Chiptune Orchestra - "Piona" by Łukasz Sychowicz AKA X-Ray (Atari POKEY)
30I always thought some chiptunes, especially using Atari POKEY, could work as orchestral pieces.
So I decided to orchestrate a few!
The goal is to be as faithful as possible. No notes were added other than octaves or reusing existing chords and bits of melody, to keep the melody intact. A few minor transitions were also added to make the layering more interesting, but this is merely a time aesthetic, not tone.
This is "Piona" (subsong 1) by the POKEY master, Lukasz "X-Ray" Sychowicz.
Here's the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krGRhxfO5Eg
I've been fooling around with this one forever, but I never managed to get the instrumentation juuuust right. I don't have the proper woodwinds and brass styles I need.
This is the best I managed so far.
The original has a nicer punch to the beats. I really wanted to do that using a brass and woodwind ensemble sound, but nothing I tried sounded good enough. I ended up doing it in the piano, which makes it smaller.
There's also a very high pitched bit near the end of the loops that I really really really tried to make it work, but I ran into problems.
First, my script that extracts notes from POKEY data and converts to a MIDI file didn't manage to extract those notes. They come from a very specific technique that I couldn't really find a way to map to pitches.
I tried transcribing them manually, but it took a long time get just a little bit. It's too fast and the waveform is just super weird.
The bit I DID manage to transcribe, I tried my best to make it work Best I could make it was with a xylophone, but it's just way too fast to be "orchestrable", in my view. Sadly, I had to leave it out. Maybe some day I'll find a way to get that part right.
It's a very short piece that loops, so I had to play around with some repeating bits, changing the instrumentation, to make it more interesting. This may be boring to some, but I don't want to change the tune, remember?
I'm following a Ravel's Boléro sort of philosophy here: change the flavor of the sound, not the tune.
It all could be better, of course, but since I'm the only person that cares enough to give this sort of thing a try I have nothing else to compare to.
Hope you guys like it! I've been listening to it for a while now and I'm rather fond of the result, even if it's not exactly what I have in mind.