Sam Ascher-Weiss
-
Posts
572 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
8
Content Type
Articles
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by Sam Ascher-Weiss
-
-
Oh, yeah, I know it isn't pure at all, although I wasn't aware what synths he used in the album, but mainly, the point I was trying to make is that even though he limited himself throughout most of the album to "chippy"-sounding synths (gawd, that man can work a pulse wave), he managed to create an absurdly epic prog rock opera. The limitations are part of the brilliance, and they drive the innovation; that's the beauty of chiptunes in my opinion. That, and I fucking love the NES and Gameboy.
I got your meaning from the original post. I was just being pointlessly anal. It's one of my more charming character flaws?
-
I think you need to listen to C-Jeff's Preschtale album. It wouldn't quite qualify as either 9-bit or pure chiptune, but it lies much closer to the latter, and it achieves some pretty incredible things given the hardware limitations.
Preschtale makes use of... among other things, Quantum Leap Colossus. While I agree it is an INSANELY brilliant album, I'd hardly use the words "hardware limitations" when describing it.
-
I just wish more people would try out this 9-bit stuff because I love it so damn much. Hearing 8-bit makes me want 9-bit.
I know what you're saying. Every time I listen to
I'm always like... where are the break-beats and wobble bass!Chamber music... more like LAMEber music. I'm so sick of orchestra, listening to orchestra makes me want MOREchestra. Swan Lake sounds so lame without Flanger and Filter sweeps.
-
Thank you for taking the time to do that, I really appreciate it and it gives me a better understanding on how a judge might respond to a wide variety of chip styles.Reviews etc. -
I love clarity, I'm a huge fan of clarity, and I do want us to be as clear as humanly possible. It's just that sometimes there's an inverse relationship between clarity and flexibility - hopefully we can enhance the former while maintaining the latter, and a resub/revision from Sam can kick off that process.
I kinda thought we had achieved touchy-feely closure at that point, but as for danimal's subsequent comment about second-class citizens, digital piano, etc.
- We like VGM, dude. We're ALL second-class citizens. That's the main battle we're fighting, at least here at OCR.
- Using some of the same logic already employed to make a case for chiptunes based on popularity, you COULD argue the following and not be completely moronic: Piano has been around for centuries; ditto that for guitar. Our generation is often accused of wanting instant gratification, without earning it over time. Attempting to "play the victim" and argue that chiptunes don't get the same exact respect suggests that as a medium, they've accomplished in mere decades what those instruments have built up over centuries. Mad love for the chips from ME, personally, but I wouldn't expect instant parity with those two particular instruments, which represent the heavyweights of solo instrumentation. I'm not saying OCR specifically should treat the two differently, I'm saying I wouldn't be representing chiptunes in this fashion, personally, since it seems a little... impatient? I don't know the best word, but hopefully you get me. Based on Sam's multiple citations, it seems like things are going the right way, regardless... hopefully it's about the music and not about proving something.
I agree with you whole heartedly, which is why my original post claimed it would take at least 70 years for things to be at the point where chiptunes would be allowed in their most basic raw form.
The reason I continue to press the point, is not so much impatience as, I feel discouraged by the standards as they are, despite my initial enthusiasm. I realize, in order for things to change, there are always double standards that are reasonable.. e.g. white rappers can't get away with being mediocre and make it, without exceptional circumstances. Not necessarily the best example, but I get it. For a chiptune arrangement to be taken seriously, it will have to go above and beyond the call of duty.
I will try my best to answer this call, though it will probably be a year or two before I really feel up to it as other things take priority at the moment.
I'd like to say though, this impatience you speak of.. that fire.. that passion, without it I don't think change would come. It always comes at a snail like pace, I accept that, but if we were to strive for that specifically... if all movements took the stance of, lets just be patient and wait for change to happen on its own, then even 200 years wouldn't make a difference.
So I personally don't see this impatience or "playing the victim" as you call it, something to look down upon. And I guess some of us hope, that a site like this, might try to be ahead of the curve by as much as possible. Please don't mistake this for a sense of entitlement.
- We like VGM, dude. We're ALL second-class citizens. That's the main battle we're fighting, at least here at OCR.
-
Yes, it's very interesting, no doubt about that. But at the end of the day, what's being asked is that we make special rules and exceptions for a production style, because that production style is popular. And you just said yourself that a large portion of people who enjoy/make it don't even have the VGM connection, which sort of weakens that case.
