::|CONTENTS
- OHB Crash Course + Rook Tutor
- Expy Tutor
You've caught an
OHB dedicated solely to
zxbeep (format), but haven't made any 1-bit songs before? Well, consider yourself lucky - there's a way to learn it in five minutes. Or more, depending on how Sonic-ky you are.
So you would know, beeper has no "uniform" sounding, compared to 2A03 or SID - there's actually many ways to squeeze music from it, and it's also possible to make it sound really close to 2A03 or SID (except with slightly worse quality ^,^). For each such way, there's a dedicated beeper music engine, but for your first track, you're gonna use one of them all...
OHB Crash Course + Rook Tutor
Right off the bat, you need to download
Beepola here - it's the most popular zxbeep tracker that specializes in creating two-channel songs.
Your very personal guinea pig called
Special FX is set by default every time you open Beepola, so pretty much once you run the tracker - you're started!
To give you a general idea of how Special FX works - you've got two channels of tone, both of which generate those fuzzy noises. ^,^ All of those noises eventually fade to silence by default - that both sounds cool and prevents you from dealing some massive earrape on long notes (unless you
really know your format). If you want, however, you can change the
Sustain parameter - the bigger your value is, the longer it will take for the note to fade out.
Also, there's a little channel manipulation trick - since channel 2 sounds louder than channel 1, you might do an echo effect for your songsie! Otherwise, use ch1 for the leads and ch2 for the basslines.
The note range is G-1 to A-5, but you're not advised to go farther than octave 4 - just to avoid the aforementioned earrape. Oh, and don't be scared of that there's no notes lower than G-1 - the second octave is just about perfect for basses! ^_^
Once you're done placing patterns, notes and drums, go to "Tools -> Compile Song...", save your freshly cooked creation as a .tap file - so basically you're doing a ZX Spectrum tape image - and upload it on BotB.
There you go, your first zxbeep track's done! \ ^_^ /
Expy Tutor
Say, there's too many beeper engines to go for! The
zxbeep (format) page contains quite a huge list of engine stuff you can abuse, with each having its' own tracking methods, sounding, channel amount...
(I hope to fill it with more and more and more pretty soon)
