This is actually something I wanted to do as one of my first experiments when I started this. Unfortunately I can't find any *good* MIDI files of their songs. There are plenty of stems out there, but I can't work with the stems.
Oh if Mick Gordon got some of this he could probably use it or manipulate it around pretty creatively. (as in he would incorporate it into songs, not make entire songs out of it)
For real, though. I've seen some of the other floppy drive orchestra attempts, and the other people that try to do this, every last one of them, have gigantic piles of drives, like 30+, but they all run at fixed voltages, and therefore can't be used in sync or harmony. Some of them go as far as to edit in things like door knocking and glass shattering because they can't get the drives to produce enough of a pulse sound to imply a drumbeat. TL;DR this guy is amazing. I mean, he pulls it off with nothing more than a few camera cyclings edited in to show different angles of it. Hell, this guy made the halo theme sound far more intense and dark on the floppies than the actual halo theme soundtrack ever could have sounded. Same on this one, the song sounds far more depressing here than the original. I can't wait to hear the stuff this guy makes when he gets a full set of thirty or so floppy drives.
I'm glad you brought this up because i was thinking the same thing but I couldn't have worded it as well as you did, I understand how inconsistent hardware in general can be especially older tech. Even the way he records it sounds way better than any other Floppy drive orchestras.
Thanks! Unfortunately, anything above 16 devices will cause some complications. The General MIDI standard technically has support for up to 24 tracks, e.g. unique voices, but the hardware limitations with how I am using them means I only have access to the 16 physical channels within the standard. In other words, one device = one MIDI channel. It would be possible to rebuild the software to switch over to tracks, but that is way beyond my scope. I am sure it could be done but not by me. In this setup you may notice I am using more than 16 devices. 14 floppy drives, 2 hard drives, and 1 scanner. The hard drives are wired to the same Arduino output, which in effect means they receive the same signals. I do this for the purpose of making them louder. I could use a more powerful amplifier to drive the coils in them so I could only need one hard drive, but basically anything outside of cheap chipamp/DIY range will need more power and I'm really really close to maxing out what I can hook up. It's not so much "maxing out", I have about 16A to work with, but it's more a matter of complexity. In order to properly run the CCFL lamp in the scanner I am using a 12v to 24v boost converter, and that puts a ton of stress on the 12v ground rail. Every once in awhile the amplifiers for the hard drives will randomly lose their signal. Well, the signal is still there, but with how much stress is put on the ground line, they end up sounding harsh and shitty. You can almost hear some of those effects in this video, which was when I first noticed it. It wasn't too harsh though and it managed to stay hidden pretty well. It causes the tones from the hard drives to sound very choppy, like half the wavelength is missing. If you listen to the hard drive notes around 3:52 you can hear what I'm talking about. I could hook up more floppy drives for sure, but I'd have to daisy chain them off of existing Arduino outputs. At least, to run them in real-time and all together I would. They would be just like how I have the hard drives, just taking the same information and processing it. Same notes as whatever they're connected to. It wouldn't add any variation other than increasing volume, which would be nice for live performances but I've fixed that with the addition of some phased contact mics and a simple amplifier and speakers. Most songs usually have all of the core melodies and harmonies on about 4 to 6 channels, so I generally weed out unneeded channels or try to add them into empty spaces on other used channels. It can get really complex when editing the MIDI and very confusing very quickly. Let's say on Channel 1 there's nothing playing for 4 bars but in Channel 17 of the original MIDI there's notes in that empty section on Channel 1. I just pull those notes out of Channel 17 and paste them into the same spot on Channel 1. I then copy any notes I want to other channels, and build it up from there. Usually by the end of most MIDI revisions I have around 5 to 8 unique channels, 1 being the scanner, 1 being the hard drives, and the rest being covered by the floppies. It can make the process of building a MIDI to "sound right" very complex. It's difficult to explain, but basically think of editing an image in Photoshop and after every change to the image you have to merge your layers and then rework it from there. I can easily undo any changes