Okay I'm starting to get a little confused. When you say production style.. it seems that the term is being applied a bit broadly. If we're talking strictly production, expecting a piece of orchestral music to be normalized on the same level as an electronic submission would be pretty ridiculous. Any non live instrument song with this kind of production, lack of clarity etc. or like Danimal said earlier.. expecting a harsichord arrangement to have a huge dynamic range.
Beyond that though, pure chiptunes are far more than simply a 'production style'. They are an entire aesthetic unto themselves. You say "but you can have jazz chiptunes... or rock chiptunes", you could have a string quartet play a jazz standard as well, does that make it simply a production style? I point this out because, asking chiptune artists to do things like add reverb/panning or HQ electronic sounds as a requirement, would be like demanding all orchestral arrangements make use of filter effects and flanger/phasing and other types of processing used in straight electronic arrangements.
-
Okay this is starting wear on me a bit, the more posts I see like Dave's etc. the more I realize this situation is still not acceptable.
For one I'd like to more clearly understand exactly what meets the bar:
Here are some examples of chipmusic, all of these take the purist approach, and all but three were written for actual hardware, I'll specify which three:
(not for actual hardware)(not for actual hardware)(not for actual hardware)I purposely picked a more technically minimal Virt track, as I'm curious if it would meet the bar.
These are all very different styles, from a technical perspective, though I know they were all crafted with a ton of attention to detail and they all have what myself and many others consider to be a distinct and beautiful aesthetic.
If I were to write a chiptune, in an attempt to meet the current vague and nearly unreachable standard, most likely it would sound like it was trying too hard to prove that it was REAL MUSIC, rather than being allowed to explore the full spectrum of the purist chip-tune aesthetic. Something that as I pointed out in an earlier post, unlike other "lofi" methods of production... like recording windows default general midi sounds, or a live recording using terrible mics and mixing, or any other supposed slippery slope candidates, chip music has a ridiculously huge following ESPECIALLY among gamers.
I appreciate Djp's example about jumping off a bridge.. something being popular doesn't make it good, straight covers are also popular....but they go against the basic mission of this site. Chiptunes do not in my opinion because they are a distinctly MODERN form of music making. The fact that people are CHOOSING to work within a set of limitations, this is a revolutionary and important aspect of purist chip music and part of why it holds such a fascination for so many, a large portion of whom don't even have the nostalgic attachment to these sounds as they're too young to have grown up with the consoles that they originated on.
Anyway, it would help clarify the standards to me, even though I think all above styles should be completely acceptable if the arrangment aspects were to meet the bar, if I knew which of them would actually stand a chance.
-
I still stand by my first post.
In 70 or so years, chiptunes of all kinds, including many NES soundtracks from the 80s, will be held as a form of almost folk music.
There is something beautiful and elegant about the sound of a chiptune with limited use of 'tricks' etc.. these tricks are wonderful and a fun and important aspect of chiptune composition, but they shouldn't be considered a necessity in the sense that only the most technical of chiptunes, are considered worthy.
I realize for the time being this is probably too much of a concession to demand, so I don't expect it, but I understand what danimal means about 2nd class citizen. There are some relatively juvenile piano remixes that have been posted, from a technical and compositional [pianistically speaking] perspective. But for a chiptune song to pass, it has to be in the top top top 99.999999% percent of the genre.
Anyway, I know that this will not change, and I don't expect it to anytime soon. BUT I stand by the fact that it should, and will...when the times change and chiptunes are regarded with the respect they deserve on a universal level.
-
This may have been a mistake, or may have pre-dated the standards revision. I leave it up to the judges whether a re-evaluation makes sense; maybe it does?
For the record, I feel I've learned a lot about chiptunes and chiptune technique to the point where I'd be slightly embarrassed if that song were ever posted... however, I'd love to give it another shot with perhaps a VRC6 arrangement using far greater detail and variety of sound than I was capable of with espergirl
-
Fixed. Which you'd think was implicit and understood, but ah well.
Fair enough...however, If chiptune artists were composing using the NESDEV tools, then I'd agree with the "traditional limitations" rule. But considering Famitracker created nsfs can exceed the 32kb limit and the "traditional limitations" [this is not just about song length but the level of detail and complexity as well adds to the filesize] not to mention the amount of fine tuned control we're given that the NESDEV tools did not possess by any accessible means.
and as far as gameboy chiptunes, LSDJ is so far beyond the available devtools for the old gameboy that it's pretty ridiculous. Just the use of the wavetable channel alone.
-
but we DO want to express that if you throw a chiptune arrangement that employs 100% standard NES defaults our way, it's going to be judged similarly to if you had recorded the MIDI output from the default Windows MIDI player.
