You're welcome to download the DMF and try fiddling with it, but I'm about burned out on this track, at this point.
I took a look at your current DMF file and well, let's just say that there's a lot of waste in the channels... If I were to 'tweak' it, I'd honestly want to remake it from scratch, but this does serve as a plenty good enough basis to help me with that...
That said though I'm not gonna remake it from scratch because I have like, a load of other covers on the back-burner that I haven't posted yet because I wanna post them all in a big bundle if you know what I mean >w>
(Also, if I make a new cover of this song based on yours I feel like I'm cheating >~<'; )
But if you don't mind, I have a few suggestions for your future covers:
- Pick a channel to put all of the least important stuff in it, preferably channels 5 or 6, and stick with it for all of your future songs! I like putting my percussion on channel 6 so I pick channel 5, now what do you do with this channel? You use it as little as possible! Avoid using that channel as much as possible so that it can be cut out to play sound effects with as little loss in the song as possible, while still taking somewhat full advantage of the soundchip! It's important that you pick channel 5 or 6 because those are the only two that play white noise, so they're the best channels for synthesising sound effects that use both waveforms and white noise, always keep that in mind when making songs for the PC engine!
In my case, I mostly use channel 5 for de-tuned delay/reverb effects, so whenever a sound effect needs to be played, the reverb is gone, but the song doesn't lose any detail, but you know, sometimes I'm not even using all of the other 5 channels on the song, in those cases I put the reverb in another channel, leaving channel 5 playing nothing, which leads me to my next suggestion:
- Use as few channels as possible! I've noticed that you often use 2 channels to play the same note without even de-tuning them (or at least not to a noticeable extent) you can easily replace that with just a single channel without any loss in quality or detail... Let me put it this way: Never use 2 channels to play the same note unless you're de-tuning them or doing delay-reverb (or both, btw, it's always a good idea to de-tune your reverb) Even if those channels are playing different instruments, avoid using 2 channels for the same note, you can play the same note of 2 different waveforms on the same channel by simply halving the wave resolution of both waveforms and adding them together, thus making a new waveform, kinda like this:
(In this example I'm taking a sawtooth, halving both its height and length, then repeating the length horizontally, then adding the heights of the two new waveforms together to make an octave saw)
It's always a good idea to free up channels in case you want to play chords or a complex harmonic support, one of the best ways I know to free up a channel is to put the delay/reverb on the same channel as the instrument that's using said delay/reverb, it works best when the instrument that's doing this effect plays a new different note very often, like, every 2 rows, so if you have an instrument playing like that you'll notice that every odd row is empty right? Well, why not fill them up? Here's what I do, I fill every odd row with whatever note played 3 rows before it, only at a lower volume and panned differently, so you'll be adjusting the volume and the pan on that channel constantly, it takes up a lot of memory, but well, memory isn't exactly a problem anymore... I've used this trick prominently on my Fighting Back cover as well as on my Battle Xtasy cover, check'em out:
http://sta.sh/01l3peenzmerhttp://sta.sh/01w5meszyjirAlso, don't be afraid to shift an instrument from one channel to another mid-song in order to free up channels to play something else!
- Use the Note Cut (ECxx) effects on the basses, cutting off the bass one tick before the next note gives them a noticeable boost! I've noticed that you're just using Note OFF commands before every bass note, that works too, but you get more control over the Note OFF with the Note Cut effect, they're pretty much the same thing, but with the Note Cut you get to pick in which tick of the current row the Note OFF effect gets triggered...
- You can use NEZplug to rip waveforms from PC engine games! Just go download NEZplug, then go on Zophar domain and download .hes versions of whatever PC engine soundtrack you want (so long as it's not on CD, unfortunately they don't have any CD PSG soundtracks), then you just listen to the songs you want, click the CH button to turn on and off channels, and to rip the instruments you want click the DMP button, then select DEV_HuC6230 (I know it's HuC6280, but it's just numbered wrong in the software) and click on the channel you want to rip, you're gonna get a string of Hex numbers that represent the wavetable currently in-use in that particular channel in the song you're listening to, just convert them all to Decimal and you've got your wavetable! I know you like making your own waves based on the waves of the song you're listening to, but it's a wise idea to use the wavetables from PCE games you like as well!
That's about as much as I can think of right now... Mind you, I'm telling you these things from experience, you've got a lot of talent you know, more than me perhaps, but it just seems like you need a little bit of guidance before you can achieve great heights!
Either way, keep up your great work ^^
