Recreating SNES Music in FL Studio? (Edison specifically)

[Rux Ton]

Hi there. I've been a lurker here for such a long time (got my start here even) and over the years I've met a lot of people blah blah- basically i've landed on a game dev team and we have been avidly prepping up a game

Now for a while we talked about styles of music and how we wanted to go about it. Leader of the team is a HUGE earthbound guy and is very inspired by the whole Mother series and we kind of came to a compromise of.. Emulating the SNES sound, but using it stylistically (He originally wanted to use soundfonts but, legally I don't feel okay with that, plus I want my own unique sounds from my own library i've created myself)

I came up with my own system to emulate it but also to modernize it so it won't sound too lo-fi. I've used the loop point method in Edison to make a tight loop and i record one middle C note of whatever sound i want. Be it a synth i design or a sample of a flute etc.

But I was wondering what other ways are there to emulate that .. sort of SNES sound? I know there is bit reduction involved but I don't know if thats something i want to totally do. I notice when I try to get a tight loop sometimes I get a popping sound at the loop. I try to cover that up using slight release tails and the infamous SNESverb tape delay effect. But I feel like I could do more? Like... what could we do with the drums?

I'm open to discuss any type of SNES style music production here honestly. I'm just looking at what else I can do. If you guys have samples of things you've done definitely feel free to share. This is something i've thought about for a while but never really spoke about until today. Im really curious to find more information, specifically for FL Studio.


PS Sorry this is all over the place, i'm a little bad at organizing my thoughts properly.

[MindWanderer]

I don't know Edison, but C700 is tailor-made to create authentic SNES sounds.  Doesn't do reverb quite right, but it sounds like you know how to do that otherwise.  Just load an SPC into it and you're good to go, or you can mess with its parameters to create your own sounds.

Of course, there's always Super Audio Cart for the easy win.

[Rux Ton]

But what if for example i have a sample library of like.. trumpet samples that are long recorded out in a C5, is it just as simple as finding a loop point somewhere that's really tight? I feel liek im over complicating the process. I made a video showing what I am doing but im just wondering if it's enough.

Ive heard of C700 but im trying to stick to an in FL only way of doing it as im on a team with 2 other guys who use FL Studio and are musicians that play instruments (they will be recording some stuff too) so im just lookign to see what other options we do have.

Yeah i really want that Super Audio Cart. Im so proud of this community and Zircon for coming up with that (i swear ive been waiting on something like that to come out for years!)

[zircon]

Thanks for the kind words on Super Audio Cart!

Yes, the key to creating good SNES style samples is primarily focused around very tightly editing + looping one-note instrument samples. You must keep the size very small. But before you even render that sample, you need to make sure it is set to MONO with a max sample rate of 32khz. (Or if you want to keep the samplerate at 44khz for practical reasons, use a very sharp lowpass to cut off everything above 16khz.) If you are using a bass sample or similar you may want to go down even lower to 22 or 11khz.

Once you have your downsampled audio, you will want to do authentic bit rate reduction (BRR). You can search on Google for various BRR encoding tools out there. Most require you to do some stuff in the Windows command line to actually encode the samples. Essentially you want to encode the samples to SNES loadable format and immediately decode back to WAV, which gives you properly compressed/filtered audio.

Lastly, using a looping app like EndlessWAV (free) you can very tightly edit, trim, and loop the sample until the final result is - at most - 20 kilobytes or less.

[Rux Ton]

Ah! The good man himself (I messaged you before a long time ago saying this but you really shifted my direction with some good critique a long time ago. good stuff)

Thanks a lot for that information man. I'm gonna report back to the team about this and utilize this is a major key in how we go about this soundtrack. Thanks for the great feedback and again thanks for that amazing library. I feel like its a game changer  (literally in this sense tbh)