Sufjan Stevens - Come On! Feel The Illinoise! (NES + DMG Arrangement)
22Get notified when the Kickstarter campaign to press the entire album to vinyl goes live:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctoroctoroc/illi-nes-a-chiptune-tribute-to-sufjan-stevens?ref=7cyra0
An arrangement of 'Come On! Feel The Illinoise!' from the 2005 album "Illinois" by Sufjan Stevens 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 "ILLI-NES" which will be pressed to a double vinyl LP and funded via Kickstarter between September and October - follow my Facebook page for updates!
https://www.facebook.com/doctoroctoroc
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 has stepped down from the hobby, unfortunately.
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 Blue
- (Ch02) Pulse 2: Medium Blue
- (Ch03) Triangle: Dark Blue
- (Ch04) Noise: Dark Orange
- (Ch05) DPCM: Dark Orange
Gameboy
- (Ch01) Pulse 1: Light Yellow
- (Ch02) Pulse 2: Yellow
- (Ch03) Wav: Orange
- (Ch04) Noise: Pale Brown
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.