Hey everyone I hope all is good.

I’m kinda close to replicate that Sega genesis sound inside a DAW and I’ve tried different VSTs and I’m always hitting a freaking brick wall, driving me crazy.

For example using the VST VOPM is great, volume/velocities work but I simply can’t find a way to do vibrato and the UI looks freaking confusing, maybe there is something in there I need to turn on?

I have also messed around with FM-Drive which is also great and fixes the other issue I have with VOPM which is I know how to turn on vibrato. However every note has the same volume no matter the velocity. UI is a bit better than VOPM but still kinda confusing.

I feel like fixing this is kinda essential to make music, I mean I need to be able to change the volume of each note and using vibrato is kind of almost always a must for lead sounds.

Thanks

Peshti

hey there!

you can use the VST "Genny"

to create authentic Genesis music; in fact, there's even options to use it for .vgm export, if you should desire it. Genny should serve you well in other productions too, though, and comes with a bank of instruments from popular games.

if you happen to be an FL Studio user, it *also* has a specific FL version that integrates more deeply and lets you use slide notes and other FL-plugin-specific functions!

i wrote an article on setting it up for chiptunes here: https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/Genny+VST/

oh, and if you don't mind paid products, chipsynth MD by Plogue would be a good VST recommendation. i actually haven't tried the ones you mentioned, though i've heard of others using them

So Genny has both vibrato and note velocities?

yes it does, (and incidentally, you specify vibrato via special notes in really high octaves, where the velocity controls depth and the midi note value controls speed, which is quite neat!)

Cool, well I look into it then. I do really like vopm and fm drive too however but there's just issues I don't understand.

genny is not ideal to me because the parameter automation basically doesn't work, though besides that it's fine.

Any recommendations tennisers? I really like both FMDrive and VOPM, there are just kind of small issues I have with them.

There is also OPNMIDI

It is based on libOPNMIDI

, which has a build option to enable midi2vgm functionality. I haven't tried that latter part, but interesting potential there; assuming that any midi parameter automation interpreted by the plugin would be converted with this.

MAmidiMEmo

also includes a vst option (Windows only); it's an interesting project as there is an included tool to playback vgm on original hardware, via the controller port.

if you are willing to pay, i have had great success with chipsynth md

I actually got chipsynth md but I'm not that great with it yet, yeah I got too many VSTs for sega stuff and I just can't figure it out.

if you use FL Studio, BENDY

lets you do vibrato, pitch slides, panning, etc with third-party plugins including VOPM and FM-Drive

I have actually made some really decent and important progress with fm drive. However I have now found out that jbridge doesn't save my settings after I have close the project which kinda sucks, so it's kinda not useful right now.

Maybe I'll just start making sega stuff in reaper or fl studio, I have tested it in reaper and it seems to work, maybe because it has native 32 bit vst support. I haven't tried it in FL Studio yet but I bet it works.

About FL Studio, I love but moved to Cubase mostly because I make orchestral music too.

I do also have Reaper and Renoise. I kind of never use Reaper, I gave a shot to learn trackers but I suck at it haha.