8-Bit Metal

So far, regarding the composition, it sounds empty. But the quality's good. Put them vocals! How long have you been doing this? Is this a new project?

Thanks for the honest feedback. I will be working on that for the next step. I received praise on my vocals for a couple of songs, and I'll push toward that. Also, a big thanks for putting up the info about the album on this database. It's a comical take on the Duke's despair and alcoholism resulting from his lack of employment because he's been waiting so long for the game to come out.

Thank you very much! Also if any lurkers tried to download but didn't see the link, for some reason my host seems to have rolled back one update, so I had to put it back up. Not sure how long the link was out, but it's back in now. So if you went and didn't find it, you can now.

08/08/08 marks the release of RE: Discoveries, the first full-length album from the 8-Bit Metal project. One part heavy/power metal and one part chiptune, the 8-Bit Metal sound fuses electric guitars and sounds from the Nintendo Entertainment System to render original music and lyrics centered on classic video games from all eras. This one-man project is manned by an hobbyist musician and distributed freely as downloadable content on the project's website. <http://www.le-ludophile.com/melomania.htm> RE: Discoveries features the following tracks, written, recorded and individually shared on the internet over the course of three years: 1. The Heroes of Yesterday (intro) 2. In the Year 200X (Mega Man 2) 3. Thirteenth Zodiac (Final Fantasy Tactics) 4. Saving the World Barechested (Contra) 5. The Founding of Booty Bay (World of Warcraft) 6. The Duke Got Nuked (Duke Nukem Forever) 7. Bloodlines (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) 8. 'Twould Be Best (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) 9. Moon Sugar (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) 10. The Devil and the Incarnate (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) 11. Behind the Mask (Final Fantasy IV) 12. Beyond the Mask (Final Fantasy IV) 13. Hatred Eternal (Final Fantasy IV) Bonus track (feat. Mitchell Emmen): Where All Things End (Doom Castle) (Final Fantasy Mystic Quest) In addition to the MP3 files, the RAR archive available for download contains a booklet in PDF format and an album cover. A separate Print-It-Yourself version is also available for those who still enjoy their music on CDs. The booklet contains all lyrics and the author's personal comments on the games covered. ----- Your interest, and all comments, are appreciated!

I didn't like this mix. The bass booms right through and smothers the guitars, which are not defined wide enough. And the bassline is repetitive and throws the harmony off at one point (didn't check which exactly). I lost interest and didn't make it to the solo that people talk about. Or maybe I didn't hear it, I can't up the volume without disturbing my neighbors because there's too much bass. As far as I could hear, the guitars were replicating the original notes, minus the expressivity. The lead guitar sound is flat and the performance lacks harmonics, tremolo and/or vibrato. Sorry.

I've tried, and somewhat succeeded, doing some music on Linux. But I'm going to ditch the OS and reluctantly go back to Windows. Doing music on Linux is a hassle and not worth it IMO. You have to set up a JACK server or you can't have two applications sharing audio at the same time. You have to patch your connections on a graph. The best software amounts in overall quality and processing power to the commercial ones out there, which is a feat, but their GUI and general usability is horrendous. I've tried Ardour for a while, it seemed promising, but I didn't have enough time to sink in it to really learn it in-depth. Nothing is intuitive in there. Audacity is fine for recording tracks, but mixing with it is really not user-friendly - and it's prone to crashing AND data corruption for apparently no reason. I'm sure there IS a reason, but I'm not ready to spend hours searching the internet, downloading packages, editing config files, and so forth. My conclusion from my foray into Linux (using Ubuntu distribution, supposedly for ease of use) is that it's stuck in a catch-22. If you want to do advanced stuff (audio/graphic design/film editing), the softwares are behind commercial ones (of course, we can't really expect to have free what corporations put tons of professional man-years to produce, can we?) and the investment it takes to set up your system - and MAINTAIN it - is really prohibitive, at least for me. I didn't mind taking a long time installing and setting things up, but the fact you have to review your setup and debug everytime an update hits any of your applications or your system - and they come really often - was something I was not prepared for, and not interested in tinkering with my OS a few hours every other week or month. What works good is the mundane, day-to-day usage - type a letter in OpenOffice, browse the web, check your emails. Yet it requires substantial knowledge in computers to operate and maintain it, such that people who would have use of it to do everyday tasks cannot really install it. Rosegarden is apparently nice, though I've never managed to make it work with MIDI. It probably has to do with the way I setup my MIDI server and the JACK connections. Or not. There's just too much stuff to keep track of. Managing a Linux computer to record and mix audio is like trying to gear up a 70 Prot pally in WoW. You need a friggin chart to keep track of everything.

My cover of Doom Castle is called "Where All Things End" and was submitted to the judges here. In the meantime, give it a go there: www.le-ludophile.com/melomania.htm.

