Fortunately now we can make music for the SNES with a tracker-like editor using Furnace. It basically made Deflemask obsolete, it supports so many chips and systems it's incredible.

@LavaCreeperPeople

9 ай бұрын

yup! I'm having fun creating the most ear piercing, incoherent music possible using random samples and soundfonts on old sound-chips xD

Im most curious about how Earthbound did all that crazy pitchbending and other synth sounds where the waveforms cant be found in the sample data

@livvy94

3 жыл бұрын

So the weird pitch bending abuses the fact that pitch on the SNES can only be from 0000 to FFFF, it goes past those values and wraps around. There's also a noise sample that sounds completely different in EBMusEd, but it's because the amplification bits on each sample block header are (purposely?) effed up, so it sounds like noise on the hardware but the actual waveform is different. (Shoutouts to LMPuny and Pinci for bringing this to my attention!) The rest of the samples are findable in EBMusEd as far as I know

@LuisDiazDrums

3 жыл бұрын

doood i know what tim follins does its unique, his sounds never get old

@exodustx0

3 жыл бұрын

@@livvy94 Pitch has a range of 0000-3FFF actually! So it's even less than that :P I frequently get headaches from it.

@livvy94

3 жыл бұрын

@@exodustx0 Oh wow! I had no idea

@dany1492

3 жыл бұрын

as far asim know you can do it in varius forms usinf ebmused i use it with f4 xx or e3 xx xx so pretty much thats all

This is fantastic. i reckon about 99% of this is completely new to me and I wrote music and effects for SNES. The sax on the final piece is superb. What an educational resource this is.

@AWISECROW

Жыл бұрын

It's awesome Neil.

...you have to be one of the most underappreciated channels in all of youtube. you are summoning salt tier.

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

this is an insanely generous comment. thank you

@YellowWalkman

3 жыл бұрын

Completely agree

@chrismingay6005

3 жыл бұрын

Generous comment maybe, but absolutely warranted! One of my favourite channels and I'm surprised it has not taken off more.

@BBWahoo

3 жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO I remember your bubble bobble gst release, and darius burst, you are automatically god tier.

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

@@BBWahoo That's not me! you're thinking of GO-GO-GST, later rebranded as LINE-OUT GST. That's all run by Emma Essex, who does absolutely amazing work. I simply liked the idea of calling "unofficial OSTs from Games" GST, and used that acronym for my own channel.

Just stumbled upon this channel and my first impression is this: A table of content, a time-stamped list of all songs used, citations and linked image sources? Wow, this makes my researcher heart jump with joy. This kind of stuff takes A LOT of work, so I strongly appreciate you going the extra mile with that. You have my subscription and keep up the great work!

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

Adding citations like this was a bit of an experiment, to be honest. Glad to see it appreciated!

@dmrodri3

3 жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO It is hugely appreciated, as is your research itself. Awesome video!

Dean Evans and the Follin brothers have definitely got to be my most favourite SNES composers. TMNT 4's SNES soundtrack is a fucking banger as well.

@newdykung6775

3 жыл бұрын

Finally some recognition from these legends other than Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu,David Wise, Jun Ishikawa etc. Those're wizard genius

@Darknight0681

2 жыл бұрын

Yes, Harumi Ueko did the soundtrack Turtles in Time, and was also responsible for Gradius 3. Anyone familiar with Bemani will probably know him as Jimmy Weckl. Konami had one of the BEST sound teams in the business during that era. With him, Shoichiro Hirata, Akira Yamaoka, Michiru Yamane, the list goes on. They made ANY sound hardware sing!

"Samey" I was expecting you to say *"Seinfeldy"*

This is super interesting....It's such a shame that a lot of the things mentioned are just "lost to time." I guess we should be glad that people like Alberto and Barry have been able to discuss this with the public who are interested in this (mainly, us) so we can kind of uncover SOME of the details. This also explains why NA/PAL territories had so much difficulty trying to get the system to sing like the Japanese could...because a lot of times they weren't even given proper instructions in their language and had to reverse engineer in some cases. Wow. Great video! I need to go watch the Genesis one now.

