Bloop Bloop, Hey, Bleep Bleep: Emulating Video Game Sounds

But maybe you’re not that hardcore. Maybe you have a modern computer with modern virtual synth plug-ins. Great, because we can use standard analog synth plugs to emulate old-school video games! The most important thing to remember about old-school video game sound is the limitations, not only in the sounds themselves, but in musical arrangement. Depending on the hardware, video games usually had severely limited polyphony, in many cases just two or three voices. And the tones themselves were often limited to easy-to-generate-in-digital square waves and noise. Given these limitations, the original “chiptune” composers frequently used tricks to add perceived complexity to their music and sound effects. We’ll cover some of those too.

Let’s set up the basic patch, then I’ll show some of these tricks.

Fire up a virtual analog synth, and set one oscillator to a square wave. That’s it for our oscillator. Moving on to the filter, set it to “bandpass” if available. Set it somewhere in the middle of its range; we’re just using it to generally lop off lows and highs and get rid of some of that darn fidelity. If you don’t have a bandpass filter, you can use an EQ plug-in and just lop off lots of lows and highs. Make sure there’s no filter envelope affecting the sound, and then set the amplitude envelope to a simple organ-type on/off shape. Attack and decay should be zero, sustain full up, and release on zero (you can tweak the attack and release up if you hear clicking).

All done, right? Wrong. It doesn’t sound bad enough yet! Remember that 8-bit sound is a pretty unpure thing, and since most modern systems run at 24 bits, that’s about 16 bits too many! In your DAW’s channel strip, load up a bit reduction plug (or “bitcrusher”, as they’re known), and go to town. I set Logic Pro’s Bitcrusher to 8-bit resolution, and while I was at it, I set the downsampling to 4X, though you can mangle to your own taste. Just keep in mind that we want to sound like a video game, but not a Skinny Puppy video game.

And now: the tricks. This would be a good time to log on to www.celebutantemusic.com/keybmag and check out the piece of music I created. One trick that you’ve heard a zillion times in video games is the rapid ascending or descending glissando. These are super easy to make; just take that square wave and play a descending or ascending scale over five octaves into your sequencer, quantize it so it’s perfectly even-sounding, and speed ’er up. Here’s another trick: Modulate the pitch of the oscillator with a fast-running LFO set to a square wave, with depth at exactly one octave. Another common old-school video game trick is the superfast arpeggio. Just play simple single-note triadic arpeggios, quantize them, and speed them way the heck up.

One more thing before I leave you. Try substituting the square wave with white noise. It’s a good idea to route the keyboard tracking to filter cutoff, so high notes will be brighter than low ones, allowing you to play some crude beats. And for real madness, try automating the bitcrusher controls: instant Defender and Missile Command! Yee hah! Until next month, keep blowing up them aliens, don’t forget to save the girl from the ape.