff with perfection in mind, haha, so I’m sure there are some parts which to an audio engineer would just be “wrong”. I wouldn’t wanna change things and take away the essence of the tracks, but just fix up the things to make it a little more speaker-friendly
Really nice tracks, love the warm chipsound, especially 80s style. Downloaded all the tracks. Maybe some new instruments besides the used can fresh up some tunes.
The knight-rider thing is great, how did you make this pitching and robot-voice effekt?
Thanks. Yeah, if we do any new tracks we’ll definitely try to work with a wider range of sounds. We just got a bit carried away on these tracks.
As for the robot voices in the tracks, as I mentioned above those were created using doctalk.exe, which is a pretty standard (and crap) text 2 speech thing used by a lot of Windows applications. You can find it in many things, but probably one of the most “famous” these days is that Shit Talker program, for doing prank phone calls, heh.
Disclaimer: I haven’t checked out these files myself, this is just what I found on Google. I would highly recommend checking them with a virus scanner before you do anything.
Anyway…
This is what the program looks like, and you can see it doesn’t really have a lot of options, hehe. Basically we had to “tune” the pitch hz of the voice, to match the melody of our songs. Then we recorded several versions of the same phrases, in different pitches/notes. Then we cut up all the recordings and rearranged them so that they “sing” along with the melody.
Ah, nice 1. This reminds me of “Patric C - The Horrible Plans Of Flex Busterman”, a classic. Everyone who likes this, should get that album.
Some constructive criticism. I must say, I don’t like the robo voice on some of the tunes. Perhaps it’s too much or you should try some other text-to-speech programs (like the Atari one - Das Boot ) for some variation next time. Some of the hooks could also be better, but overall I like it. Also, it’s too bad Quadrasid doesn’t use the ReSID engine, which sounds a lot fatter (and like a real SID).
The songs are nice… i get this authentic “soundmonitor” feeling somehow…
But i guess that’s probably the purpose of creating 80’s style… to use 80’s vintage elements
(though I do hope you can create alot better sounds with quadrasid than flif flaf soundmonitor level)
After downloading and carefully listening to the upmentioned tracks…
WE, the high council of Ancients, have come to the conclusion that D4t s7uff… iz t3h r0x0r!
) for some variation next time. Some of the hooks could also be better, but overall I like it. Also, it’s too bad Quadrasid doesn’t use the ReSID engine, which sounds a lot fatter (and like a real SID).
