NESmaker - Getting Started, 11: Music with Famitracker

[@alfredotrojse1474]

I'm a professional audio engineer, I work everyday with Pro Tools, and HQ recording stuff, top rated synths and sample libraries... this is the funniest thing I've ever worked with ahahahah I wrote songs for years, and since 2015 I was experiencing the famous "writer's block", and dealing with it every fucking single day. This "adventure" in NES games making (obviously they called me to write the game's music) brought me back everything I used to have years ago, I'm writing songs and I can't stop!! and you, the 8-bit heroes, made it possible!! so, my big THANKS go to you!!!! great work of great people!!!!

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

Dude - that is very humbling and validating to hear, so thank you :-) Welcome to the club! I also come from a music production background, so it's fun to see where the overlapping nerddoms lie :-)

[@alfredotrojse1474]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes maybe because after all the time spent... "retrieving demo version of expensive software" online and making them work, programming NES games is a child play ahahahah believe me, these days messing with NESMaker really made me decide to start game-music composer job career. maybe in 24 bits... 😂

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

@@alfredotrojse1474 - for reference...this is me in my other life. haha kzbin.info/www/bejne/anPFhaatdpqno6c

[@alfredotrojse1474]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes... let me guess, are you a Foo Fighters fan? ahahah that absolutely rocks!!!! "some hair ago" we were on the same vibes!! kzbin.info/www/bejne/qIWbha1piM1naLM

[@DaleCoop]

Great video! Very useful as music for NESMaker is always difficult (it has issues). Thank you for that, Joe.

[@baardbi]

Thank you so much for this video. Probably the best (and easiest to understand) Famitracker how-to video on KZbin.

[@grhmhome]

Thanks for the tutorial. Now I can make my own music for my game or just chip tune music in general.

[@livvy94]

Potentially unpopular opinion: chiptune tools are like musical instruments in that you need to practice them a LOT to not sound terrible, and I'm still somewhat worried for the folks with experience in all the other elements of making a game in NESmaker, but going into this blind. I wish collabing was more common with game projects like these...

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

It will be :-)

[@CutterCross2A03]

I can attest to that statement. Famitracker is fairly difficult to wrap your head around at first, and you'll need a LOT of practice to get good with both the tracker and the 2A03 chip itself. (Not to mention the extra restrictions of NESmaker and GGsound.) But personally, now with about 5 years experience with Famitracker, it's practically second nature for me :)

[@YQN2149]

battleofthebits.org is the place to browse for mind blowing chiptunes

[@platinumdiamond7]

You are 💯 percent right

[@sillygoosedude9604]

the fact that you're using famitracker just allows people more creativity for music while doing storytelling i like that

[@CutterCross2A03]

I have absolutely NO need for a tutorial like this, but I always enjoy watching them anyway! Song needs more Follin arps though ;)

[@livvy94]

We need tim follin to descend from the heavens and teach us his ways

[@CutterCross2A03]

@@livvy94 Well I mean... I've been using Follin techniques in my NESmaker music for a while now. That's kinda why I was joking about it ;)

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

You could probably make a vastly superior vid...I tried to keep it very simple! :-)

[@CutterCross2A03]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes Well... I can't give away ALL my musical secrets, can i? ;)

[@mr_noodler]

I absolutely love the NES maker! Great job!

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

Glad you're enjoying - make sure you're working with the latest tutorials on the LEARN page of the website.

[@bioman1hazard607]

Cant wait to play with this program

[@medicalbenko]

Keep this up! I'm enjoying the tutorials

[@raycastello2532]

Very good! Is the file size limited? I intend to test a 40 kb song made on famitracker

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

Hey there - make sure you're checking out the most recent tutorials on the website, rather than these which are outdated. As for size, by default, music needs to fit inside of a bank. That would be immense, and you would need to crush it down considerably, but there are a lot of ways to do that where you sonically would barely notice. Cutter Cross, who is a wizard at this stuff, crammed my music suite down to 50% of it's size without me even recognizing a difference, and I'm pretty sharp when it comes to examining music. All that said, this is how NESmaker works by default...with a certain mapper, that uses certain size for its banks, and uses one of those banks for all of its music code. Advanced users could likely work around these limits, but as anything with the NES, it would probably come with compromises. So is it possible? Sure. However, I'd focus on reduction if your intent is to get it in game using NESmaker's default set up.