If you're wondering how the heck those .abr files got identified and utilized in the song at the end... it wasn't through loading them into SLICK/Audio and replicating the hardware setup... instead, I personally reverse-engineered enough of the format for them to be convertible into the BRR file format more commonly used today (I didn't actually create the utility, though, and the sample data was already pre-converted for the most part, just represented in a different way header-wise... and sometimes not properly terminating the sample properly, as I eventually found out), and I even found the tuning info in these files!

@kanpaifighto

Жыл бұрын

are the samples available online? where did they come from?

Good news, the music tracker Furnace has (mostly) working SNES support now though no SPC export yet. Still it's a pretty big development imo

Incredibly interesting stuff. I wish more people were into this stuff it's so cool and interesting and there really isn't anything quite like making music on limited hardware :)

Regarding the bass sample issue, the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation wiki mentions that the infamous SYNBASS.ASM sample actually came from the Korg M1 "Slap Bass" patch, and that it was sampled by a Sony engineer, but there's no source on that last bit. The sample seems to be the same from the Korg patch, tho.

I’ve been fascinated by 3rd and 4th generation console music and how it’s made for about 12 years now and while I was familiar with the GEMS interface, I’ve wondered how the SNES composers did it, so thanks!

This channel is easily one of the best on KZread right now. Between yourself, Retro Gaming Explained, and I'm sure many others, this really is the golden age of accessible, well researched, and well presented information on antiquated hardware.

Imagine how nice it would be to get a SNES music maker that is like FamiStudio but for the SNES.

@jtn191

8 ай бұрын

Chipsynth SFC 😉

@CarloNassar

8 ай бұрын

@@jtn191 That doesn't count, because you can't export SPC files for ROM hacks.

1:03 is literally a screenshot of my screen a few minutes ago, except your video about crazy sample lengths was also there! I'm surprised it's so hard to learn about music making on the SNES, thank you for your videos

These type of videos are my favorite that you make. Great job!

Now you can make SNES music in 2022 - now with Furnace Tracker with SPC export coming soon

It took my time to find some video that REALLY explained how SNES music was made. This is by far the best one I found and I want to thank you for the gargantuan effort put into this to clarify a bit more the long and windy road 80's and 90's musicians had to struggle with in order to make music with so less information given by the companies about their hardware.

A very fascinating and interesting look at how SNES music is composed! Kinda sad to hear that authentic SNES music composition seems to be a bit of a lost art though

Personally, i recommend the Plogue ChipSynth SFC if you want to work with SNES music today.

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

ChipSynth SFC is the best way to get the SNES sound today, but I don't think it actually exports SPC files. I might be wrong on this though...

@natasetibahm1843

3 жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO It is indeed just an instrument (but it is excellent). It reads spc files very well, however.

@MakotoIchinose

3 жыл бұрын

I would recommend OpenMPT/Impulse Tracker + SMCONV instead. Not only you can pick your own sample and stuff, you can also make a legitimate .SPC out of it.

@HLRxxKarl

3 жыл бұрын

@@MakotoIchinose What's SMCONV, what does it do, and where can I find it?

@MakotoIchinose

3 жыл бұрын

@@HLRxxKarl SMCONV (actually named SNES MOD) is used to convert Impulse Tracker modules into .SPC files

And yet, the music from the SNES is among the best ever made.

Great vid as always! Would love to see an Alberto Gonzalez artist feature video. His GB and SMS tracks always make me think "how did you write something that sounds so complex with such little room available." My guess..... magic.