I make but if I paste a note section into Channel 1 from Channel 17, and duplicate Channel 1 8 times and then find that note section is too loud, then I have to overwrite some of those sections in only a few of the duplicated channels with different notes. It's a balancing act. There are easier ways to do this though. I've seen that MOST people who do this use a feature called drive pooling which basically causes the Arduinos to intelligently process notes and delegate them to specific arrangements of drives. In other words, with drive pooling I can say "Drives 1-4 will only play Channel 1, drives 5-8 will play Channel 2" and so on and so forth. The benefit to this is you can have 3 or 4 channels in your "flopptemized" MIDI, but the downside is you end up with MUCH less control over what drives will play what. Some drives are louder than others, some drives play certain notes better than others. I try to mix and match the note arrangements on each individual channel of the 16 I use until I get a nice balance. If I used drive pooling, I wouldn't be able to do that. I could run two separate setups entirely, and just record each one and then mix the audio in post, but that's not really a "live performance". It would still be neat, but not really something I have the space for. In my newer videos with the Steam controller, that is a device that I recorded and mixed separately. It wasn't playing in tandem with the floppestra because it can't receive the same information from the Arduinos. A little bit of trickery but nothing crazy or over the top, no different than how professional bands are recorded in studios. Backing tracks and such are all recorded independently and mixed in with the final product. Well, it CAN receive the same information from the Arduino but I'd have to tear down the controller to wire in directly to the piezo actuators, and considering I actually use my Steam controller that was something I didn't want to do. I've also found that most of the 30/40+ floppy drive videos only have two or three unique channels, absolutely no point in that if you aren't going to use those for other unique voices. If you properly record the drives you can make a single floppy sound extremely loud and very nice. Most people who do this do what I used to do, which is record them with their phone camera. Doesn't capture the same sound at all. Getting an expensive recorder just for this project has been the wisest thing I've done so far. I think that's why so many people do it with that many drives. It's because they don't want to spend money on a good audio capture solution and think they're making up for it by having 20 drives playing the same notes.
Well, a hard drive can sound like whatever you want it to. It's fundamentally a speaker, so in this orchestra I'm feeding it pure square waves, which is why they sound just like that. However in a few videos I've played around with the generic wave and applied minor and major distortion effects to it, both using hardware circuits on the output of the Arduino as well as in post-production with audio editing. It helps vary up the generic synth tones that the Arduino outputs. In a lot of my newer videos I've been giving them analog audio signals, particularly of isolated vocal tracks and acapellas that I've modified to sound good through the coils, as well as time stretched to match as closely as possible to the quantized notes of a vocal melody in whatever MIDI I'm working with. Due to the size of the coil and the magnets, everything you pass into the drives will sound extremely tinny and shitty. In the case of pure waveforms like square waves, or even a pure analog waveform from an analog tone generator, you'd get a really nice, stable sound output. When I use messy analog signals like isolated song vocals I have to play around with them a lot before it starts to sound remotely decent.
See you Floppy Cowboy Flop you Space Cowboy See? Flop space cowboy! See you flopped cowboy! See ya flopping cowboy Flop you Flop Cowboy Space cowboy flops you Cowboy flops your space You fl*p*ING space cowboy! Flop see cowboy See space, flop cowboy See you cowboy Beflop -The script of the fit episode of Cowboy BeFlop
you know this song/show was fucking insane when a cover using floppy disks makes me a bit sad remembering the ending ( not that this version was bad, very impressive stuff )
Bobby Kew Don't have enough space to spread them all out. I'm actually trying to build a chassis for them to help improve sound quality, but it likely won't be anywhere close to done until after Christmas.
I saw this video in a meme complilation, and it reminded me of Cowboy Bebop.. so.. I had to some to the channel you watermarked-- and sure enough, it was that song. It is amazing what you've done here.
I have never seen Cowboy Bebop before, but this makes me want to. Just knowing that this is part of the soundtrack makes me want to try out watching anime for the first time.
