Deepwater Dungeon (Dungeon A)

2 weeks ago by @retroindiejosh

Deepwater Dungeon (Dungeon A)

retroindiejosh

00:00

00:00

Liner Notes

This one started life as an attempt on the piano to meet the palindrome challenge, but eventually I settled on something non-palindromic and made it the harp part. Ironically, the main lead came closer to a palindrome than the harp.

I've been learning a ton about ChipSynth SFC, a "bit-accurate" emulation of the Super NES sound engine, to make this mock 16-bit RPG soundtrack (my ultimate goal of FAWM 2025). The SPC700 doesn't like long samples which makes slow, moody tracks like this difficult. But I figured I might as well start with a challenge!

The aforementioned harp bit on the piano felt very watery for me, so I assigned it to the "water dungeon" theme for the mock RPG, one of five dungeons themed on Chinese elements. I'm taking heavy inspiration from the Final Fantasy series (Nobuo Uematsu) and a bit of Chrono Trigger (Yasunori Mitsuda) and trying to stick as close to the SNES limitations as I possibly can. This one took up all 8 channels and only used 63% of the available ARAM so clearly I did something right.

I also hated the way this first came out. Super harsh and random, but some cool ideas. I think I managed to smooth it out a bit but again, the SNES sound chip actively fights against this sort of music, as does my discomfort with moments of silence. I can at least work on that second one.

It cuts off abruptly because it's meant to loop. I thought about including more than one loop in the bounced version, but figure it's easier for you to just hit play again. 😉

Thanks for listening!

#soundtrack #instrumental #videogamemusic

Comments