Synth Flakes by Juan Linietsky
7This video is posted with Juan's permission.
0:00
Juan's Original (I believe this is an older version as it doesn't have the same intro that I remade. It's the only version I could find on my hard drives, and the Internet)
3:07
My Game Boy Advance version (4 Game Boy channels, 8 Digital, 32000Hz with some L and R stereo channels. This would never work in-game. But, it was still playing back from the hardware)
6:14
LEFT SPEAKER=Juan's Original
RIGHT=My GBA version
Preamble:
Many of you know him as "reduz", the creator of Shake Tracker and Cheese Tracker. This song I believe was created in Shake Tracker, a MIDI-centred, linux-based tracker. Here's the story.
He gave me this song for critique back on IRC in the early 2000's (This was before Chrono Resurrection). I loved it. At this time, I was dabbling with Game Boy Advance music creation, and asked Juan if I could create it on the GBA with Paragon 5's tracker. He agreed, giving me both the Win32 based build of Shake Tracker, along with the source module file (essentially, the actual written "song") and the soundfont that it used.
I plugged the soundfont into my Sound Blaster Live and played the song, and it sounded HORRIBLE. I couldn't figure out why, the SBLive was mutilating the song. I finally concluded that the Sound Blaster Live! drivers were horrid, and the actual playback of most of these sounds (which were filter based) depended on the DSP of the Sound Blaster AWE32. I didn't have an AWE 32, I had an AWE64, collecting dust on a table somewhere.
I pulled my PC apart, installed the AWE64 PCI card, and plugged that soundfont in after installing the drivers. It worked, it sounded awesome. So, I proceeded to sample the instrumentation (filter based instruments, recorded as samples is a very hard thing to do properly, as their "effects" mess up when played back at different speeds) .. I went through 10 bass samples before I found the one that matched the original sound the best.
So on went the "translation" (basically, analyzing Juan's pattern structure, and recreating it in Paragon 5's GBA Tracker. I believe I only got a couple notes wrong. He also noted that Paragon 5's tracker did not have versatile tempo settings, so I came to it as close as I could.
For this video, you will notice that I modified the GBA version to be the exact speed Juan's is.
I am not handing out MP3 versions of Juan's song. If you want it, contact him. The MP3 of my remake is available via my website, but not easily found. I may make it public soon.
Anyways, enjoy! :)