【PC-98】Night Slave - Initial Velocity - PC engine Cover【Deflemask】
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Deary me, this one was a bit of an ordeal to get done...
Firstly, despite using only 5 channels, this song has a couple of instruments that actually manage to play more than a single note on the same channel at the same time, which while possible on 4 operator FM synthesizers such as the YM2203 (for which the original song was composed) it's not quite as doable on the PC engine, and to top it off, in the intro of the song such instruments play on 2 channels, which means they've got 4 notes going on at once within those two!
Because of that, as you can see in the video, I had to spread those 4 notes across 4 channels, leaving me with no channels to spare (which of course means there would be sound-clipping if any sound effects needed to play during the intro if this song was actually used in a real game) but I was only able to do that because I actually took advantage of the PC engine's wavetable synth to combine 2 square wave notes within a single channel to play at the same time!
Yeah, I know I just mentioned that wasn't quite as doable on the PC engine, and it most certainly wouldn't be for those FM instruments, but square waves are much simpler waveforms, they're way easier to deal with on the system, but I'm pretty limited on what two square wave notes I can play together on the same channel at the same time, for instance, playing the same note but one or more octaves apart is pretty easy, and the first two notes in the square channels did exactly that! But then come the next notes in the sequence, wherein the 2nd square channel is playing a note an octave and a fifth above the first one, I was planning on simply playing one of them and drop the other like I usually would, but then I thought to myself: "Why don't I try to mix those two notes within the same waveform? I mean, it's just a square wave, I could probably get pretty close couldn't I?" And I did! I figured it out! I managed to make a wavetable that sounds kinda like two different square waves playing two different notes on the same channel at the same time! It doesn't sound perfect but it's close enough, and I bet most of you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference considering how it's concealed within 5 other channels playing different notes at the same time~
But then the next notes in the sequence were totally not playable within the same channel at the same time, so I just dropped the other one... My ears miss that note, but I wonder how may of yours will...
That was only the beginning of the challenge though, while the most of the rest of the song, leads aside, is mercifully repetitive, the leads themselves were a bit of a pain to transcribe, it uses a lot of different instruments, the note progressions, while not quite hard to get a grasp of, had rather tricky timing, it's got so many triplets... Gosh, it's got Snare triplets! Wouldn't be such a big deal if Deflemask had a Noise Mode envelope, but it doesn't as of yet, so I had to break the pattern, raise the row speeds to the maximum in the next pattern so that I could better control the timing of the wave-to-noise toggles and vice versa, and then break that pattern into the next one with the more regular speed in order to continue the song like normal...
I'm tired, but I've got one more song from this game that I want to cover before I'm done, not sure when I'll be able to upload it, but I'm aiming for sooner than later...
I hope you enjoy what you hear, you can hear my previous song, which was the 2nd stage theme from this game here: https://youtu.be/pgAoiJC51EQ
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, this is the first stage theme, and I LOVE IT! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do ^^