#harold krell

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

Sega Genesis/Megadrive Arrangement of Press Garden Zone Act 1 from Sonic Mania.

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

Music for cup aficionados.

[haroldkrell]

It’s Louny Balloony! He’s back -- in .ogg form!

(actually it’s a .wav, sorry)

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

For around the past month, I’ve been working on reconstructing a track I made for my game RoboAgogo using Shiru’s VGM Music Maker, a tracker that emulates the Sega Genesis/Megadrive sound chips.

The original MIDI file was created around 2010, though since then, I’ve been studying composing with trackers in order to get a consistent “video-gamey” sound in my game.

For my first draft, I attempted to arrange it pretty much the same way I did in the MIDI (with a few tweaks to make it sound livelier).  This was okay for a first pass, but I was dissatisfied with how the percussion took too much focus.  Also, there are too many long periods of just sustained notes. I would describe it similar to a Donkey Kong Country piece like this, the problem being that the Sega sound chip isn’t very good at capturing the timbre of long sustains compared to the SNES.  Games that used the Sega sound chip well made good use of blending waveforms across multiple channels to make vivid sounds with lots of depth.

Take, for example, this piece from Dynamite Headdy. If you listen carefully, you’ll notice the main melody is made up of multiple channels occasionally switching through waveforms.

Now, compare that to this track from Bubsy. The Bubsy track has a very good composition. The chord progression is pleasing, and the melody is interesting enough, yada, yada, yada... However, you may notice that this track sounds noticeably “flatter” than the Dynamite Headdy piece.  This is mainly due to the Bubsy piece using a single channel for each tone, which also results in a more synthetic “square-wavey” sound since you’re only using one wave to construct the timbre of the instrument.

Anywho...

I guess the important thing to get out of this is that composing music in a tracker is a different process from composing sheet music, so for my 2nd draft of my piece, I dialed back on the volume of the percussion and did more interesting things with the harmony to make it even more livelier.

I may tweak it a bit more in the future, but for now I think this a good direction as far as music goes for my game.  Hopefully you can expect more soon!

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

Here’s all the music I made for Woonatale, the Undertale fan-game.

Now located in a convenient playlist!

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

Background music for the last stage of Lou-ny Balloon-y Goes Floatin' 'Round Town.

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

Theme for the 3rd level of Lou-ny Balloon-y Goes Floatin' 'Round Town.

[haroldkrell]

(Harold Krell)

Theme to the 2nd level of Lou-ny Balloon-y Goes Floatin' 'Round Town.