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Friends, I have awesome news. At long last... after five years of talking about it... American Pixels is here. The project has just landed on Kickstarter for the final push, this 4th of July in the year of our Lord 2016. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1265656914/american-pixels-a-game-music-tribute-album-by-maze This has been a labor of love, blood, sweat, and tears... and damn the music came out awesome, if I do say so myself. Now I just need that last little nudge to cover the cost of mastering, licensing, CD duplication, etc. Any and all help from the OCR crew to spread the word would be vastly appreciated; let's make this thing EPIC together!

I'd be happy to take S3 credits, but it wouldn't be orchestral (which I believe is what @Black_Doom was hoping for). What I'm envisioning would be "uplifting" or "epic" trance, like this: Armin van Buuren - Love You More feat. Racoon or maybe more like this: Conjure One - Extraordinary Way (Antillas Club Remix) My track wouldn't have any vocals though, and my buildups/breakdowns wouldn't be *quite* so long, lol (I wouldn't be going for the full "club"/"DJ" experience here, although I may make a separate "club edit" similar to what was done with Super Cartography Bros). It'd probably have more elements of progressive trance, as well (along the lines of Above & Beyond's most recent "artist" album, We Are All We Need).

I use FMdrive as well. Can you post an example on soundcloud of what you have created with it? I can't believe it would be faulty emulation on FMdrive's part because it's extremely close to the original outside of some really minor differences. Metal squad was the title screen so there was no juggling of the chip's maximum polyphony of six voices outside of the song itself. I haven't analyzed thunder force's music yet (no idea why either)but assuming one voice for the other instruments (Kick, Snare, Distant Guitar in the BG, Lead Guitar) then you actually have 2 voices to get that rhythm guitar assuming no juggling for polyphony. Even though something like this would be double tracked to be stylistically correct, I don't think it was in the source to save voices. It does sound extremely narrow for a rhythm guitar. However, I'm guessing what you are hearing is actually the FM bass making up the vast majority of the impression that is that rhythm guitar. In general , the depth of the rhythm guitar is far more dependent on the bass than any metal guitarist would actually have you believe so focus on that and see if it works. I might give this recreation a shot sometime today or tomorrow and see what I can come up with as well.

Yes, I'm sure! I'll start working on it real soon thanks!

@KingTiger Yeah, the orchestral arrangement is quite an obvious idea, and I was really hoping to have it, but uplifting EDM may work pretty well, so if you want to remix this iconic track, and you're sure you want to join the project, I can let you do it.

First off, chill out, this is not a life and death problem. I respect your exuberance, but you're focusing too highly on it and I'll tell you why. Second off, yes, it could have something to do with the limitation of emulation and just the basic simple problem of recreation from synth alone. Emulated synthesizers often only sound like the real thing at the forefront - most of us who aren't pros are satisfied with it, but people with great listening talent find they don't compare up. I'm not personally familiar with FM Drive or Genny (I do have YM2612 though), but even hardcore professional synth emulations like Arturia don't always match up to the real things they are emulating. Third off, FM synthesis is famously hard to program and it doesn't surprise me at all that you're having trouble recreating it. I'm not an FM synth guru so I don't know if YM2612 programming is as hard as that holds up to, but I think that's the summary and the real cause of your problem here. I don't have a very helpful solution for you, I'm just reassuring you that you are not really the problem there and that much of it really is just the limitations of what you're working with. Keep practicing, keep looking for tutorials and asking around synth forums and you will get closer to your goal there.

yeah, i've already retweeted, etc. I think it's great

...derp, that's an error on my part! Apparently I thought it was "Together Always", which grated on me due to the low-toned mallet melodies. Seriously, someone should at LEAST do something good with that song though

I tweeted out that last post to see if there's anyone interested.

Deconstructing old sequenced music and listening to the separate components is one of the most interesting things you can do, and an extremly efficient learning tool. Not just for learning how chiptunes were made, but just growing and becoming a better musician in general. Elements that sound very simple and detached on their own but fuse to become more than the sum of their parts, or just knowing when to kill your darlings (like getting rid of the root note of a chord to save channel space, which the bass is already playing anyway) is not just a chiptune thing but also arrangement 101 and ultimately a means to getting a well balanced mix (since arrangement and mixing is largely intertwined). I feel as though it's a skillset that is becoming more and more rare in today's production climate. Top-tier arrangers do this kind of stuff all the time even when they're not beholden to technical limitations. I think it's worthwhile for any musician, no matter what genre, to dabble around with chiptunes. And by that I mean specifically working with getting the most out of these constraints and not just resorting to "bleeps and bloops" which is the usual reductive thinking applied to this type of music. It's such a great way of training yourself in these elements and really start thinking actively about them overall. I have provided 2 "stem" archives for some Genesis soundtracks I find technically interesting, by just isolating the channels and rendering them into .wavs so you can load them all up in a DAW and thoroughly analyze what's going on in them. You can do this yourself using the [url=http://www.smspower.org/Music/InVgm]in_vgm plugin for Winamp with anything from [url=http://project2612.org/]Project2612 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/Thunder%20Force%20IV%20Stems.zip Notice how the rhythm guitar here is split up into 2 layers with different sounds. One for mids and one for treble. Then these are "dubbed" once again and panned (as well as detuned slightly for a chorus effect), taking up 4 channels in total to create this huge wall of guitars that is pretty much equivalent of a fully fledged studio metal production. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66640537/Devilish%20Intro%20Stems.zip I really like how the simple PSG squares synergize with the FM bells here to create a very vibrant sound. You can also hear how the "choirs" are really the same kind of synth string section you often hear on the system, but it just has this fast upwards pitch bend in the attack which adds this kind of formant quality to it that we usually associate with voices.