181322
this is another one where i feel like you were able to flex your style really well while still leaning into the bitpack asking you for a melodic carol, cool mixture of parts here
Here we go a-singing, here we go a-sledding
Here we go a-singing-sledding, having so much fun!
Winter time is so nice, snowball fights and sleigh rides
Help me build a snowman and we'll make a friend!
(Friend, let's make a friend, let's make a friend, making a brand-new-winter-time-best-friend!)
Winter nights are dark but the fire glows so bright
Winter nights are cold but the fire keeps us warm!
Warming up our hands and warming up our feet and
Drying out our soggy clothes for next day's fun!
(Fun, let's have some fun, let's have some fun, let's have some singing-sledding-snowball fun!)
Snowball fights and sleigh rides and the jolly happy snowman, yes
This is how we have fun when everything is cold!
Playing in the snow, playing in the cold
Then we go inside and feel the fire's warmth!
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Actually my first-ever real-ass big-boy basically-finished SID song. I've made blips and beeps in the various trackers out there, which doesn't count, and I don't count Deflemask either, because it sucks.
It's put together in GoatTracker, though I sketched out the basics in OpenMPT, wrote out the melody in REAPER and imported the MIDI back into the OpenMPT project, and imported the resulting .MOD. Still did some alterations here and there in GoatTracker once I realized the tracker entry was actually reasonably slick - though it'd be nice if one could change the step size.
Honestly, once I hunkered down and read the documentation, the "table/pointer" method of instruments kinda clicked into place surprisingly quickly. It really gave me a fresh appreciation for just how great the SID is, and how it really must have just been the absolute most awesome thing imaginable to experience in the early-80s when a synthesizer was still a multi-hundred-dollar investment. Just truly ahead of its time and completely without parallel - the chip world never even really caught up before PCM became affordable enough to take over.
I can barely even bring myself to kvetch about the toolset, which is generally a passion of mine. Heck, I'll even give props to GoatTracker for not crashing during the entire two-hour session, especially because if it had I would have lost a lot of work, because, Lint_Huffer you incredible dumbass, CTRL-S does not actually save a file in GoatTracker. Dodged one there.
Sound-design wise, the lead is a bit simplistic and bordering on grating-on-the-ears, but that's kinda how caroling songs are supposed to be, no? The lyrics are more "popular holiday song" than "carol", if we're being picky, but let's consider the verses a secular re-work of some long-forgotten small-time hymnal, and the monotonic chorus an even-more-recent addition by whatever hard rock band got their hands on it afterwards.