for YM2612 + SN76489

by MetallicOrwell

It's time to chill out. Nah, don't worry--I'm not going mellow on you or anything like that... actually, I am. After so much metal madness for the past few months, I decided to try something different. I'm still quite proud of my Pokemon mash-up I did back in October, with its endearing, tender sound, so I thought I might try to do something similar again. Tifa's theme from Final Fantasy VII is one of the most mellow pieces of music I've ever heard in a videogame, so it was the perfect choice. You might call this genre "pastoral chiptune" or something like that. Just for tonight, we stop headbanging, we look out the window, and we marvel at the starry skies.

This is a very straightforward, minimalist piece, really. There is a main melody, which is sometimes played on an oboe, flute or bassoon, some piano accompaniment, some strings occasionally... and that's about it. But therein lies the problem: your boy MetallicOrwell can do mellow, but he doesn't do minimalist--ever. So how to tackle this in a style that I'd be satisfied with? Primarily by using tons of echo, and also by adding a little something extra to the main melody. Let's do the rundown.

Firstly: I'm using extended channel 3 with algorithm 4 for the entire duration of this piece. The reason for this is that I decided I wanted an acoustic bass in this arrangement (the original PS1 version didn't have one) in order to provide it with a fatter lower end which was very much needed. With FM synthesis, you can make a perfectly serviceable acoustic bass with just two operators. So, why not do exactly that, and use the other two operators of channel 3 for something else? That's what I did: they are filled with a simplified version of whatever instrument is playing the main melody in order to provide echo. Do they sound as good as a full, 4-OP instrument? No. Do they sound convincing enough for an echo track? Yes, they do.

In the first section the main melody is actually harmonized: there is an oboe, with echo on channel 3, and a clarinet--and because its waveform is so similar to that of a square wave, I can use those to provide it with echo as well. The FM instruments are just some random ones included with Furnace and tweaked slightly. Now for the piano, I'm using *the* electric piano, the one from YU-NO (PC-98, OPNA) with two out-of-tune echo channels panned to each side. This way, maximum spatial depth is achieved. In the next section, the two echo channels for the piano are replaced with my custom synth strings, so the square waves have to do the piano's echo instead. This dichotomy defined the experience of arranging this piece: sometimes I had loads of free channels, and sometimes I had to play tetris to make as much as possible fit in.

Next up, we have the flute part. In reality, with the way the instrument is designed and my pitch/vibrato/portamento effects, it sounds more like a whistle, but that works rather well. I had one free channel in this part, so I filled it with the Sonic 1 Ring effect. The electric piano sounds a lot like a bell anyway, so they complement each other. In the final part, the bassoon comes in, as well as the strings again. There's supposed to be a flute to enhance the melody at the very end, but I didn't have any empty channels and didn't want to give up on my Sonic 1 Ring either. So, I made a composite instrument: a simplified version of the ring combined with a simplified version of the flute/whistle. With everything else going on in this part, it does the job well and you don't even notice.

It was a little challenging to get the acoustic bass' volume right, because higher notes are much louder, but no biggie. The square waves are also used sometimes to play piano notes that didn't fit in the FM channels. Anything else? Well, I decided to record the song from real hardware instead of just using Furnace to render it because this has some pretty high-pitched bell-like sounds. Those can hurt some ears, so the Mega Drive's low-pass filter is useful here. And that's about it! There really is a huge gap in the effort needed for my massive metal arrangements when compared to just about everything else I make.

Incidentally, I am an OG FF7 absolutist: I do not acknowledge the legitimacy of anything that's not the original PS1 game or its 1998 PC port: no Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, Before Crisis, Crisis Core--whatever the fuck crisis we're on now doesn't concern me. Don't even get me started on the modern remake. In a word: NO. That's just me, though: if you like any of the works listed above, that's coolio. Regardless, because of my fondness for the original game, choosing the background image for the video was easy:

See you around.

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