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FamiTracker
Hey guys,I just thought I'd share something really cool with you. I have talked to some musicians who wrote music for NES video games and asked them how they wrote it. This is what they said:
Akito Nakatsuka - Family BASIC
Alberto Gonzalez - Compact Editor
Barry Leitch - MODTracker for Commodore Amiga
Brad Fuller - Music V Language
Charles Deenen - Hex Code Written Directly on NES
Dave Warhol - Cakewalk and a program he created that used his own voice patches
Dave Wise, Jonathan Dunn - Hex Code
Doug Brandon - CuBase (Atari ST)
Earl Vickers - Music V Language
Ed Bogas - Atari Music Studio
Elliot Delman & Steven Samler - Digital Performer
Frank Klepacki - Dr. T KCS on Commodore Amiga
Gavan Anderson - Hex Code
George Sanger - Digital Performer
Hirohiko Takayama - Assembley Hex Code on MS-DOS
Hirokazu Tanaka - Family BASIC
Jeroen Tel - Hex code with his own program for MS-DOS (He sent me some of the original music files!)
Kinuyo Yamashita - Hex code.
Koji Kondo - Family BASIC
Mark Knight - CuBase on Atari ST with Silver Box that emulated NES chip.
Mark Van Hecke - Dr. T KCS on Atari ST using FB-01.
Marshall Parker - Hex Code
Neil Baldwin - Hex Code.
Paul Webb - Hex Code
Paul Wilkinson - Cakewalk and Hex Code
Rob Wallace - Digital Orchestrator
Tania Smith - Hex Code
Zap Ajisai - Music Maker
If I find any more ways they wrote music to NES games I will post it.
That's the same, actually, and it was most common way to make music in 1980s. This means that the composer, or his fellow programmer, had to make own music engine, and the music programming was just entering the music data as set of bytes or macros. It is one step closer to the hardware/music engine than MML.
Jeroen Tel sent me the original music file to Alien 3 and it's all in hex and there's voices like "SoftFlute" and stuff. But the notes are written like $80,$05,$96 etc.
If the notes written in hex form, there are two possible reasons. One is that the author remember everything well and does not need macros/defines, another that the author actually had the tool that translates notes from some human-friendly format to the codes (the same way that used the composers who used MOD/MIDI in the process).
Ones who made the music as the code could use macros or defines instead on exact numbers, so the numbers could be replaced with note names (like C_2=$12, and then you can use both $12 or C_2).
Woah, um, awesome! I have a couple projects going on at the moment so it'll have to wait, but we should pool our resources sometime, and make some sort article about this.
I posted a thread with basically the exact same subject here-
http://theshizz.org/forum/index.php?/topic/31625-how-nes-music-was-made/
I have a lot less examples, but the ones I do have are a bit fleshed out. I plan on interviewing Jeroen Tel similar to how I did with Alberto Gonzalez, but it sounds like you have even more contacts at your disposal. I'll be hitting you up in the future sometime for sure.
I saw that on the site that George Sanger wrote the music using his own sequencer, however that's incorrect. I asked him how he wrote it and he said that he used MOTU's Digital Performer on the Macintosh and Dave Warhol said the music was converted to the NES using an MS-DOS program that used his own patches. He told me he still has the program but it's on a 5 1/4 and he doesn't have a 5 1/4.
RE: How NES Music Was REALLY MadePosted: 2011-01-14 05:56
I know I'm reviving an old thread, but I find this really interesting. Trackers are some oddball music creation software, but hex code? That's just inconceivable to me.
More interesting to me though is how the hell did you manage to talk to Koji Kondo?
Hello, Lucien_Lachance
I did not talk to Koji Kondo, but I read in an interview that he was composing his music on a Family BASIC (a NES dev kit that was released publicly in Japan). All the other composers I've talked to though.
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