Great stuff as always. Not being impressed by the currently available SNES tools myself, I've been working on a SNES SDK for the past two years or so. I have ported the 65816 and SPC700 architectures to GNU binutils and made tools that allow me to use the Tiled editor for layouts, as well as doing bitplane format conversions. I'd love to also make a sequencer/tracker that exposes all the DSP capabilities of the SNES, including all the low pass filters, side-chain modulation and echo/delay buffer. The only hurdle is that I suck at GUI programming and design. The audio driver itself is no problem. So any fellow hobbyist homebrew hackers seeing this: help needed.

Now I can make SNES music if I time travel to 1995! Wait I don't know how to make music, shoot... Good video nonetheless, very informative! Getting a look at development tools like this is pretty neat.

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

Funny story: Long after I started my research, but before I finished this video, a website popped with a bunch of details on all the info on kits that I struggled to find. www.retroreversing.com/super-famicom-snes-development-kit/ I'm still pretty satisfied with my my own findings though!

We appreciate the loooooooooong time spent on making these videos! :) Thanks man!

ridiculously high quality content thanks man i loved every second of it

This was very interesting to watch. I had sometimes wondered over the years what tools musicians used to make music for those games all those years ago.

absolutely fascinating video. Knowing how difficult it was to program music makes soundtracks like Chrono Trigger and Donkey Kong even more impressive technical and artistic achievements.

Well, now days we have furnace furnace is finally bringing support for the SPC-700 APU

I haven't played s lot of SNES games, but the one that sticks in my mond is the first song in Super Pang. I REALLY like that song.

Thank you for this video, shedding some light on something I've wanted to know for nearly 30 years now (ok I feel old now). Before SNES/SPC emulation was really a viable thing on home computers, Apple's QuickTime MIDI interface v. 2.5 (about 1996-97) somehow sounded pretty dang close to the original SNES music. Version 3.0 sounded way different, though, for some reason.

Wow! So well researched! For us niche nerds into old console hardware + music writing this is top quality content

Bravo! love getting more context about this era of game dev and music

Great and informative as always, thanks!

Thanks for your explanation on SNES sound drivers!

IM SO GLAD U FINALLY MADE A SEGA GENESIS FOLLOW UP LETS GOOO

This is awesome, your best video yet, thanks so much! I ended up writing a Pro Tracker player/converter for my Snes homebrew games, but it's a bad fit for the Spcs capabilites, of course...

amazing video!, i remember from an article that stated that sony had special tools for composing music on the sp700 for better results, but i'm pretty confident if you didn't found something, might be a thing someone invented... the article was about Ken Kutaragi

the absolute level of quality of this video. thanks for posting

Your channel is like finding a new planet with tons of life. Thank you so much.

Thanks for this cool video. I’m a fan of listening to and ripping video game music, and learning how it was implemented is really interesting.

Thank you for the exhaustive research into this topic. Interesting you focused on that bass sample for forensics. I recall a certain trumpet sample being practically everywhere too.

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

oh yeah, it sure was! trumpet1.abr I probably should have used that instead of the sax, now that you mention it. I love my slap bass though, and the the harmonic-filled BASS.ASM was the first sample I was able to isolate, so those got the attention.

Thanks for having made this channel!

I could sit here and watch EVERY of this channel's videos and never get bored. Well, until I finish them all, of course.

Nice, Nostalgia hits hard. Thanks. Well put together.

Stellar work! Your narrated content is superb and it's a real treat to see another one of these mini-docs from you. Well done!

Thank you. Always wondered how they did it

I wonder how many British and European developers created SNES music in something like ProTracker or OctaMED on the Amiga? The Amiga's soundchip was also sample based so I'm sure there would have been conversion utilities written to convert MOD files to the module format for the SNES (or drivers written for the SNES that would play Amiga modules or even OctaMED files) The limitation on the SNES's sound chip was the 64K of RAM which is all it could access.

This is some genuinely super cool stuff. What a fun look at gaming history!

