Dirtywave M8 Syntax 2025 one track challenge compo entry

video upload by Avrilcadabra

"Syntax is an Australian demoscene party, While it mostly is a celebration of coding and tracking for 8 and 16 bit computers they do have some M8 tracking competitions.

You can even enter some of the compos internationally. https://www.syntaxparty.org/

One such compo is the one track challenge inspired by Ess's wertstoffe track.

Rules are simple, only use 1 track, no samples, no midi, no nxt.

I think my entry came 3rd, Dustsucker won and Laamaa came second if I recall correctly.
Nevertheless I was quite proud of this.

I used a variety of techniques here, starting with fm synthesis of DTMF to make actually DTMF compliant dial tones, a DTMF decoder will understand these and it works via a table in the m8. if you want to dial an 8 and you THO (table hop) to 08 and so on, then a ring tone made in macro synth.

The speech synthesis is done by creating phonemes, it's flipping instruments and using vosim , wavemap and wavetables in wavesynth then arranged and sequenced to create words.

how do you get a drum , kick , snare, bass, lead/arp playing at the same time on a single monophonic track?

technically M8 has multiple engines that can play chords paraphonically like hypersynth , macrosynths paraphonic and FM synth, so here I am using a lot of FM synth, in it's algorithm that treats fm synth as 4 voice subtractive synthesis. With thought into modulation, tables and fx lane commands, we can create a kick sound on oscillator 1, snare on osc 2, bass, on osc 3, and lead or arp on osc 4, we can control the semitones of individual parts using fx commands like FM403 FM407 to create melodys, or use them in a table to create an arp, and make variants of the instrument, so we have intruments that have any combination of kick/snare/bass/lead then it is a matter of playing your kick, kick/snare instruments on the right spots and and adding in the melody only spots then programming the melodys in via FX FM commands and table hops.

I probably went to far into the technical side and didn't concentrate enough on just making good music, as technical prowess doesn't always win the crowd!

All the project files for the entries are available on the M8 discord, if you cant find them, ping me on there and I'll track them down."