Beck - Guess I'm Doing Fine (NES + DMG Arrangement)
21Get notified when the Kickstarter campaign to press the entire album to vinyl goes live:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctoroctoroc/c-change-a-chiptune-tribute-to-beck
An arrangement of 'Guess I'm Doing Fine' from the 2002 album "Sea Change" by Beck using a Nintendo Entertainment System and a Gameboy in conjunction with a MidiNES cartridge and a Teensyboy Pro, which allow the sound hardware on the systems to be manipulated using MIDI CC signals from a sequencing program (I used FL Studio).
This will be part of a full cover album entitled "C:\CHANGE" which will be pressed to a double vinyl LP and funded via Kickstarter between September and October - follow the Facebook page for updates!
https://www.facebook.com/BeckInBits
MidiNES cartridge created by Wayfair.net but unfortunately, the website is down and the carts are no longer in production.
Teensyboy Pro created by Catskull Electronics, who also makes the Famimimidi, a great alternative to the now unavailable MidiNES.
https://catskullelectronics.com/
The visuals were created with a program called 'Midi trail' which displays the notes along a scrolling piano roll as they are played.
https://osdn.net/projects/miditrail/releases/
Below is the breakdown of each channel by color:
NES
- (Ch01) Pulse 1: Light Pink
- (Ch02) Pulse 2: Dark Pink
- (Ch03) Triangle: Light Blue
- (Ch04) Noise: Light Grey
- (Ch05) DPCM: Dark Grey
Gameboy
- (Ch01) Pulse 1: Yellow
- (Ch02) Pulse 2: Yellow
- (Ch03) Wav: Dark Blue
- (Ch04) Noise: Dark Grey
While the piano roll doesn't display duty cycle, volume, pitch bend or other 'fine tuning ' parameters, it is still a great way to present the track in a comprehensive way that illustrates the limitations of the hardware and gives insight into finding ways to utilize or work around them. Also, given a composition method I use which overlaps notes and uses volume changes on continuing notes, not all 'note on' sounds are visually represented, especially in main melody parts.