6 replies to this topic

[m00dawg]

We just released a song that is perhaps my new favorite off our upcoming album and I thought I would it with the MidiBox community. We did not use any of our MidiBox gear for this one (worry not, we have more songs in the works that do), but it does use the GameBoy as the dominant chip-synth. The NES is also used, though takes a more accompaniment role.

This is, I have to say, perhaps the best mixing/mastering I have ever done and I'm hugely proud of it in that respects, as well as with the song itself. I don't think you all will be disappointed! Enjoy! If you like it enough, the low quality version is available for download, but if you can also head over to our Bandcamp page if you want the HQ version. This is a song that warrants some HQ action, oddly enough. In fact, during the mastering phase, I ran into some weird artifacts caused by using a bit-cruncher when down-sampling to 16-bit/44.1kHz that could not be heard at either 16-bit/96kHz or 24-bit/96kHz. Turns out it may have been caused by aliasing caused by the bit-cruncher so I ended up dropping that effect. It was used for the guitars on the intro.

Anyways I'm rambling. The song should speak for itself

Listen on Soundcloud.com

[jojjelito]

Well done!

Save from the intro reverb, I started to ask what hi-quality you were rambling about. Then it struck me: The mix hangs together very well! The NES sounds very lo-fi, but the guitars give it away. There are some really nice production values in here. By the outro we hear more guitars and it sounds very hi-fi. NES cat grants you some power-up mushroooms and an extra life.

Edited by jojjelito, 30 October 2011 - 00:27.

[m00dawg]

Indeed I'm quite proud of the mixing work I've done with it and everything really fits really well I think. My band-mate has been handling all the surf guitar for this album and he did a fantastic job with the leads and things on this one.

On the note of the high quality, I have found the distortion on the guitars seems to be where you tend to hear it. After fixing the aliasing issues (I basically removed the bit-cruncher on the guitars during the intro), the differences become rather subtle but I tend to prefer the higher quality version when listening on my good headphones. Could be merely subjective at this point, though.

It's not perfect (is it ever?) - mix sounds a bit muddled in places due to all the reverb. I can get away with some of that due to the genre but it still sounds a bit over the top in places when listening on lesser headphones but still something I consider a personal achievement. I really dig doing mixing/mastering work. *shrug*

[Hawkeye]

Nice guitar & very nice chip arp
Greets!

[m00dawg]

Thanks! Been getting a few comments about that part, although my favorite part is right before with that crazy WHOOOSH thing. It's a classic surf guitar slide plus copious amount of flange and a rolling low-pass filter sweep type of thing. That gave me a renewed faith in Live's otherwise lackluster filters (I use the 8-band EQ and manually automated a sweep, so it wasn't one of Live's true filters, to be fair).

[x0xb0xr0ck3r]

Great tune! The mixing is very good and the guitars fit in very well (which is very hard to achieve in electronic music, imho).

[m00dawg]

Indeed we found an interesting genre combining surf guitar with chiptunes Our whole first album is Chipsurf, in fact. But this song, the guitars worked with everything else especially well. Glad you like it!