I for one started gradually opting out of the series since VIII...IX was a bit of a relief, but entirely forgettable, and X almost killed it. Now I've XII on a shelf while I run through VII again (only my second time ever). Ultimately, I like the symbol that this is, and consider it even (with tongue-in-cheek) some sort of fated punishment against Sony's hubris. So I like that, though the game itself will probably only grace my 360 as a rental. Still, it's not so bad, at least the game will still come out for PS3. This is nowhere near the shock VII created back in the day - "Final Fantasy is not only going on this PlayStation thing, but it's NOT gonna come out for the SNES, Ultra 64 or that mysterious "Project Reality" game boy!" Oh, and also, I hate that bishounen shit so much. Especially since in English you can get by a sizable portion of dialogue without ever encountering a gendered pronoun, I hate not having an idea whether that's a dude or a gal for hours of play-time. Just make your characters a bit above 18, put some facial hair on men, and leave crystals to jewellers, and you'll get my interest.

Like the other posters here said, I think the best chance you have is looking for someone to do your tracks. I'm new here but I saw there's a list of remixers interested in collabs and their respective instruments, so that should be golden for you to find someone. Native Instruments' Guitar Rig 2 (3 is out I believe, though I haven't looked at it) allows you to build your amp and effects set in your PC and either filter incoming sound in real-time (if you plug your guitar in, it sounds whichever way you set it up), but you can also put those effects in post-processing. People usually record the clean tone, acoustic, neutral sound of the part or song they're playing, and then afterward set up the sound file into GR2 and twiddle around to find that perfect crunchy distorsion, or whatever. If you're going to do heavy metalesque stuff, it *might* be possible for you to export a MIDI file with an okay-sounding acoustic guitar soundfont or VST into WAV, and then layer it up in Guitar Rig and tweak a strong distorsion specifically for that sound. I've never tried it, and I'd be surprised if it would give "AWESOME" results, but it might sound better than "flat" soundfonts or VSTs. Or maybe someone else has already tried that? Good luck!

Thanks! I've listened to your stuff - very different, but I like it, very laid-back. However I have a silly question: what are you going to do when you write your 11th or 12th song? Name it "Asteroid 0A00A420" ? You're going to run out of planets! Thanks! I did get a good bit of feedback like that, especially from fans of video game music / chiptunes / electronic or techno. On the other hand metal fans don't seem to mind. So I guess it's whether you think of my music as "8-Bit music with some metal thrown in" or "Metal music with some 8-bit sounds thrown in". Now of course I'm not a pro singer so the performance itself probably doesn't help my cause. I think my best work with the vocals so far is "In the Year 200X". Actually, I think it's the best song to listen to first to get the gist of what I do. Mmmh. I'm going to shuffle around the Myspace player list. Since a lot of people have told me that maybe it'd sound better with modulated/computerized/robotic vocals, I'm going to try it in a future song. I just have to find a good game to make use of that context.

You definitely get points in my book for going 8-Bit . It sounds like the great evil overlord is pacing to and fro in his dark castle hallways, brandishing a sacrificial dagger. The percussive kick-in near the end is really cool. The ending is abrupt though. Is it supposed to have a looping point back at about after the intro? In its current form it'd be good for a short cut-scene music. Not really sure how to expand that into a bigger song though - most chiptune music I've heard lasts about as long as your song in its current form, or loops back and ends up being watered and overly long.

It just worked when I got back to it. Weird. I think I like it, but I also think the vibrato/chorus effect you've put on the synth/bass (or whatever it's supposed to be...the main melody) is a little over the top. Though that may just be me. I don't really get the key shift after the first pattern though, the song has an ubpeat feel but the transposition clashes with that, makes it sound somewhat eerie or depressing even. I like how the piano kicks in, it really heightens your song and brings variety.Also the percussive diminution halfway through the end brings a nice change of pace. Overall, it's short and sweet. Good job!

It doesn't play for me.

Hi everyone, I have been recording and releasing songs under this 8-Bit Metal project for a while, and now that I've enough material to compile it, I'm going to release the songs as an album in a ZIP archive with cover and booklet in print-it-yourself form for those CD fans. I'd like general feedback on my work so far, as I feel I've closed a first step of "exploration", ie trying different things, and I've a few ideas on what worked the most and what didn't work so good, so I'm willing to see if people share that or if there are unexpected reactions. Here's a list of the tracks and the game on which they're based. None of them are covers. I only did one, and it's Where All Things End (Doom Castle from FFMQ). It's been submitted to OCRemix, but the rest here is original work. Everything is available at my website (http://www.le-ludophile.com/melomania.htm) with lyrics, or on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/8bitmetal). In the Year 200X (Megaman 2) Thirteenth Zodiac (Final Fantasy Tactics) Bloodlines (Castlevania) Saving the World Barechested (Contra) The Founding of Booty Bay (World of Warcraft) Moon Sugar + The Devil and the Incarnate (Morrowind) Behind the Mask + Beyond the Mask + Hatred Eternal (Final Fantasy IV) Thanks for listening and I look forward to reading your feedback!

Actually, I'm working on a loose cover of the title theme for my next song. It's already written, I just have to find the time to record and mix it.