Really cool video for a great song. "The Real Folk Blues". Man I love Cowboy Bebop. Easily one of the best animes ever. Also a great example of how a Dub can be done right. I sometimes listen to dubs and subs to see the difference. Many times I do find my personal preference being the sub, but never with Cowboy Bebop. Even nerding out from me. Great video.
I love this floppy drive music. I never thought someone would use mechanical drives as an instrument. Even if this isn't the original inventor it's a very rarely used concept and I salute you for continuing it!
Just watched a few of your Floppy Covers. Instant Subscribe! Keep up with that creative Work, it's wonderful! For such passion and effort i love TH-cam!
Had to go through 5 months of youtube history to find this.
The rise of the fallen: ancient technology
I listen to this unironically. Is that wrong?
I'm in the same boat as you.
Same. I keep coming back to it. This one has some really good portions in it.
Nope
not at all
Listen to it ironically and see if it sounds different
I don't know but I somehow like this better than the original....
same i don't know why tho
You may be into glitch music. I know I liked this for that exact reason.
see you, space floppy !
I propose attempting a Glitch Mob song or two.
All of their instruments sound like this anyway.
This is actually something I wanted to do as one of my first experiments when I started this. Unfortunately I can't find any *good* MIDI files of their songs. There are plenty of stems out there, but I can't work with the stems.
an ending that gave even floppy drives depression
Make "You reposted in the wrong neighbornhood" xD
aw hell yes
You flopped in the wrong neighborhood
"You formatted in the wrong floppyhood"
Now hold a fucking minute bud there seems to be something weird going on here 🤔
The scanner solo gets me everytime. It sounds so mesmerizingly sad...
Indeed... Why does it sound so sad?
@@danielbarbosa3 probably because the original song itself is very emotional! ❤️
So many feels listening to this. Excellent work. Some cyberpunk level stuff here.
The sound of these are soo cool. Some more modern composers could certainly use floppy drive to their advantage. Like an earthier synthisizer
tomatoflight I would love this so much! especially if someone like Porter Robinson or Deadmau5 did it. I know Deadmau5 would be into this.
or UKF... they're only the ones who founded dubstep...
Oh if Mick Gordon got some of this he could probably use it or manipulate it around pretty creatively. (as in he would incorporate it into songs, not make entire songs out of it)
Clorox Bleach You are so dumb
omfg these are not floppys these are hard drives
This channel is pure art
You are ridiculously good with this stuff. You should rename your channel to something more relevent, like "Floppy Sounds". +1 sub.
Yackaro i was thinking the same.
For real, though. I've seen some of the other floppy drive orchestra attempts, and the other people that try to do this, every last one of them, have gigantic piles of drives, like 30+, but they all run at fixed voltages, and therefore can't be used in sync or harmony. Some of them go as far as to edit in things like door knocking and glass shattering because they can't get the drives to produce enough of a pulse sound to imply a drumbeat. TL;DR this guy is amazing. I mean, he pulls it off with nothing more than a few camera cyclings edited in to show different angles of it. Hell, this guy made the halo theme sound far more intense and dark on the floppies than the actual halo theme soundtrack ever could have sounded. Same on this one, the song sounds far more depressing here than the original. I can't wait to hear the stuff this guy makes when he gets a full set of thirty or so floppy drives.
Yackaro all you said is so true, i hope the owner of this channel notice your comment cause i really liked his content too thought ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm glad you brought this up because i was thinking the same thing but I couldn't have worded it as well as you did, I understand how inconsistent hardware in general can be especially older tech. Even the way he records it sounds way better than any other Floppy drive orchestras.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, anything above 16 devices will cause some complications. The General MIDI standard technically has support for up to 24 tracks, e.g. unique voices, but the hardware limitations with how I am using them means I only have access to the 16 physical channels within the standard. In other words, one device = one MIDI channel.
It would be possible to rebuild the software to switch over to tracks, but that is way beyond my scope. I am sure it could be done but not by me.