Great video, with lots of fascinating insights. The history of software development is always interesting, in particular when it shows the ingenuity the developers who had to overcome all kinds of hurdles to reach their goal. And yes, it is still very much true today, as anyone who had to decompile other companies' code to figure out a bug and fix it can attest...

Thank you Arlo for showing me this gem! :)

so nice of you to do a follow up video!! too bad the question still remains, haha) well, at least now I see that C700 is usable.. you know, what I would really want to know or see covered on your channel is a legacy of Rick Fox! the track you played is just one of so many masterpieces and yet there's almost no info about it anywhere.. An artist feature with music from Aero The Acto-Bat and Pirates Of Dark Water sounds like an actual dream, tbh..

Interesting topic and a pleasant narration.

found this video from the "How music was made on the super nintendo" and plenty of people said that that video is very vague and lots of the information was wrong. this video however, is the answer to exactly what i was looking for

Excellent investigation and reporting job! Thank you.

Great video it was really interesting and well made

Just AWESOME content we have here! That Tako and Ika bit referencing Splatoon got me. XD Really reeally cool!

Great stuff as always

Fascinating video! This was a really interesting deep dive into a subject I've wondered about for a while. As you mentioned, everyone knows about GEMS, but I never really had any clue how it was done on SNES. Thanks for making this, you did an awesome job!

For as long as the Super Famicom / SNES has been around I've been curious as to the tools used for development + building soundtracks during the period. Thanks for solving this personal mystery in such an approachable fashion ! Jeremy Soule is one of my all time favorites - I didn't have any luck finding anything but a couple references to Wolfgang though. Anyone know if this software is still kicking around somewhere?

Probably the most factual video about SNES audio development. It's really good apart from you getting my name wrong. I can answer questions you might have about David Whittaker''s player.

@GSTChannelVEVO

2 жыл бұрын

oh no! That's what I get for trusting the credits of an old game, lol. sorry about that! I'd love to know more about David's sound driver, but I have so little knowledge that I'm not even sure where to start. More than anything, I'm curious about how you actually worked with it. Did it use a tracker style interface?

@fromwithinuk

2 жыл бұрын

​@@GSTChannelVEVO It was all just raw assembler code with very minimal command line tools to convert samples into SPC700 ADPCM format. The music was written in as raw data and compiled directly with the player code, which I modified a bit. There were equates to make things a bit easier so that you could put in note names and command names instead of just numbers, so the music format would end up looking something like: INST, 05, LENGTH, 06, C2, D2, F2, WAIT, WAIT, D2, F2, SLIDE, -1, F3, SLIDE, 0, END You would create patterns like the above of any length and then you could apply any pattern to any channel as part of the sequence. That sequence was just written directly into the data and the code pointed to the appropriate memory addressed. It was sort-of like a much more fine-grained and complicated tracker and the format is pretty much how all of his players worked on all platforms. Most raw playroutines were the same. My Amiga sound effect driver worked in pretty much the same way, and you can see from KZread videos that Yuzo Koshiro's PC-88 player was also very similar. It's the most data-efficient way to do it and gives the most flexibility. There was also a way to reserve some RAM for the echo buffer and set up its co-efficients if you wanted to use it. To hear what I'd written, I'd have to make sure that the instrument bank was setup correctly and included, then compile it and link it with the test player, and then send it to the devkit. I used a Psy-Q (which I still have). You can find SNES Psy-Q pictures via Google. Because each pattern could be any length, it was very easy for patterns across channels to get out of sync. Sometimes I'd play the finished track and then I'd find that at, say, 3 minutes 30 seconds I'd missed a WAIT command or something and one channel would go out-of-sync, and get further out of sync each loop. I'd have to find it in the code, fix it, compile, send it, play it again and listen to the whole thing all through again to see if it was fixed. It was very laborious. Later, I wrote everything in Protracker on the Amiga instead and then copied the equivalent music data by hand into the code, which was a much better way to work. David sold his player code when he went to EA in the U.S. We (Psygnosis) bought it, and I know that Allister Brimble also had it as well.

