aevado people ever mix traditional instruments with chiptunes or is that like watching a serious guy get dunked on by a muppet
guys guitar doesn't count it's like the doctor who immortal time traveler guy it just shows up everywhere and you're like yup this is normal
ok so the broader thought experiment here is i'm really enjoying learning the mandolin, and i'm really enjoying building and exploring mollytime, and i'm feeling a gap where i'm not really good enough to play music with people but it is nevertheless an unmet need but i could maybe use a sequencer to practice with but mollytime mostly sounds like snes sounds which makes it a somewhat odd pairing so like how do i make that not sound ironic or like i didn't buy enough daw plugins to sound good lol
first idea: mic the mandolin and obliterate the sound with filters so it matches the chiptunes better. I think this is a non-starter though because it's a pretty instrument and it feels wrong to remove that from the sound.
second idea: keep the sound of the instrument the same, but also maybe explore an additive approach involving delay loops and/or granular synthesis stuff. especially if it can put the different voices can sorta bleed into the same conductive media so to speak. maybe worth exploring
third idea: same as the first idea but backwards, leave the mandolin alone, figure out how to mutate the synth sounds into something that feels more acousticy without necessarily trying to emulate any particular traditional instrument. i have no idea how that would work
fourth idea: lie to the audience and say I was just practicing the mandolin next to the hole in reality in the corner of my apartment and hope none of you know that the hole in reality in the corner of my apartment doesn't sound anything like that
fifth idea: use a fun narrative to make it work. maybe do an album where it starts off with a song or two of, say, bluegrass music, but then the mandolinist gets abducted by aliens. main problem here is scope creep
sixth idea: add some basic sampling capabilities to mollytime and build instruments out of field recordings instead of just analog synthesis
ok i think i figured out the heart of the conflict here. to me computer is the thing that lets me graft doc ock arms onto my brain and expand my consciousness in lots of fun ways (see also: mollytime), but i'm also sensitive to the fact that there's another thing that's also called computer and most people are only familiar with the latter concept. when i picked up music as a hobby some 5-10 years ago it was supposed to be a no-computer hobby but well you know how well that went lol
so while i'm aware that folk music instruments have a longer category distance from computer than say pottery for most people, music generally goes in the mind expansion hole for me, thus the cognitive dissonance
gkrnours@aeva
https://aivisura.bandcamp.com/album/meanwhile
I don't know if you are aware if this album which mix piano and chiptune.
I wouldn't worry too much about mixin mandolin and chiptune. It's two things you like and you try to make then work. Unless you don't like how they sound together or want to explore refining the sound of one, you can simply use them together
Meanwhile, by aivi & surasshu
9 track album
Miss Aemilia🎀@aeva
You should do this anyway. Sampling is never not useful.
You should do this anyway. Sampling is never not useful.
@MissAemilia it's a planned feature, i've just been putting it off features with significant ui elements for tech debt reasons
@aeva
Fair and reasonable. UI is a bitch and a nightmare and thats why I avoid writing them in general.
Fair and reasonable. UI is a bitch and a nightmare and thats why I avoid writing them in general.
@MissAemilia oh no it's not that; *mine* is specifically a nightmare because it's largely still the same prototype code i wrote last summer in a fugue of transcendent lucidity that allowed me to bang out the basic ui in a few weeks. that also means if i want to change how something renders on all of the major screens i have to modify all of the places where i copy and pasted that drawing routine because i was following the DDRY principle of antiabstraction (don't DRY (don't repeat yourself))
@MissAemilia I genuinely love writing UI code it's really fun, I just wasn't sure what my needs were going to be for the project up front, so I prioritized building things quickly so I could figure out what they were going to be
@aeva You just use plain SDL drawing for UI, right? I seem to recall that last time I looked at the repo.