[@RyanLorensen]

I totally understand a SFX taking over the channel when it plays however, I'm having an issue where it takes over the channel and the original programmed music on that channel never comes back. Any ideas on how to make it play while the SFX is not activated?

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

This is not uncommon - try putting a *stop note* or an instrument that is silent at the end of the channel on the sound effect. That will fix it. This phenomenon happened in commercial NES releases too (i remember it in level 9 in Zelda vividly) Also, know that this tutorial is quite out of date, and probably best to be using the tutorials on the LEARN page of the site :-)

[@RyanLorensen]

I had been using the stop note to no avail. It works fine in fami but not so much in NESmaker. The fix was the silent instrument! Thanks Joe.

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

@@RyanLorensen so glad!

[@logana4260]

I downloaded the program but I can’t find a way to get it to start or even allow me to get a window for it. I’ve tried looking on the internet but I can’t find anything to help

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

If you downloaded the program, you must've downloaded it from www.TheNew8bitHeroes.com. The instructions are pretty clear there - what is hanging you up? Did you get a license? If you did get a license, and have it, but the program is automatically shutting down, there are a few possibilities. One could be that you're using a 32 bit operating system. There is a patch for that on the forums at www.NESmakers.com (search 32bit). The other is that a virus blocker has prevented some of the small files from downloaded or being extracted. Those are my first guesses.

[@demonicgravy3936]

this video was very helpful. though i have a question. how could i hook up my midi keyboard to famitracker?

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

It's pretty easy to do :-) Being that I'm not the creator of famitracker, I won't speak too much to it, but you should be able to find it easy enough in the settings menus. Keep in mind, famitracker is not great for real-time performance, BUT, it's easier to enter note values with an actual keyboard than a computer keyboard in my experience.

[@MusicTheater81]

I have a question regarding famitracker. Do all songs need to have 64 rows per frame in order to work on NESmaker? Can I, for example, make a song with 9 frames and 48 rows in each frame, or will that bring some problems?

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

Frames count is not an issue in that regard. :-)

[@MusicTheater81]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes Thanks for the answer!

[@meltthecheese]

i may have overlooked something while exporting, but once i import the text file of my song into NESMaker, none of the instrument settings seem to load except for the duty cycle. is there a way to fix this?

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

There are some particulars that are necessary to maintain for Gradual Games Sound Engine to work. My suggestion - try making very simple instruments and a song, and see if that works for you just as a test. Make sure you have at least one song and one sfx. :-)

[@thespacewarrior7126]

I can't import famitracker txt file on NESmaker, it keeps asking me to verify if it's a valid file.

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

Hm - make sure that you're following the Gradual Games' playback engine specifics. You can google them, and I'm sure they're on the forums as well. There are certain FamiTracker functions that that particular sound engine doesn't work well with, which may be the problem. Also, make sure songs / sfx names don't start with numbers. Also, make sure you have at least one song and one sfx.

[@CutterCross2A03]

Definitely check out this guide to making NESmaker compatible music and sound on the nesmakers forum: www.nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3018 It lays out all the limitations of vanilla GGsound, as well as other quirks and limitations put in place by NESmaker and its version of GGsound's ft_txt_to_asm converter.

[@barknburcu5766]

please help me,how can i use my org keyboard to make faitracker music

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

You should look up famitracker tutorials. :-) This is mostly showing how to integrate famitracker files into NESmaker.

[@EnderElectrics]

Thanks, but the sound effect for picking up a coin is not playing, and the Music doesn't continue to play after the player dies. There's just silence.

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

...alright. So dig into that specific thing. Do you have a sound effect for a coin? Can you find in the code where the collision happens to play a sound effect? What sound effect does it play? What module are you using? What scripts are you using? Certain scripts don't have a reset as a restart, but place you at a checkpoint - so you may need to re-start the music again, because by default in many of these cores, if the music is "the same" on a new screen, it won't start playing it on screen load (otherwise, every time you enter a new screen it will start over again). So chances are, these are places where you may be having problems.

[@EnderElectrics]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes For the sound effect, I use all the basic things that came with NESmaker. The sfx_coin needs to play when I get the coin. I don't know where the collision is, because I'm still a beginner. And, for the music, there's like, 5 screens with the same music and a checkpoint on the third screen. But how do I make it so that the music starts again when the player's back at the checkpoint?

