::|CONTENTS
- Specifications
- A Crash Course On How To Abuse Tritone
- Tools Of The Trade
- Possible Inspirations For You
- Olso
- See Also
The following musical thingie has got the Strobe and null1024's Choice Award 2013! ^,^
Tritone is a three-channel
zxbeep (format) engine (courtesy of Shiru) which, despite it can generate sounds similar to Savage, is in fact more flexible than that. To cook it up, you need an .xm tracker (any. Maybe except OpenMPT. Because of the compatibility reasons), the module template, SjASMplus and the Tritone conversion toolchain itself.
Sounds complicated already, huh? Well...
Specifications
You've got four chans to play around with, in a no particular order: three tones and one drum channel. Tones may have one of eight possible duties - from the nessy 50% tone to a more speccy 8% coil. Drums, on the other hand, are... Drums. Synthed ones. Which don't exceed 8 ms. If you've been using Phaser1 without sampled percussions, those might be familiar to you.
No arpeggios, slides, portamentos or heavy duty bending is supported by the engine, but that doesn't mean you can't use the F01 speed and add those in manually. Oh, and this way, you could pull off a SID without actually having one! :D
Speaking of speed, you can only define it in the very beginning of the pattern (on the other hand, you're allowed to play with pattern length).
There are two ways of volume control here: either you have three tone channels with different volumes (from left to right, quietest - medium - loudest) or you keep them at the same volume. Since .xm files have no channel volume support, you either have to make a temporary change to .it, or put the volumes on each note manually or just pretend that "hey, this bassline is gonna be louder than the lead! D:"
A Crash Course On How To Abuse Tritone
There's no such thing as
crash course on Tritone, since this is an engine that actually needs some proper mastering. But, no matter whether you're a n00b or a stud, you will need to download
the Tritone toolchain itself and
SjASMplus compiler to get going.
Again, you've got two different ways of volume control - the first one is turned on by default. To switch between these two, (un)comment the line "define NO_VOLUME" in tritone.asm.
Now, while you're at it, track the hell out of it!
Additional files
Module template with correct pitches (but which definitely won't be correct on the Atari XL conversion ,_,)
There's a mirror, incase the link provided above doesn't work:
Mirror
XM2TAP conversion tool by introspec.
In case of emergency
Since the songs are stored right at the end of ZX48K's memory, you're expected to use only 16KB for the song (which is 151KB for the .xm source) - else it won't compile at all. If you're planning to do Tritone only for aesthetic purposes, change "RANDOMIZE USR VAL "49152"" to "RANDOMIZE USR VAL "35000"", and the memory limit will be a lot bigger than before.
Tools Of The Trade
General
- Mach one whenever possible.
- Since Tritone's actual drum synths are basically insufficient for creating an unbelieveable beeper song, try to dedicate on channel for tone drums - as in the tone quickly sliding down. It's gonna sound even better if you place basslines beneath the drums. ^_^
- The pitch goes apeshit crazy between platforms, especially if you don't have the module template with fixed pitch settings. In comparison to the original .xm file, the ZX Spectrum track is gonna go eigth notes above the former and the Atari XL conversion of it (see below) will be approximately 2,5 notes higher than the source. Just keep that in mind and try to fight that, okay?
n00b wants teh instruments! :o
Bass drum by Strobe
Left channel is tone, right channel is drums.
C-6 00 | C-5 09
A-5 00 | --- --
D#5 00 | --- --
C-5 00 | --- --
A-4 00 | --- --
D-4 00 | --- --
C-4 00 | --- --
--- -- | --- --
C-4 06 | --- -- <--- bassline, change to every note you want
--- -- | --- --
--- -- | --- --
--- -- | --- --
C-4 03 | --- -- <--- ditto
Bass drum by null1024
Left channel is tone, right channel is drums.
E-5 01 | C-5 09
C-5 01 | --- --
G#4 01 | --- --
E-4 01 | --- --
C#4 01 | --- --
--- -- | --- --
--- -- | --- --
=== -- | --- --
C-4 07 | --- -- <--- bassline, change to every note you want
Tom drum by brightentayle
Left channel is tone, right channel is drums.
C-7 01 | D-5 10
G-6 01 | --- --
C#6 01 | --- --
A#5 01 | --- --
--- -- | --- --
C-4 06 | --- -- <--- bassline, change to every note you want
--- -- | --- --
--- -- | --- --
--- -- | --- --
C-4 03 | --- -- <--- ditto
C64 filter by Strobe
Can be done either with one-step transition to another instrument or two-step. The one you see below in the former.
C-6 | 01
C-6 | 02
C-6 | 03
C-6 | 04
C-6 | 05
C-6 | 06
C-6 | 07
C-6 | 08
C-6 | 07
C-6 | 06
C-6 | 05
C-6 | 04
C-6 | 03
C-6 | 02
C-6 | 01
Possible Inspirations For You
Shiru's bundle song is a pretty humble demonstration of what Tritone can do, so you could pretty much get along with it.
Once you're done, you've gotta listen to some nullcore or strobecore for the beeper. The latter even has
.xm sources in comments!
Olso
Tritone is also supported by a pretty long line of
xxl's beeper-songs-on-Atari-XL converters.
See Also
zxbeep (format)
Huby
Octode
Phaser1
Savage
Special FX
Stocker