In this setup you may notice I am using more than 16 devices. 14 floppy drives, 2 hard drives, and 1 scanner. The hard drives are wired to the same Arduino output, which in effect means they receive the same signals. I do this for the purpose of making them louder. I could use a more powerful amplifier to drive the coils in them so I could only need one hard drive, but basically anything outside of cheap chipamp/DIY range will need more power and I'm really really close to maxing out what I can hook up. It's not so much "maxing out", I have about 16A to work with, but it's more a matter of complexity. In order to properly run the CCFL lamp in the scanner I am using a 12v to 24v boost converter, and that puts a ton of stress on the 12v ground rail. Every once in awhile the amplifiers for the hard drives will randomly lose their signal. Well, the signal is still there, but with how much stress is put on the ground line, they end up sounding harsh and shitty. You can almost hear some of those effects in this video, which was when I first noticed it. It wasn't too harsh though and it managed to stay hidden pretty well. It causes the tones from the hard drives to sound very choppy, like half the wavelength is missing. If you listen to the hard drive notes around 3:52 you can hear what I'm talking about.
I could hook up more floppy drives for sure, but I'd have to daisy chain them off of existing Arduino outputs. At least, to run them in real-time and all together I would. They would be just like how I have the hard drives, just taking the same information and processing it. Same notes as whatever they're connected to. It wouldn't add any variation other than increasing volume, which would be nice for live performances but I've fixed that with the addition of some phased contact mics and a simple amplifier and speakers.
Most songs usually have all of the core melodies and harmonies on about 4 to 6 channels, so I generally weed out unneeded channels or try to add them into empty spaces on other used channels. It can get really complex when editing the MIDI and very confusing very quickly.
Let's say on Channel 1 there's nothing playing for 4 bars but in Channel 17 of the original MIDI there's notes in that empty section on Channel 1. I just pull those notes out of Channel 17 and paste them into the same spot on Channel 1. I then copy any notes I want to other channels, and build it up from there. Usually by the end of most MIDI revisions I have around 5 to 8 unique channels, 1 being the scanner, 1 being the hard drives, and the rest being covered by the floppies. It can make the process of building a MIDI to "sound right" very complex. It's difficult to explain, but basically think of editing an image in Photoshop and after every change to the image you have to merge your layers and then rework it from there. I can easily undo any changes I make but if I paste a note section into Channel 1 from Channel 17, and duplicate Channel 1 8 times and then find that note section is too loud, then I have to overwrite some of those sections in only a few of the duplicated channels with different notes. It's a balancing act.
There are easier ways to do this though. I've seen that MOST people who do this use a feature called drive pooling which basically causes the Arduinos to intelligently process notes and delegate them to specific arrangements of drives. In other words, with drive pooling I can say "Drives 1-4 will only play Channel 1, drives 5-8 will play Channel 2" and so on and so forth. The benefit to this is you can have 3 or 4 channels in your "flopptemized" MIDI, but the downside is you end up with MUCH less control over what drives will play what. Some drives are louder than others, some drives play certain notes better than others. I try to mix and match the note arrangements on each individual channel of the 16 I use until I get a nice balance. If I used drive pooling, I wouldn't be able to do that.
I could run two separate setups entirely, and just record each one and then mix the audio in post, but that's not really a "live performance". It would still be neat, but not really something I have the space for.
In my newer videos with the Steam controller, that is a device that I recorded and mixed separately. It wasn't playing in tandem with the floppestra because it can't receive the same information from the Arduinos. A little bit of trickery but nothing crazy or over the top, no different than how professional bands are recorded in studios. Backing tracks and such are all recorded independently and mixed in with the final product. Well, it CAN receive the same information from the Arduino but I'd have to tear down the controller to wire in directly to the piezo actuators, and considering I actually use my Steam controller that was something I didn't want to do.
