Halloween World (chiptune)

I don't know why, but something about the sound of the harpsichord at the end of Halloween World made me think: this would probably sound pretty good as a chiptune song. I like to think that I was right.

Making this was no easy feat. It turns out that, outside of LameStation, I don't have a huge amount of practice programming synthesizers, and spend most of my time playing with presets. That wasn't going to work here.

First, I picked a platform to target: the NES. Because why not?

Why pick a platform at all? There's nothing stopping someone from going crazy and using infinity voices and tons of effects, but that makes a song sound modern, and I wasn't going for modern. I wanted to be faithful to the medium, and that means picking a target platform, and adhering to the constraints of that system.

Anyway, with some research, I determined that the NES has five voices:

• Two voices for variable-duty square waves,

• One voice for a triangle wave,

• One voice for pseudo-random noise that stretches with the note played,

• And one voice for sample programming.

Sampler excluded, you have 3 notes and one trash sound playing at a time. Doesn't seem like NES offers much in the way of effects either. You can control volume of individual voices though, which I would use for the fade-out.

So I set about programming the INTEGRA to do this. The square and triangle waves were built into the INTEGRA's oscillator, and after some digging, I found a PCM waveform of white noise that would sound pretty close to what the NES would offer.

I then configured all patches to only allow one note at a time, and disabled velocity on the keyboard so that all notes would sound at the same volume.

This led to me figure out pretty quickly why chiptunes feature arpeggios so prominently and so frequently. It turns out that an arpeggio played fast enough is a good approximation of a chord, and it really fattens up what would otherwise be a very dry and sparse mix.

The end result is better than I expected, and I'm motivated to see what other sound chips I can emulate with a little homework and careful programming.