Tim said in an interview that he regrets not getting to work with the Megadrive/Gens chip more often (he only worked on this game) as he enjoyed it and the driver he used was written by a friend and was the most flexible Genesis driver he had seen.
@@kociemleko1 I think that's what helps make this so interesting though. The fact that he created all these sounds with just 5 channels of pure FM bliss.
@@julienbraudel7109 I think what he meant was more like "this is easily around the limits of what the chip can produced" rather than "soundtracks like these can easily be produced on a YM2612"
.... is this tim follin a god damn time traveler? You fucking serious? It's like he took some of the best elements from electronic music years later and spit it all over the fucking Sega Genesis. Really? HOW does this sound so good?!?
Aight, mobile users. Here ya go: 00:00 - Title 04:33 - Cool Guitar Track 08:39 - Track with all the Sine Waves and the Flutes and the Bells 13:46 - That other Guitar Track 18:37 - Intermission 26:09 - Game Over H
@@iwanttocomplain yea have you actually worked with this stupid fucking chip?? this chip is a literal nightmare to work on, adding weird as fuck saturations, constantly glitching out with incorrect timings. my god it's a miracle any track was made with this pile of garbage
Wow, that Intermission track is over 7 minutes long with chillin jazz tunes. All that on a sega genesis, that is almost unreal. This was definitely ahead of its time and the composer a genius.
From 14:06 to 15:36, there is no better 90 seconds of music on the Genesis and maybe even the entire 16-bit era.... Oh wait, yeah there is. The first 90 seconds of the video. This fuckin guy Tim Follin, man. Nothing short of legend.
Far better if Sega hired Tim Follin, Sakimoto, Jesper Kyd among others to work on genesis soundfont and sound drivers than spend money on sega cd or whatsoever
@@bored_person Yea, in FM we call each "sound" a patch, sound "fonts" are just wavetable samples of an instrument. A patch is basically how you are matrixing the FM oscillators, what envelopes you are using for each oscillator, etc.
@@hakemon the Sega Genesis does not use patches for it synthesizer, values are written to the registers directly buy the program. Either way, soundfonts are still specific to General MIDI synthesizers, and the Sega Genesis isn't, and the Sega Genesis has no support for Midi.
@@bored_person I was simplifying it for the guy. I've developed for the Genesis so I'm a bit familiar with it, hell I've even done the write up for replacing the YM2612 with a YM3438 while retaining full backwards compatibility, so I know my way around it. But yes in actuality, while most musicians are sequencing and composing their songs for the FM chip, we will indeed use patches to define the sounds we want, and can even go direct if we want to depending on the driver used in the game/program.
I've known and loved this soundtrack for a long time, but there's something really awesome, when you know at least the basics of how FM synth works to actually get to see the final waveforms for each track, and get a peak at the brilliance that went into crafting each sound! One waveform I'm actually confused by is the dirty bass in tracks 3 and 5. All the operators on the Genesis are sine wave, and yet, this one looks like it has square in it. I get that the top and bottom could be intentional clipping due to making the channel so hot, but the ramp up looks almost straight up. I would love to know the exact operator configuration for that track! For all of them, actually! :-) This is art, meets science, meets sick black magic - and it's excellent! Cheers!
In a 2-op configuration just set 1:1 as the ratio between modulator and carrier, with lots of feedback. This will give you pseudo-sawtooth waveforms, and by driving the modulator's intensity you can emulate an analog lowpass filter. Actually driving the modulator's intensity with a decaying EG is what is done in that bass patch. 1:2 ratio (1 is carrier, 2 is modulator) will give you pseudo-squarewave.
mima14031985 excellent, thanks! Yeah, I knew about the 1:2 fake square already, but having seen it on an oscilloscope, it still only vaguely looks square. I actually did a blog post about "FM fake square vs PSG real square" on the Genesis. It's an interesting subject, I think. I also wondered if EG was coming into play with as fuzzy as it sounded. I think they use a very similar bass sound in many of the Cosmic Carnage tracks. So I know about square, and now I know about saw, but what about the other basic waveforms? Is there a way to "fake a triangle" or "fax an asymmetrical pulse wave"? Just curious. I know that a triangle and a sine don't sound radically different anyway, so I don't know how useful it's really be. But it might be fun to have a big triangle bass NES-like aesthetic in a Genesis chiptune.