So by what criteria could one pass the panel? And for the record, while general midi is certainly a popular format, and there are websites devoted to it, you don't have:
general midi artists touring the world (Jeremiah Johnson, Joshua Davis etc.),
being featured on late night with Late Night Carson Daily,
[to name a few]
Holding international festivals, one of which was covered by MTV here in the sates
having more than 2 MILLION scrobbles combined amongst just THREE musicians....
reaching number one on bandcamp in sales with a FREE ALBUM
maybe it's time to stop using the "it's the same as .mid" justification.
-
Yes! So here's what's up with this:
I always have, and probably always will, viewed OCR as a website that favors production values more than arrangement values. Some (including zircon and dave) might disagree with that statement, but I really do. My all-percussion mix was placed under an arrangement limitation (in part derived from the source): one type of instrument. However, from a production standpoint, it wasn't too bad. The instruments were all live, which already provides a greater complexity of sound.
As for my arrangement: I have to say, I really don't think it was brilliant. I tried to be smart about the source--stating it verbatim in the beginning and end (but with addition accompaniment), and then mixing and matching fragments of it to provide the foundation for a "solo section" in the middle. No brilliant transformation or transcendence happened from my treatment of the source material. As a composition, nothing groundbreaking.
I think a good example of a website that places arrangement over production quality would be (despite not being video game related,) youngcomposers.com. Most of the time, you're submitting midi realizations of Finale and Sibelius scores, and are being evaluated purely on their compositional structure and content. I certainly wouldn't want to play any of those at a party (unless it was a nerdy composer party or something).
So for that reason, it doesn't really surprise me that brilliant chiptunes get rejected from this site, for the same reason that brilliant midi realizations off Finale or brilliant recordings of live concerts using your iPhone camera wouldn't get accepted. An absolutely brilliant arrangement might help a low-quality product get accepted, but a high production level will almost guarantee a mediocre arrangement get passed given it adheres to the submission standards. I think that's fine--that's just what the site is about. I mean, it's much harder to be picky about super-subjective musical criteria pertaining to the quality/depth/construction of somebody's arrangement anyway--and quite frankly, I don't know if I would trust the judges to make those types of judgement calls. It's extremely subjective.
So getting back to my remix, the reason those limitations worked were because while they placed limitations on the parameters of my arrangement, they did not limit the parameters of my production quality. While a chiptune, when written authentically, does limit the arrangement parameters, it consequently limits the production values drastically--thus severely limiting any chance of it being passed.
ps zircon if you disagree with me please don't fire me
Interestingly enough Doug.. we kind of spent several pages explaining why chiptune doesn't actually LIMIT production values by any objective measuring stick. They are just as complex in many ways from a production perspective as recording a solo instrument. From timbral shifts combined with all kinds of volume macros, echo techniques a miriad of arpeggiation methods that create entirely new timbres, not to mention how these things are used in conjunction across multiple channels to create unique sounds through combinations etc... I could go on at length.. people have, entire message boards with thousands of users are devoted to nothing other than aspects of chiptunes which have NOTHING to do with composition.
-
The point is that when Dave started the site in 1999, there were other chiptune and MIDI enthusiast sites, but no sites focused on MP3 arrangements of all games, so a specific point was to use more modern sounds and productions applied to older game music to explore it in ways outside of those traditional limitations. So that's why, if you use MIDI or chiptunes stuff in OC ReMixes, it has to be paired with more modern sounds and modern production techniques. Founder's discretion, and that's the way it's been done.
because chiptune technique as it stands today, a field that is still constantly being innovated and revolutionized, is clearly not modern while, using virtual analog synths and 808s based on completely outdated hardware, common place in synth based remixes, clearly is. What if somebody submitted a remix in the style of a 70s rock song...or worse yet, something classical. Modern all the way!
EDIT:
I apologize for my tone, and I realize that it's not quite that simple, however I don't think this issue can, or should, be so easily dismissed.
-
It's not really a double standard, it boils down to subjective preference. Just because chiptunes are popular doesn't mean that the style of production is objectively 'good'. Some people (and judges) do subjectively feel that the production style is basic and abrasive, and that it's sort of an arbitrary restriction. People like you, halc, chthonic/ben briggs (etc) have shown that you can use heavy chiptune elements in a track without being 100% chiptune and those will get happily passed and enjoyed.