@GSTChannelVEVO

2 жыл бұрын

@@fromwithinuk Just as I was thinking "this sounds like a tracker format but with extra steps", you mentioned that you ended up just composing in a tracker and copying the data. Beautiful. It's funny how common it was to write music in a text editor back then. It seems less "glamorous" than the custom tracker solutions that some devs conjured up, yet resulted in equally amazing music.

@fromwithinuk

2 жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO Making GUIs is a pain. Always was and always will be. It's also (relatively) easy to write a playroutine for a sound chip without having to understand how to do any graphics or handle keyboard input or anything on the PC to be able to make an actual app. When you get into the right mindset with the text editor, it's almost as easy as using a tracker apart from the lack of instant previewing.

This was excellent. Thanks for all the work you do!

You really hit my nostalgia feels with the Top Gear title music.

Great Video!

you forgot to mention the Plogue chipsynth SFC VST - actually the most accurate way to produce SNES music nowadays.

@jethinabox

3 жыл бұрын

Does it export to something you can play back on SNES hardware though, which is what this video is about

@jaronimo

3 жыл бұрын

@@jethinabox good point. I mean, it is a VST that emulates the SNES sound chip and creates midi output - so theoretically yes? but I can only guess, since I'm not sure how the other VST mentioned in the video delivers its signals to the SNES...

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

C700 has a "record" option that spits out an SPC and a SMC based on whatever MIDI information you sent. This is not particularly efficient, but it works 100% on the hardware. Apparently, chipsynth SFC is even less efficient, so they haven't implemented any export at all (yet)

@JoseHiggor

Жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO unsure if this only happens to me, but when I do the record thing, the sounds come in random midi channels, instead of the ones they were assigned to

Soon to have 1 million subscribers, keep up the great work @GSTChannel

Please I'm begging you make more videos like this.

Thank u so much for making this

Excellent video. Subscribed

GST keep answering the questions that keep me up at night

Seeing Tommy Tallarico mentioned here hits different these days.

@GSTChannelVEVO

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, it's quite weird to look back on. The GEMS video is even weirder. But! I still stand by what I presented in both.

Amazing video, I need to watch it a few more ties to fully grasp everything. Love it

this is absolutely fantastic, thank you so much :^)

Thank you for your research, it's really a good video 😁👍

First time I'm happy about my KZread recommendations. Great Video! I had to check a couple of times because I couldn't belive you 'only' had 11k subs, I thought you had about a million for sure and were some kind of big channel that I missed. Keep going you definitely have the qualifications to become a big boy channel!

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

my weakness is that my main focus is on music, and narrated videos like this are a bit more rare. (as you may have discovered if you've looked through my channel) I'm trying to change that by making more narrated stuff, but my philosophy of "music first" is unshakable. thanks for dropping by

i'd like to mention furnace tracker, a tracker that works with snes among many, *many* other systems

Wow this is really amazing friend really interested I got to say and yes I do hear the sound effect time to time but since I played the Super Nintendo for a long time that I got used to it but yeah there's some music that is similar to others but the snes has a lot potential and use the snes sound and music to his full power and of course in good hands it can produce great music but yeah some of them can be too simlar to other games but it can get better results with time of corse it can produce amazing soundtracks.

Yooo 0:36 C700 VST. Love using that thing.

Best documentary !!

That slap bass sample was from Roland, I'm pretty sure; their sampler synths all came with it at the time (and in fact, if I'm right, the same sample is "Slap Bass 1" in Windows's built-in general MIDI sound bank).

Such interesting knowledge! I’m learning from this!

Good job using FFV music in the background. Under-appreciated, that one!

Please consider making videos like this regarding the Nintendo 64 and the Game Boy line of handhelds. The Game Boy Advance especially has an interesting history of sound tools.

this makes the sound work on Super Castlevania 4 even more impressive as a launch title

Insanely interesting!