I've also found that most of the 30/40+ floppy drive videos only have two or three unique channels, absolutely no point in that if you aren't going to use those for other unique voices. If you properly record the drives you can make a single floppy sound extremely loud and very nice. Most people who do this do what I used to do, which is record them with their phone camera. Doesn't capture the same sound at all. Getting an expensive recorder just for this project has been the wisest thing I've done so far. I think that's why so many people do it with that many drives. It's because they don't want to spend money on a good audio capture solution and think they're making up for it by having 20 drives playing the same notes.
You are my new favourite person in the world.
My gosh, this song translates so well to floppy drives. Thank you for making this. High fives for you.
Thumbs up for refering to floppy drives as an instrument!
whatnoww2
?
This rendition is very special to me, and has been since you made it. My ears love the rough sounds. Thank you
this is the nerdiest thing i've ever seen god damn its beautiful to watch.
Dude, you are so unironically cool
It's actually amaizing how well it sounds and how perfectly everything is synchronized. I love those videos! Here, have a sub.
By the way, I never really thought about it before, but it's impressive just how much a HDD sounds like a generated square synth.
Well, a hard drive can sound like whatever you want it to. It's fundamentally a speaker, so in this orchestra I'm feeding it pure square waves, which is why they sound just like that. However in a few videos I've played around with the generic wave and applied minor and major distortion effects to it, both using hardware circuits on the output of the Arduino as well as in post-production with audio editing. It helps vary up the generic synth tones that the Arduino outputs.
In a lot of my newer videos I've been giving them analog audio signals, particularly of isolated vocal tracks and acapellas that I've modified to sound good through the coils, as well as time stretched to match as closely as possible to the quantized notes of a vocal melody in whatever MIDI I'm working with.
Due to the size of the coil and the magnets, everything you pass into the drives will sound extremely tinny and shitty. In the case of pure waveforms like square waves, or even a pure analog waveform from an analog tone generator, you'd get a really nice, stable sound output. When I use messy analog signals like isolated song vocals I have to play around with them a lot before it starts to sound remotely decent.
Now I know how Valve made Portal's 2 soundtracks
See you Space Floppy.
See you Floppy Cowboy
Flop you Space Cowboy
See? Flop space cowboy!
See you flopped cowboy!
See ya flopping cowboy
Flop you Flop Cowboy
Space cowboy flops you
Cowboy flops your space
You fl*p*ING space cowboy!
Flop see cowboy
See space, flop cowboy
See you cowboy Beflop
-The script of the fit episode of Cowboy BeFlop
JerryDaMiry special floppies and beef
This turns my floppy disk into a hard drive
aaaaaah i heard some guy say that some time, "wow she turned my floppy disk into a hard drive"
Cowboy BeFlop
This is the second time floppy drives have made me cry. :')
man I ought to watch bebop again, after i watch and like the rest of your vids
Now do Tank (the intro)
This is phenomenal
holy fucking god you're great. how come I haven't seen this ever before.
So I have a bunch of old floppy drives that make weird noises. Ya want them?
See ya, Space Floppy
DUDE... Star Warz. Seen it done on like 8 floppys. Would love to see your version
Leana Deal Thanks, but I'm trying to keep away from songs others have already done. I may do it in the future however.
can you do more klk? blumenkranz was so good!
*****
Yes.
Sounds like something from the portal soundtrack
For anyone who wants to hear the full original version. th-cam.com/video/DXUjCC_Xvf0/w-d-xo.html
I was wondering if you could do a Beatles song?
If you did homestuck music, everyone would die and love you
you know this song/show was fucking insane when a cover using floppy disks makes me a bit sad remembering the ending ( not that this version was bad, very impressive stuff )
why would anyone dislike this video?
You should try to do some death grips on floppy. Something like Get Got, if possible, would be really neat
Don't even know the original anime or song but this rendition is fucking fire.
this is a cancer curer
I would love to see any song from the Legend of Zelda recreated on these devices, regardless, keep it up!
Same.
I'd take some of Zeliard's songs as well.
