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Big hearty welcome to DJPRETZEL to the team! He will be claiming the Military Facility Dungeon track and I'm super excited to see what he has in store for us! He has one other obligation to clear out first but then it should be onto this album next! With him and @Yoann Tolpin claiming three tracks (ambitious!) things are looking up!

Round extended to... Round ends: Feb 19 1PM Vote ends at Feb 21 11PM If no one else enters, Necrox gets another freebie Sorry about the delay...had work at a very awkward time. Shift work kills man.

Kind of a broad question that spans many different sound chip manufacturers but usually it's because of the limited polyphony that the old sound chips were capable of. Taking the Genesis for example the yamaha 2612 sound chip that was in that system was only capable of six simultaneous voices. That's 6 channels that needs to be split between music and any sfx so chances are the game at any given time is hitting the maximum amount of polyphony it can handle. Now, if a game uses a "pause"/"unpause" sound effect that requires a single channel to play. In order to play the sound effect something has to go at least for the duration that the pause sound effect plays at which point the missing voice can come back in. You can usually hear this throughout a lot of 8 and 16 bit games when a lot is happening on screen, parts of the background track are dipping in and out. Juggling your different voices in an effective way that doesn't detract from the game was a necessary skill to have for a game composer back in the day.

hey guy love your mixed just one wish is SUPER SUPER justice to the song hope to see more from you like that!

Updated my sheet.

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.

Fascinating stuff It's weird how Green Hill Zone could sound like random notes when you only hear them on separate channels. Watching the Streets of Rage 2 one makes me more convinced that Yuzo Koshiro could make any game soundtrack, regardless of hardware limitations, sound so damn good.

Eimear Noone, composer for Blizzard and main conductor for The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, just announced a Kickstarter called Songs of Zelda: A Link to the Celts. It's an album of Zelda music arranged in a traditional Irish style. I particularly liked how The Windwaker Theme sounded in the promo video.