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@aeva YO. Mandolin and dulcimer and similar in chippy electronic is fucking great.
Some of the EVE Online score does that and it's DELICIOUS.
(Shitty game. Great music.)
@joshuaelliott paste me an example
@aeva Maybe a little closer to 'drony' than chippy, but it's still a cool mesh. (Kicks in late.)
https://soundcloud.com/ccpgames/eve-online-times-of-sanguinity
EVE Online - Times Of Sanguinity
Music from the immensely massively multiplayer online Sci Fi game, EVE Online. More information and a free trial can be found at www.eveonline.com
@joshuaelliott ooo nice resonator
Evie 🏳️⚧️@aeva I mean people did put weird instruments into a rock band and made it work https://youtu.be/T4RHuXd5pMg
鈴華ゆう子with和楽器バンド / 六兆年と一夜物語
Evelyn EstelleMusic is art. Experiment! Be original! Do the weird thing!
I love when someone makes seemingly incompatible instruments work together.
Above example is a good one. Artcore is another where they mash motifs and instruments from classical, electronic and Japanese pop together and it usually sounds epic.
They finally made a kalimba synth and its wild ( Bastl Kalimba )
Max Cahill@aeva fwiw playing with a drum machine plus minus a few loops that you can swap between is a great solo alternative to jamming with friends.