Awesome! Do you think you could do a video showing all the floppy drive heads in operation without wrecking the sounds?
Bobby Kew Don't have enough space to spread them all out. I'm actually trying to build a chassis for them to help improve sound quality, but it likely won't be anywhere close to done until after Christmas.
Ah. That's alright. Good luck on the project though! I hope to see it soon.
I saw this video in a meme complilation, and it reminded me of Cowboy Bebop.. so.. I had to some to the channel you watermarked-- and sure enough, it was that song. It is amazing what you've done here.
Could the drives change pitch fast enough to play Roundabout?
I have never seen Cowboy Bebop before, but this makes me want to. Just knowing that this is part of the soundtrack makes me want to try out watching anime for the first time.
Noah I'm not a huge fan of all anime but I believe cowboy bebop is something everyone needs to watch
I want to download this and play it on my iPod.
Really cool video for a great song. "The Real Folk Blues". Man I love Cowboy Bebop. Easily one of the best animes ever. Also a great example of how a Dub can be done right. I sometimes listen to dubs and subs to see the difference. Many times I do find my personal preference being the sub, but never with Cowboy Bebop. Even nerding out from me. Great video.
2years ago I've set this as my ringtone . Epic. Nostalgic. Incredible.
This is a great pick for floppy drive conversion. The Real Folk Blues is an excellent tune, and you did the ol' Seatbelts proud
Why was I expecting Beatles
This was a lot more emotional than I thought it was going to be.
I love this floppy drive music. I never thought someone would use mechanical drives as an instrument. Even if this isn't the original inventor it's a very rarely used concept and I salute you for continuing it!
My dude, when you getting on Spotify?
would it be possible to hook up a midi keyboard to this setup and play it in real time?
Yeah, but he's tried MIDI before, and he says it doesn't sound as 'refined' as it would w/o some small modifications.
Just watched a few of your Floppy Covers. Instant Subscribe! Keep up with that creative Work, it's wonderful! For such passion and effort i love TH-cam!
Play this at my funeral.
Damn that's good!
I really like this :-)
don't really care about the meme, but you did a good job recreating 'the real folk blues'. kudos for that.
Fuck yeah, I loved Cowboy Bebop. Amazing creativity :)
we need megoloflopa or floptrousle
Those wouldn't sound good on floppy drives, it would have to be something more like Flop of Justice
This needs more views
Sounds like some chill Glitchmob
0:27 No matter how many times I see that final shot of spike, I always get a little sad inside. That’s how you know when something is amazing
i don’t listen to the original, just this one… have you considered uploading these as sound files and releasing an album?
I love the low moan of the scanner. It's just so GOOD. I need to get me a bunch of scanners and have them do some music.
i am very sick, and this makes me feel slightly better
damn I lost this gem and couldn't find it, until TH-cam randomly recommended it
23 April, 1999 - A day that will live in infamy~
Wow. Awesome videos. Love them. Make more!
Do the Portal 2 end song! :D
You called it
:P
*Bang.*
incredible
I hope it's not rude or anything to make a request, but you should totally do "One night
In Neo Kobe city" from the SNATCHER OST
goosebumps.
More please
not floppy, hard drives
well rounded everything channel [Concentrate] Your a special kind of stupid arent you
I think I might actually like this better than the original version, nice work!
This is so good
God this sounds so amazing. I can't stop listening.
sounds awesome
I don't know why this makes me feel what I do, but it do.
You should make a video on how to DIY your rig.
Can we download this somewhere?
WOW. AMAZING!
What's the song from?
Megalovania next please.
Not enough views!
I'd like to hear floppy drive edit of Dragon Ball Z Vegeta's Theme (by Team Faulconer)
baaahhng
MEGALOMANIA PLZ.
How do you do this?
who is this man
That poppy?
Bang.
Lyrics?
*BANG*
Bang
Is there any kind of sheet music for this? I really like this version more than a lot of the piano versions ive seen
I think some of the songs from the Halo games could work quite well