Happiness is a warm chip | 8-bit Nintendo EP

video upload by Jay Hosking

Additional HapiNES posts

"Please support my work on Patreon: / jayhosking
Five chip tunes made with the limitations of the original NES.

00:00 - Stage 1
02:41 - Underworld
05:07 - Cutscene into battle
08:07 - Peace and war
09:55 - Overworld

I grew up on video game music, and it's probably a large part of why I love synthesizers today. What impresses me most about those old soundtracks is how much they can achieve with such a limited voice count and, to a lesser extent, sound palette. (I actually adore the sounds, so I don't see them as limiting.) The Nintendo Entertainment System had two mono synth square waves, one extremely chunky triangle wave mono for bass, and then a noise oscillator for percussion. There was also an extremely low-resolution sampler ("Blades of Steel!") but I chose not to reproduce that here.

For a while, I had been thinking about working within the limitations of the original NES. I could do that on any modern groovebox or synth, of course, but I wanted the limitations forced on me, and I wanted something that got me close to the original sound without a lot of work. Thanks to my Patreon community, I was able to pick up the Twisted Electrons hapiNES L, which emulates the old NES chip sounds, right down to the mono (not stereo!) out.

Once I had the sounds in place, I wanted a way to quickly write and structure songs. The Teenage Engineering OP-XY proved a good choice, because it's quick, has two octaves to play on, has a smart and creative transposition tool, and has an excellent song mode for structuring longer compositions. I also wanted to use some other sequencing tools, so I pulled out the Oxi One Mk2 for the final song. I didn't find it was quite as effective for the song-mode sequencing, but its new Chord Palettes mode led me in some extremely interesting musical directions.

I could have kept going, but five days seemed like a good haul of NES music for now, and proof to myself that I could do it again in the future. I know the music here might not be to everyone's tastes, but it satisfies the kid in me and makes me wish I had an 8-bit game to write a soundtrack for.

Thanks for listening.

https://jayhosking.bandcamp.com"