With the release of the Clone Hero v1.1 update, I thought it'd be a good time to talk about the song I included for it! When I was approached by the dev team to include a song of mine, I was hoping to have an original song made that matches the recent covers I've put out. Sadly, I didn't have something like that ready, so I instead dug through the various songs I made for Battle of the Bits' music competitions. Out of all of them, Fool Around was the song that I thought would the best to include for Clone Hero. Not only because it would be the most fun gameplay-wise, it's also a very good showcase of the soundchip it was designed for and how I approach making chiptune music.
If you're not familiar with the Sega Master System, it was Sega's answer to the NES before they came out with the Genesis/Mega Drive. Technically speaking, it was more advanced than the NES in a lot of ways, but one of areas it lacked in was the sound department.
The soundchip had 4 audio channels to work with, 3 of which were only capable of producing square waves, and the last one could only make noise, which also had a very limited range. Worst of all, the chip lacked the ability to produce low bass frequencies. If you wanted to include a bass part in your song, you better make damn sure that it wouldn't go below A-2 (110Hz).
As a result, a lot of music made for the Sega Master System doesn't stand out as much compared to other consoles. Sure, there were some composers that managed to get around those limitations to make great music, but when you lack that low bass and only have square waves and noise to work with, it often feels like there's something missing when listening to Sega Master System music. With the hindsight of over 35 years of chiptune knowledge though, you can squeeze much more out of such limited hardware than those composers could ever think of all those years ago.
One important step to unlocking the true potential of the soundchip is through the use of a special noise mode that was discovered years after the system came out. Besides the standard white noise, there's also periodic noise, which turns the noise channel into a thin pulse wave. It even makes use of frequencies that are lower than 110Hz, finally allowing the chip to have a proper bass register! The one downside to this though, is that you have to sacrifice the 3rd audio channel to control the frequency, but hey, we take what we can get.
With that in mind, the first thing I did for my song was sketching out a funky bassline. I added a short little octave blip at the start of each note to make them sound more plucky. The end of each note also keeps playing but at a lower volume, enabling a subtle echo effect with just one audio channel.
Then I needed to add some percussion. Since the noise channel is already dedicated to playing the bass part, it would seem very difficult to make it also play percussion at the same time. But it's simpler than you may think. The trick here is to make your percussion instruments as short as possible, so that you can switch between them and the bass part very quickly. When they're played together fast enough, it gives off the illusion that there's 2 instruments playing at once, even though we're only using 1 audio channel.
The one exception to this is the kick drum, which I've actually put on one of the square wave channels instead. Not only does this make the kick clearer to hear, it also shapes how the melody is structured, because it has to play on all the off-beats where the kick drum isn't playing.
One thing to mention before the chorus hits is how the bass gets more and more detuned when building up. Because the periodic noise mode plays at a much lower frequency than what the chip expects, it actually gets more detuned the higher up you get in frequency. Just a funny little quirk I decided to exploit before returning to play the bass part.
For the chorus, I decided to shift focus more towards the melody itself, making use of as many effects as I can. After the big descending chord hits, I make use of both square wave channels to play the same melody, but an octave apart from each other. This makes both channels blend into a single instrument, almost sounding like a thinner square wave.
I then keep switching to different variations of the same square wave instrument throughout the chorus. There's one with a soft attack that sounds like a flute, one regular instrument for the chords again, the flute instrument again but with a stronger single channel echo effect, and then some quick arpeggios for more chord variety. They're all using the same square wave sound, but all those extra effects add up to make the song more varied.
The bass part in comparison takes more of a back seat. It's now more simplified, allowing for the kick and snare to have more room to play inside channel. There's even breaks to allow the square wave channel to play an arpeggio swell. Still, there's not really any room to play a crash cymbal without interrupting the bass, and that's how I came up with those descending chord parts to replace the crash cymbal.
Also, to go on a bit of a side tangent, I realized while making the chorus melody that it sounded an awful lot like the default Fortnite dance. I thought it was obvious when I made the song, but somehow no one else has commented about it in all the years the song has existed. I guess I can get away with more plagarism than I thought.
Heading into the solo is where I really decided to flex the bass usage and make it the primary instrument. The square wave channels are relegated to playing the kick and arpeggios patterns, and the other percussion is shorter as well. Again, despite the noise channel having to play both the bass and percussion, it doesn't sound like they're interrupting each other. I even get to use fast arpeggios to make the bass play chords, as well as a section that keeps switching high and low notes repeatedly.
The rest of the song just repeats a lot of what I already talked about, so I do wanna mention a fun fact about the last note in the song, which is the only time all 3 square wave channels and the bass are playing at the same time. The way the bass gets its frequency is actually by taking the same frequency the 3rd channel has, but plays it at a much lower octave. That's why it's impractical to play both the 3rd channel and the bass at the same time outside of that one section.
So yeah, that's a deep dive into how I go about writing chiptune music. I often have a hard time writing original stuff, because it just seems so hard to extrapolate the stuff I listen into something that feels distinct enough. But with these old soundchips, it seems like their limitations actually help me set boundaries on what I can do, which helps me further explore what you can and can't do with them.
It has been a long time since I've written anything original though, it's been like... over 2 years now? I've kinda neglected visiting sites like Battle of the Bits lately in order to focus on other stuff, but I still think about making music occasionally. I've even romanticised the idea of making a concept album, thinking about the themes I want to use and the songs I want to write, but that's gonna be useless if I don't know how to make original music in the first place.
Like all skills in life, that's just something I'm gonna have to find time to practice. I do have a couple of ideas of how I could go about doing it, and it may not even be fully chiptune. I've slowly been getting into vocal synth music lately, so perhaps I'll make something inspired by that? I'll leave you with a cover I've made to try out using vocal synths.