The MML compiler AddMusicK is how I personally create SNES music, with C700 mainly used to create samples. AMK is somewhat lacking in ease of use, though. Just about every single effect from pitch bend to vibrato to setting the FIR filter requires you to reference a hex code lookup table instead of having easy-to-remember commands like PMD or Mucom88. Supposedly people are working on improving it, but so far it doesn’t seem like it has anything to show.

Love it- but you forgot the one game that haunts my nightmares with its slap bass hook... Paperboy 2. That game should be against the Geneva convention.

I'd love to know what synths and drum machines were sampled for the SNES games.

Phenomenal work, mate. Always love to see new uploads from you. Nice to know SNES music dev was just as "fly by the seat of your pants" as MD music for the West!

After appreciated SPC musical hardwares. Decided talking about TG-16 sound drive next.

Awesome video.

I guess this video already talks about that, but in a nutshell, that cheap slap bass sample you would hear in all these "samy" compositions, compared to let's say, FF6 (to take one of the best) was the same thing as hearing badely converted midi to GEMS compared to beautiful FM soundtracks like SoR or Sonic.

11:38 There is a modern remake of that hardware you can buy today. It is called the Super Midi Pak

nice work using sax_teno with the echo effect. Can a selection of classic snes samples be found for use with the C700 vst I wonder?

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

you can load *.SPC files and extract the samples from them in C700, which is the method I'd recommend. There is a selection of samples that were provided to Jeroen Tel, which he later leaked with the source code for the music to NBA Hangtime, but the instruments are in a format that isn't compatible with C700, and the tools I used were *not* clean. Some manual hex editing required. it's not something that's in good shape to release

@KungFuFurby

3 жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO Yeah. I actually provided some reverse engineering for the .abr file format itself just so that the process could even be done in the first place.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 2A07 seen at 3:07 is PAL variant of the 2A03, the sound chip for the NES.

@HsienKoMeiLingFormerYANG

3 жыл бұрын

2a07 PAL felt overlooked.

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

you're correct! the only thing is... the 2A03 (and 2A07) are primarily the CPU, they just also happened to house all of the sound generation components.

Great video! It’s fascinating to learn how despite the limitations and constraints they achieved such quality and also made the sound tracks so memorable.

that slap bass sample is definitely from the korg m1. it's the same one used in seinfeld and the cps2 versions of street fighter 2, among other things

@GSTChannelVEVO

3 жыл бұрын

That was my first guess as well, but it *seems* to have a slightly different attack/decay than any of the notes I played on my M1, which makes me wonder if it's a different rompler.

@steakysteaky6

3 жыл бұрын

@@GSTChannelVEVO the snes sample seems to be a lot shorter than the original, as snes samples usually are, but otherwise it sounds identical

Hy =) noce work congrats 😁👊 do you have any information about the playstation 1 and sega saturn music composition? How the program the composers used for? Thanks so much 🙏

@GSTChannelVEVO

2 жыл бұрын

Nothing specific. I know that redbook audio was interesting in that era because it was a sudden shift for a lot of composers as they tried to quickly build their own full studios. So you saw lots of romplers and synthwork that might be considered "cheesy" today. I haven't looked into the generative side of that era of music at all, though

Is there any music from the snes sound chip that comes close to doing something similar to the mega drive fm, psg and pcm combination?

@DonnyKirkMusic

3 жыл бұрын

Donkey Kong country 1 and 2 use a ton of synth samples off of Korg M1.

@JogadorVelho

3 жыл бұрын

@@DonnyKirkMusic more examples?

@PastPlayerss

3 жыл бұрын

Plok! Snes

@maxwelseven

3 жыл бұрын

Pop'n Twinbee Rainbow Bell Adventures used some Mega Drive FM synth in a lot of songs. Like in "Distorted Fantasy", "Run! Run!", "How Did We Do?" and much more other ones.