Back in the dim dark ages of computing, I was a coder and musician on the C64 & Amiga demoscenes. Over time, I lost my collection of music I wrote on these platforms with the exception that a few people found. Here’s my C64 & Amiga profiles.
It’s been about 20 years since I’ve done much musically. That is , until last year when I got the idea of releasing an album of C64 remixes. This resulted in an album called “The 8bit Spindle”. It’s available in hard-copy or on Soundcloud.
I thought that this year I would do “The 16bit Spindle” and remix some of my favourite Amiga scores but there’s still many C64 tunes I wanted to have a go at. So this time around I’m doing an album inspired by both platforms. It’s going to be called “Paula, 6581”.
Needless to say, both albums have been done exclusively with Renoise. I wrote my own sound driver for the C64 but once I moved up to the Amiga, I started tracking. Renoise was a perfect fit for me! As a massive Unix user, I was thrilled to find that Renoise was SO cross-platform that I could stay in Ubuntu and use a DAW of awesome quality. Renoise is the most amazing software I’ve ever owned.
I’ve done eight tracks so far and I’ve finally got one of them through post-production. Here’s track 2 as a taster for what I am doing. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m running Renoise under Linux where VSTi’s are doable but hellish to use so for all my tunes that you hear on Soundcloud, I use no VSTi’s at all. Those chords are made with a combination of a polysynth & ensembl with an extra chord base note running the “Axx” command. I then add to the rest of the chord a phaser DSP. The envelope for the instruments have a fast decay and then a long reverb and that blends (slushes) them into the next chord.
As a non-trained musician, it’s a trick I think I recall picking up from listening J.M.Jarre.
Hey, many thanks for the like on Soundcloud! I’m gonna listen to your pieces on Soundclound after work today.
The Axx command is really limited… you can’t adjust speed and arpeggiate over three notes. I always found this command more useless than useful.
I rather arpeggiate in the pattern editor using sample offset or in the instrument pitch envelope.
I like your ideas. They would mean having a different instrument for each chord combination that you want to use. Not that’s a problem, really. I’m just trying to make sure I know what you mean.
G.
If you use the pitch envelope in the instrument, yes that would indeed be the case, but if you create a chord pattern in the pattern itself, you don’t need to.
But then again, shifting the sample offset to the correct position with each adjacent note can be a hand full of work. The advanced edit interpolation tricks on selections don’t always bring a satisfying result.
