So, the past couple of days, as I've been scrambling to get work on the BOTB game jam done, I've fallen into a rabbit hole of creating my own SNES samples, and just samples in general.

Sadly, I can't find that many resources that go super in depth on sampling for the SNES, so I'm making it up on the fly. I've made this thread so our 3 collective braincells can share tips. Feel free to talk SNES samples, or general s3xmodit/chiptune sampling stuff.

I'll go first. I've found that with a liberal amount of vibrato, and a dash of pitch modulation (owie my ears), I can make a semi-convincing sample of FM patches. The best example I can think of ATM is this port of thunder force 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sLy0C-7y5w

As a 2nd tip (I'm not so sure about this one), I've found I get more mileage sampling PS1 era romplers (like the JV 1080) than sampling common SNES era synths (like Korg M1). Any more technologically advanced tho, and it gets waaay harder to sample.

1. DSP wank in vcvrack
2. Record physical instruments
3. Record random vst
Multisampling across different ranges will help a lot to make something sound less canned

for simple waveforms:

draw it in openmpt
(export if im not using s3xmodit, tho that hasn't really happened much)
/\/profit\/\



for complex waveforms:

pull up a daw (my preference is sunvox)
attempt at sound design
export to whatever
/\/profit 2\/\
(like tennisers said, you can also export it with a slightly different sound to get a "round robin" (weird name tbh)
have i ever used this?
no.)

i don't, i just steal them from either the Soundtracker Sample Disks (ST-XX), Zero-G Datafile, MAZ-Instruments, or other modules I shamelessly ripped lmao

FM seems pretty hard to sample in a limited space environment since a lot of the magic happens over time, but stuff like brass or bass could work! loop a wave cycle after the initial attack and the waveform starts settling down

i do most of my sample prep in openmpt since its sampler lets you get really hands on with sample rates, loop points, pitch etc.

everybody sleeping on milkysynth lol

@damifortune Glad I'm not the only one to take notice of OpenMPT's absolutely cracked sample interface. I agree that bass is the easiest thing to sample in FM, followed by brass. I've been messing with sampling thunder force IV guitars after stumbling across that aforementioned vid and I'd love to see your take on sampling the genesis

@tennisers
Multisampling is godsend for sure. What's your range for each sample? I normally stick to every octave or so

@SRB2er
IDK how people come up with waveforms to draw. Could you go more in depth on your process?

I have a variety of sources I use, but I manually edit them down in Schism Tracker... and also do crossfading as needed. And I also do downsampling as needed, most commonly by halving the length of the samples.

I personally just have a wealth of VSTs and hardware that I can sample from, and I know generally what I want, where I want it, and how I go about it. A song I've done, Sunken Lights, to use it an example; it samples a lot of the Alesis S4 Plus that I own, in addition to some Emulator II Shakuhachis, and a patch I designed with Serum.

If I'm optimising it for a specific system (e.g. SNES) then I'll typically do a post-processing pass on the sample to optimise it - this is stuff like an EQ to boost the high frequencies, downsampling it, microlooping it, aligning the loop to the stupid steps of 16 or whatever, etc.

I typically either edit them via FL Studio's Edison, Audacity or Furnace's sample editor.

@melonadeM

that's been my general go-to process for a long time. I have... an embarrasing amount of VSTs to sample from. The options can get overwhelming sometimes lol. I haven't touched serum for chiptune sampling, although I probably should.

for years i used to draw waveforms more frequently on milkytracker than on openmpt - most of the times i interoperated between openmpt and milkytracker because of this

I just grab some samples from internet, edit it with openmpt and convert it to brr with C700, if the sample is a chord, I record it with FL Studio and btw, what's pitch modulation?

it's a funny thing you can do with the SNES that takes a channel and makes its pitch go crazy by modulating it with the 1st channel.

https://www.tumblr.com/retrogameaudio/168147807888/vgmtrivia-pitch-modulation-in-snes-music

it's mapped to a certain midi macro in c700 (click the help tab) and I forget how to do it in SNESmod

Most of the samples I use I get from actual SNES games, which can be done with C700 or the tool Split700 (which comes with a handy brr2wav executable as well in case you need something like that to quickly convert).

When I do make samples though, I usually do it through C700 in OpenMPT, with the caveat that I'm not usually able to get a sample that works in all octaves. Maybe this is due to the source not being hex-based, or a difference in interpolation? I'm really not sure, but while I know it's unavoidable for things like small waveforms like with recreating NES music on SNES, I figure there's gotta be a good way to rip a wav sample or VST such that you don't have to have 6 samples to cover all octaves of that VST, since that eats up all the ARAM you have in no time.

I have played a tiny bit with coding my own samples, since the BRR format is not super complicated; just blocks of 9 bytes where you set stuff in the first byte and the remaining 8 just "draw" a waveform in a sense. I haven't gone beyond drawing simple waveforms this way, since it's not really efficient to manually draw something complex like that, but it was a fun exercise to better understand SNES samples.

@icrawfish

It's cool that you're able to just casually code your own .brr samples
I'm somewhat familiar with most of the other techniques in this thread but this is new to me. Would you be willing to walk me through the process of coding a brr?