Okay, the difficulty I have with this is, if rejecting chiptunes is based on a 'subjective' preference, because of what 'some people' feel, then there's a lot of material which could be rejected with the same 'subjective' reasoning (some people find orchestral music boring etc.). You're saying that chiptune production is not 'objecitvely' good, does this mean it IS objectively bad? if it is, then why reject them on a 'subjective' basis... you see why this gets confusing? So speaking subjectively, people in this community and the overclocked remix listening audience I would say are more predisposed to appreciate the chiptune genre then almost any other scene out there... and as far as being 'basic and abrasive', again.. speaking subjectively, there are plenty of 'acceptable' genres that fall into that category.
-
My one issue with the argument I'm constantly hearing repeated... to paraphrase "what if he made a remix in the style of Zimbabwe Uyulating, it's a legitimate genre that consists of nothing but recordings of frogs being skinned alive... etc.
I've heard this being used with wind chimes persay, as an example, or yogic rock banging.
This argument falls apart for me a bit because, if the judges heard a remix in one of these genres, and they actually liked it, I don't think they'd reject it solely BECAUSE of its limitations, they'd only reject it if they felt the limitations kept if from being, for lack of a better description, good music... there's the double standard.
-
Sweet, I'll get crackin'. Maybe I'll add some piano accompaniment. Would it be accepted if the NES parts weren't stereo though? Hmmmmmmm... would it get accepted if the piano wasn't the main part and the NES was? Man so many things to consider. Maybe I should add more channels; how many channels does it take to have good production values?
I heard about some soundtrack coming out that uses 20 NES channels or something like that, maybe that would suffice?....can't remember who wrote it. Some dude with a funny name. Google it
-
in 70 years or so, when chiptunes are regarded as a medium on the same level as other relatively minimal forms such as a string quartet.... if OCR is still around then, they will accept chiptunes.
So given the current length of the queue you might as well submit one now
-
I'll let you all guess who this guy sounds like.... hint: reverse his initials.
-
Album will be released on march 15th, at http://www.ubiktune.org following a listening party at http://www.areciboradio.com. Details here:
http://www.facebook.com/events/261447153934695/
Also, one more preview video:
-
One of the greatest musical experiences of my life was listening to this album. I invite you to enjoy the ride!
FX4 is a concept album set in the oceans and skies. Its story immediately precedes that of FX3. Unlike the previous albums, which were written as "soundalikes" using sampled chip sounds, FX4 consists of machine code that can run on a real NES system. It was written in Famitracker, available for free at famitracker.com.
The album is free, and I am not expecting or asking for payment, although I appreciate donations — the proceeds will go toward software I need for my one-man indie game project.
virt.
-
So amazing!!!
-
Awesome! Really Cool!
-
When he defeated his game genie in battle, Tommy was rewarded with an item of immeasurable value. Where the genie had been only a moment before, there now sat a new cartridge for his nintendo entertainment system, his parents helped him hook it up. He took this enchanted cartridge and put it into his system. A single message flashed on his screen. PREPARE TO JAM. Not sure what to do, tommy went to his older brother's keyboard and placed his fingers on the keys.....they suddenly started to move and they began playing the themes from his favorite games. And then the magic happened, his nintendo, powered by his new mystical cartridge, started to play along with him. Tommy turned on his tape recorder and the two of them, boy and console, jammed for 40 minutes straight. 20 years later, this recording, now digitally remastered, is available to the public for the first time.
Underwater (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) (2:51)
Temple (Zelda 2) (3:16)
Alien Lair (Contra) (3:07)
Night Sea (Little Nemo the Dream Master) (3:46)
Dwelling of Doom (Castlevania 2) (3:17)
Kung Fu Alley (NES Original) (4:42)
Title (Double Dragon) (3:34)
Gemini Man (Megaman 3) (3:58)
Stage 1 (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2) (2:59)
Area A (Shatterhand) (3:26)
Wood Man (Megaman 2) (3:37)
Artwork: Katie Kinkel
Piano and Famitracker: Samuel Ascher-Weiss
Composition: Tracks 1 and 9: Keizou Nakamura
Track 2: Akito Nakatsuka
Track 3: Hidenori Maezawa, Kyouhei Sada
Track 4: Junko Tamiya
Track 5: Kenishi Matsubara, Satoe Terashima
Track 6: Samuel Ascher-Weiss
Track 7: Kazunaka Yamane
Track 8: Yasuaki Fujita (BUNBUN)
Track 10: Iku Mizutani, Koichi Yamanishi
Track 11: Manami Matsumae, Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, Ogeretsu Kun
© All rights reserved.
-
this is really cool
Chiptunes ...?
in General Discussion
Posted
Personally I'm with you guys....