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

@@EnderElectrics - have you loaded the sample music that come with NESmaker? Have you assigned the coin sfx to a constant? What module are you using? There are still a lot of questions that make it hard to figure out what the problem may be. However, in your project settings you can see all the scripts that your current module uses. That's where you can start to try to track down the code that may need to be adjusted to your needs. Aside from that, (just speaking about the logic, not method), you'll need on screen load some way for the game to determine if the player had just died and was starting at a checkpoint, and effectively "ignore" ignoring playing the screen song if it's the same in that specific case. I'm quite sure that there are tutorials about this on the forum (which is a much better place for these answers, being able to show screen shots, write code, etc). I think that the sign in feature is down somehow right now, but you should still be able to search www.NESmakers.com to find a solution :-)

[@EnderElectrics]

​@@TheNew8bitHeroes I don't know wich one to link with the sfx_coin effect in the SFX Labels tab. Maybe I assigned it to the wrong one. And also, I tried to search for it on the forum, but the word "music" is a word that's used too frequently. So I need to search through every single time the word "stop" is used in the forum.

[@EnderElectrics]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes Also, yes. I assigned the Start_Song, Main_Song and Win_Song to the sound map. And also all the sound effects.

[@shankar4510]

Hi i want more of these please. just about using famitracker in limited way to make nes sound

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

I'm sure there are lots of famitracker tutorials in particular! That's a bit beyond the scope of the purpose of these, which is to show how to make music and integrate the songs into NESmaker.

[@floatingdoor]

Is it possible to use just wav files if I only wanted to run it on pc? sorry this is a vague question but I'm not sure what all the limitations would be.

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

That's not how the NES works - however, you can always use a modern tool (like GameMaker, Unity, Construct, etc...) and limit yourself to NES limitations except for the music. Alternatively, you can look into emulators that replace assets (MESEN does, however because of the way we handle graphics through CHR-RAM, I'm not sure if this would be possible?) Thanks!

[@floatingdoor]

The New 8-bit Heroes thanks for the reply back! Still gonna pick this up but was curious about the possibilities. I’ll definitely be looking this stuff up.

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

@@floatingdoor Also, though...trust me, it's very cool to de-make your music into NES music. Check out our competition (which celebrated games made by the community)...we had a fun "musical number" from a band that adapted their music for their NES game. :-) kzbin.info/www/bejne/qpCyYZ-Gj9GdiLs

[@oleschoolgamers]

Was doing good until 20:23 importing into NESMaker. "An error occurred while reading \MyDumbSong.txt. Please verify that this is a valid file. The given key was not present in the dictionary. An error occurred while importing Sounds Value cannot be null. Parameter name: s". Any ideas? Not sure what parameter s is, but if I did, I'd make sure it wasn't null, maybe then it would be in the dictionary? Help..lol

[@jordantfryman6184]

uh how do you import more than one .txt file? (if possible)

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

You don't currently. You do all your music work in famitracker (so, for instance, if you wanted to combine files, merge famitracker projects). Export the merged project and then import it into NESmaker.

[@jordantfryman6184]

@@TheNew8bitHeroes ok.

[@starbladesgames]

Is it possible to add the VRC6 chip to certain projects? If not, would about the cartridge we flash it onto? 😐

[@oleschoolgamers]

I'd love to ask this question on the forums, but the website is still down...or at least my DNS still resolves to the merchandise site.

[@Trisstunes]

Question: Does NES Maker support expansion audio? (VRC6, specifically!)

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

Not by default. You'd have to do a lot of backend work to use a mapper that would support it. Technically, NESmaker can do anything that the NES can do...it's a script and asset organizer and editor. But...it depends on how deep you want to dive into the ASM, and how comfortable you are flying blind with just code and no GUI.

[@CutterCross2A03]

NESMaker is designed to use Mapper#30. VRC6 expansion audio requires... well the VRC6 mapper. Same for any expansion audio, they all had proprietary mappers designed to use them. Even so, the N/A and PAL NES can't actually play the extra channels without modifying the console a bit, or so I've heard.

[@Dahandax]

fuck you did magic in 10 minutes!

[@MemeMaster9000]

it doesn't work

[@TheNew8bitHeroes]

You'd have to be more specific. But you're also watching an outdated tutorial. You should be following the tutorials on the LEARN page of the website - make sure that your version matches the version of the tutorial series you're using.