Electrosound 64
| Electrosound 64 | |
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| Creator | Orpheus |
| Released | 1985-??-?? |
| Platform | Commodore 64 |
- For the example song, see Electrosound 64 (C64).
Electrosound 64 (nicknamed Leccysound) is a Commodore 64 music and sound editor which was sold for £14.95 and used in many British demos and games in 1986.
User-friendlily, the main menu suggests an order in which to arrange:
- Define up to 10 instruments and play them on the C64 keyboard, on which you can put a Commodore Music Maker overlay. Per instrument, you can set all SID chip registers and add modulations on pitch, pulse width, cutoff frequency, and key down or up. On almost all modulators, you can choose delay, speed, depth, direction (up, down, vibrato, shuffle), and whether to restart upon every note, after every rest, or not at all.
- Fill up to 20 sequences with up to 240 notes. Per sequence, you choose its tempo and 3 instruments. These 3 instruments stick with the 3 SID voices for the whole sequence, except that whenever a voice may rest, you may insert a drum sound (out of 24, which themselves cannot be modified), which was becoming a standard technique in chiptunes. Arpeggios and tuplets require fast notes.
- Repeat and link sequences to each other in a track (a coherent song), just like the later MOD format.
- Save 5 songs and 10 instruments into one big source file. You can additionally save 10 instruments for use in another song or as sound effects.
To deliver a soundtrack, you load a separate compiler program, load the source file, up to 2 instrument files, enter a start address (dictated by the game programmer), and save a file he embeds into his game. To play a sound effect, he just calls the driver to temporarily mute one of the musical voices, play the sound effect there, and later to restore the musical voice.
Still, the usage is a bit complicated. The driver does not loop, is tuned at 423.9 Hz and requires the game program to redefine the tempos. Also, despite its power, it is poorly coded and the slowest known on the C64. In 1987, it became largely superseded by Soundmonitor.
Composers
Rob Hubbard rightly believed Electrosound 64 could give him competition. The following composers used it on at least one game:
The following composers used Electrosound 64 before scoring games:
Picture Gallery
Box.
The main menu.
Entering instruments and playing them on the C64 keyboard.
Entering Für Elise.
Woodblock in thirty-seconds, two eighth bass notes and rests, basic drum beat with hi-hat.
Entering track.
Preparing 5 songs and 20 sound effects for our game.
