DuckTales NES Moon theme

[Mr-K]

I thought about mentioning that. My girlfriend and several of her non-gaming, non-nerdy friends ate up that soundtrack.

[Type Ryan]

The moon music is, hands down, one of the best video game songs ever written.

This. This. This.

We were listening to the Duck Tales video game soundtrack at Hour Haus a few months ago.

[Chux]

A return to minimalist composition and a strong focus on melody is what made the Katamari soundtrack so memorable.

Get that shit on your iphone, you'll be a lonely rolling star on the road son!

[Johnbear]

Hearing this and playing Gradius Rebirth makes me wonder why more devs don't go hella old school in their compositions these days.





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[Cheebs]

Which is a shame, the Ducktales comp. did more with a 4 channel wave synth (or whatever caveman sound tech the NES had) then Motoi Sakuraba usually does with an entire synthed orchestra with like 120 instrument channels.

It went deeper than just "4 channel". On FM synth and anything more advanced, you can generate many notes simultaneously on a single channel (polyphony). If you wanted a chord, you only needed one of your channels to do so.

Those tone generators on the NES could only make one sound at a time. Any proper chord would use up all 3 (the 4th did "noise") channels. So chords were pretty much right-out. Think about that. Composing a song without chords. Most guitar band stuff has nothing left but the bass line and vocal melody without chords.

Composers on the NES could fudge their way around that by making 5ths with the bass and one of the two other generators. Or they could create the illusion of a chord with arpeggios or rapid alternation of the notes in a single generator.

If that wasn't difficult enough, they also had to compose in a way that the song wouldn't totally fall apart when one or more of the generators was pulled away for an in-game sound effect.

So it really came down to creating melodies that stood on their own. They were forced to write single-note lines that were engaging and appropriate... And took up almost no ROM and could loop seamlessly.

Christ, how the hell did they do it? Better composers than I, for sure.

[Cowutopia]

Why did Johnbear get banned?

[Josh]

He was padding his post count to make a spam thread.

[Cheebs]

Why did Johnbear get banned?

My guess is he was a spammer trying to get enough posts to create a thread to advertise shit. At least that's what his two identical posts in this thread and his meaningless post in the zombie Wolverine April Fool's thread tell me.

[Mzo]

Why did Johnbear get banned?

Look at a record of his posts and his awful signature.

All he wanted was to fill his post requirement or whatever the fuck and make a thread advertising something or other. Just worthless.

Plus I hadn't banned someone in AGES.

[Bojack]

Hearing this and playing Gradius Rebirth makes me wonder why more devs don't go hella old school in their compositions these days.





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YAY! I was quoted by a spammer!

Anyways,

Yeah Cheebs, I never noticed that there's only like 3 instruments running at once in the majority of NES songs. Intersting the constraints that old composers dealt with.