@MissAemilia yeah, i'm doing everything with their basic 2D renderer and the sdl font library. everything that isn't text is drawn with single color polygons, even the sweet gradient illusion background. i want to transition that to using ES2 directly instead so i can do shaders and stuff easier
@MissAemilia describing everything parametrically was a good idea because it makes resolution independence easy and it also makes it fast to iterate on things. i want to take it a step further so that it can also be the basis for a theming system
@MissAemilia oh the other reason why i want to rewrite the UI is so I can yeet python entirely, which will greatly simplify the build system and make distribution much simpler
@aeva Oh gods I didn't want to say it but I'm glad you said that, I was thinking you were only making life harder for yourself by bringing in python before, lol.
@MissAemilia pygame made it beneficial for rapid iteration at the beginning, but it's a burden now. i'm debating replacing it with lua vs pure c++
brennen@aeva i'm not sure if it would give you any particular inspiration, but i submit local heroes Foggy Mountain Spaceship (findable on youtube and probably other stream-y services) for an example of something that's mixing traditionally acoustic instrumentation and electronic sounds quite handily.
(they have the advantages of being virtuoso long-time string band weirdos, and of banjo's being pretty amenable to being space-ified, but still.)
Pillbug@aeva I wonder what it would sound like to add the resonances of an acoustic instrument body to a synth
LR
ferunando
Rk@aeva I recently wrote the software for this: https://youtu.be/hxnEjurNkcg?si=lIcYewtIvfQ1n07g . At the core it’s a bunch of modular synths, it took some work to make it sound more organic and cohesive. If you feel like going the route that makes mollytime less c64ish, I can privately give you some tips I found useful!
Frap Tools MAGNOLIA – 8-voice analog thru-zero FM synthesizer – OUT NOW
jell
tef
Irenes (many)@aeva to be fair we'd enjoy watching serious people get dunked on by muppets
@ireneista now that I'm thinking about it, either one could be the muppet too
Klara in the hidden land@ireneista @aeva Like this is a thing that happens in more Muppet movies than not, I'm pretty sure.
By analogy the music thing sounds cool also.
Simon Richter@aeva there is pornophonique: https://www.youtube.com/c/pornophonique
@GyrosGeier ty :O
Justin Fitzsimmons
River Tae Smith (he/him)@aeva I think dubmood's newer stuff does this but peak chitune+instruments was like 2010 https://infinityshred.bandcamp.com/album/future-and-it-doesnt-work-remixes
Future, and It Doesn't Work + Remixes, by Starscream
13 track album
@aeva also yes but like in a good way
Chip@aeva What do you mean by “traditional”? There’s plenty of bands with guitars and chiptunes.
@bytex64 i don't have a precise definition, nor do i want to litigate one. keeping that in mind, i think acoustic guitars would absolutely fit most reasonable definitions of "traditional instrument", but the guitar is a funny case because it's had pretty much unbroken popularity over the past century or so, so it doesn't really sound out of place anywhere
@bytex64 whereas i think if you were to play the banjo or the hurdy gurdy with a square wave accompaniment people might reasonably assume you were being ironic
halcy​ 
@aeva @bytex64 this feels like a thing that is impossible to figure out without trying. Like maybe it rules? or maybe it doesn't? I actually feel like specifically a hurdy gurdy could work
like it fits real well into dark sounding techno beats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6msesBTcuNM so why not?
Hurdy-gurdy techno - Welcome from my studio vol.01
cancelthe main problem you will have is sort of the same problem you get trying to blend acoustic instruments with distorted electric guitar. the guitars have an overwhelming amount of high frequency content and it's hard to hear anything else playing at the same time. unfiltered chiptune waveforms are even brighter. so you have to build your arrangements around dealing with that (folk metal is a good example)
@cancel @halcy @bytex64 also i should clarify that i used "chiptunes" somewhat arbitrarily in that first post because that's one of the easier sounds to make with mollytime but i really just mean that most of the time i post something i made with mollytime there's at least one reaction comparing it to a retro console. "chiptunes" was a more concise thing to say
Gracious 
AnthraciteMaster Boot Record. Driving heavy metal with chiptunes in the mix. Also see their side project Keygen Church, which substitutes pipe organs for chiptunes.
REALTIME EXECUTION, by MASTER BOOT RECORD
15 track album