Typical 8-Bit Arpeggiator Sound Synthesis

[YMMD]

Hey everybody,

I'm a 22 years old demoscene lover and I'm very excited to join this community! I'm addressing you with a question which I guess is in best hands when shared with you. I am playing around with FL Studio for some years now and it sometimes happens that this results in more or less decent songs. I don't publish them to a big audience, but the few people I showed them to always liked them.

My only claim is to really produce the sound by myself. I don't want to use given Synthesizers with presets that everybody could use. I want to build the sound "with my bare hands". :-) I often tried to give my songs a little 8-bit touch because this sounds so incredibly magic and expresses nostalgia to me. So I always start with a 3xOSC and Square Waves and a fast Arpeggiator. This already sounds kind of 8-bit-ish, but it's far from what people are producing with real hardware. I can hear that my sound misses a stereo phase modulation and I know how to achieve this in FL, but it still doesn't sound the same. Although I devoted days into experimenting with the synthesis, I was never able to achieve a sound like this one:

You can hear the phase oscillating, but I don't know how it's done.

I know that FL requires me to add much elaborated automation in order to do this and that a tracker might perhaps faciliate the attempt. But as I said: My goal is to make it by myself while understanding how the waves are synthesized. And I'm also pretty much used to FL.

It would be wonderful if you could help me getting closer to creating such a sound in any way! Explanations, tips of all kinds and even (video?) tutorials are much appreciated! Thank you so much in advance for taking the time!

Kind regards.

[mal7921]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

What tends to happen with the phasing is that oscillators go slightly out of sync and can be detuned slightly, which gives a fuller type of sound. With older analogue synthesisers this happened as a result of the components rather than a deliberate design element.

A way I used to use to create something similar on the old Yamaha PSS680's was to play the sam arpeggiated sound pattern with the same voice twice, at the same time with little tweaks in the positions of the notes. This created an analogue type phasing which gave the sound more character and depth.

At the very beginning of this site, I wrote a series of articles on sound synthesis (Which were adapted from a series I wrote on my blog back in 2006 after losing my job at the time), the first article covers how these sorts of things occurred and why. The first part can be found at http://www.atarimusic.net/featured-arti ... d-digital- and may help.

The other thing to look for is some soundchip emulation plugins, which will give more of the 8 bit chiptume sound from the demo scene. The KVR forums would be the place to look there, assuming you want to keep working on FL.

The other thing to do is download an emulator and a tracker program for more authentic chiptune sounds, though some may argue the only way to really work is on the 8 bit hardware itself though many of todays emulators are almost as good as the real thing.

[yerzmyey]

I didn't find an actual question, I admit, but the best is always to sample arpeggios from Atari and use later the samples under FL.