New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

T his weekend I've tried a different approach to writing and recording a song and it's worked out so well I thought I'd make some notes here about the process. First of all, here's the finished music. I only spent an hour or two actually writing it. That was in itself an exercise in composing but I wanted to try this new method of recording and just got something down to work with. I like it a lot and will definitely expand it. All sounds here are produced by the C64, albeit one fitted with an ARMSID (set to 6581). Only because my working C64 with a real SID chip is playing up. Rather than try to write for 3 or 6 voices and then import that information to end up with a .prg that will run and play the music (aka a "sid") I've written any number of parts, with up to 3 voices in each, and used the C64 as a MIDI instrument, sending each part as MIDI to the computer and recording the audio that comes out of the computer. I think that Logic and other...

I've made a little progress with my game, and I'm feeling a little more positive about the gameplay now. Here's evidence I have about three 'happy sheep ambling about' tunes now, and this is the reason that the game has been sidelined a little. Once I'd started to write music, that's all I wanted to do for a while. One of the pieces I started writing (there are many) is 'music for an imaginary spooky video game' which has just about made it out of the end of the pipeline. I did start to compose it for three voices with our friend the SID chip in mind, but it grew! This is the full orchestral version, MuseScore is doing a pretty good job of rendering the instruments, but as usual with these things, some instruments suck, particularly the brass. I've got as far as making a satisfactory version that runs on the C64. This involved quite a bit of programming, I first adapted Derek Morris's sound routine (which he says he's happy for ...

T his post is going to combine musical notation, music XML, cocoa programming (objective-C for MacOS) and retro game programming (specifically the music) in assembly for C64. That might qualify this as an extremely niche post, so if you're reading because you're interested in all or some of those things, or if there's some other reason why you'd like to convert sheet music to another format, do let me know if the comments so that I know I'm not entirely alone! In the last couple of posts in this series I wrote about how I was tinkering around with a little tune for a game I'm writing for C64. Writing out the notation is something I'm very comfortable with. I eventually arrived at a great and efficient way to store and play the music within my game. This involved using a kind of 'bytecode', combining instructions and data. (A development of code that came with Derek Morris' book). That looks like this: That looks pretty laborious to wri...