It looks vaguely like a pure squarewave in an oscilloscope but the harmonic content is very similar, so it can be a good surrogate of a true square. To "fake" a triangle wave in FM is simple too, as the harmonic series of a triangle wave it's the same of the squarewave (f + 3f + 5f, etc...). What changes is the amplitude of each partial. In the square wave we have f + 1/3*3f + 1/5*5f etc... so the 1st partial will be 1/3rd of the fundimental's amplitude and 3 times its frequency, the second one 1/5th the amplitude and 5 times the frequency, and so on as the series continues. In the triangle wave we have f + 1/(3^2)*3f + 1/(5^2)*5f etc... with the first partial being 1/9th of the fundimental's amplitude and 3 times its frequency, the second one 1/25th the amplitude and 5 times the frequency, and so on. The partials decaying much faster in a triangle wave than in a square wave (thus making the triangle wave having a lot less high frequency content) will give its typical, more soft and "flutey" tone. In FM synthesis to approach this tone you just have to set your operators as if you're doing a pseudo-squarewave, but with a lower modulator's amplitude. This will give you a good approximation. For pulse waves the matter it's being more complicated because they have a more complex spectra, and FM synthesis is unsuitable for the purpose of "faking" PWM waves. The only FM synth which can do "true" PWM is the Yamaha OPL3, because its operators are able to output other waveforms rather than just the sine, one of these being a true squarewave. By slightly modulating a squarewave operator in a 1:1 ratio with its modulator, you can obtain pulse waves, as this tune, entirely done on OPL3 shows very well: www.adlibtracker.net/files/encore_-_the_absence_of_julia.mp3
Ostra Diemgi right. I know. But the more limited a chip is, the further away it gets from the "any sound" ideal it's going to get. To be sure, there are chips that are well more basic than YM2612, and I'll be the first to say that YM2612 is capable of truly incredible stuff - such as this track! But in the grand scheme of things, it's not a spectacularly advanced chip. And while two sines can fake a square tone very believably, they don't actually look that much like a square on an oscilloscope. So when I see what looks like an actual square on an oscilloscope on an FM channel, it perplexes me because while 2612 can "fake" a square just fine, as we've already established, it can't actually "make" a square, a real square, that is. My knowledge of the YM2612 is far more academic than it is experiential, though. My only chance to have actually used it, and tried playing with its operators, and algorithms, and envelopes and envelope generators, to have actually gotten my hands dirty with it was a few hours monkeying around with deflemask. So maybe a more experienced craftsman will be able to poke holes in my theory for various reasons. But the only thing that makes sense to me is that the levels on the voice are cranked to past the clipping point causing the curves of the sine form to cut off at the tops and bottoms of the scope. That would also explain the wonderful distortion on what otherwise sounds like a pretty basic tone. Any chipsmiths out there who can confirm my suspicion, or shoot it down and provide an alternate one? Thanks!
18:37 is DEFINITELY my favourite track on this whole project! holy wow! Fucking gives me chills!!! I'd put it up there as my favourite Genesis track of all time with go "Go Straight" from Streets of Rage.
Literally!!! Fun fact: October of 2021 I had lost my job due to covid related issues. I skateboarded home that night surrounded by stars with this track playing at full volume. Gave me the feeling of starting a new chapter in my life, biggest mood ever
Sublime. Only a complete genius can make something so sodding difficult to pull off sound so effortlessly musically accomplished. So much innovation, time, blood sweat and tears wasted for an unreleased game. Kudos to whoever uncovered this. Stunning work, especially 'Intermission'
Snes is technically superior , no arguing on that. See what follin did on SNES "X-Men and Spiderman vs arcade" BUT timetrax is fabulous indeed, it gets clear that only a few composers were able to make fair use of Genesis FM chip.
I don't really blame anyone for "ignorance". There is a critical mass of badly handled audio on the platform, beyond technical limitations, and there is also the barrier of many people just not liking the way FM sounds, especially from lower end parts. Even the superior YM3812 and YMF262 (OPL2 and OPL3) had the problem of composers not knowing what to do with them. But now we have Diode Milliampere's Adlib Tracker tunes to cure the ignorance. As a kid I called Genesis "the farting system" because of the audio.
People who say that are correct, technically speaking. Personally, I prefer to focus on the artistry of the soundtrack rather than the technical specifications of the hardware.
Waaooow this soundtrack just recently came to my attention. There's a lot of great Genesis/Mega Drive soundtracks out there but this i definitely one of the best sounding one's. Seriously this is even better sounding then the first to Sonic soundtracks and i'm a big fan of those. Amazing work on the YM2612 chip here!
This is literally the best choice of a soundtrack to do something like this for imo, but unfortunately it seems a little bit desynced. Thanks so much for making this though, I've actually wanted to see a visualizer type thing for this soundtrack for quite a while!
No muffled or harsh audio like you do get with compressed & speeded up adpcm sound on the snes, fm is sounding fully dynamic and crystal clear,, These sound tracks are amezing, because it looks like i also do hear guitar sound effects in it.
Anyone else have problems with this soundtrack distorting on their Mega Amp-modded Model 2 VA1 Mega Drive (/Genesis)? No other soundtracks have that problem.
Funny that I have had a collection of old VGM music forever, to me it just sounded like prog with synths, I thought it was amazing, now, 20 years later, normal people are getting into it. Glad to see it wasn't just me that appreciated these old VGM compositions and composers :)
Tim worked miracles. While I know he works best under limitations I would absolutely love to see him work on a modern "retro" styled game using such limitations. He did amazing things in both sample and FX. Check Plox to see what he's capable of on the SNES side.
Modern producers will never understand what making music for these old chip was like. Ask any one of them to make something similar to this using only sine waves and FM between them.
@@SuperShadow Theres definitely reuse from older tracks in newer stuff, either unintentionally or not. Parts of High Score from Ghouls and Ghosts on the C64 sounds very similar to the Main Theme for the Amiga version of the same game he also worked on. Im positive there's more similar stuff if you really dig through his stuff
The fact that he only used up 5 (6 for the title and the game over jingle) FM channels alone without any additional use of samples or the PSG chip for this stellar soundtrack is amazing! Follin’s a genius!
One of the most impressive things to me is how he crams complex, four-part chords into only two channels in the Title Screen music. I don't think I've ever seen this trick used outside this collection of songs. This must have been a valuable skill when you only had 6 total channels to work with and refuse to use the PSG or PCM channels. In my limited experience playing around with FM synthesis, I've figured out that he's probably doing this by using an op configuration with two carriers and setting the one op's frequency multiplier to 2 and the other to 3, making it output a fifth harmony. As long as the interval between any two notes in the chord is a fifth (i.e. 1 and 5, 3 and ♯7), you can play a pair of notes on one channel and another pair on second channel and only tie up two channels instead of four.
They were playing that track at 8:40 during this past SGDQ and I didn't get a chance to look at the name of the song/game. I thought it was going to bug me for years trying to find this song, but googling "genesis soundtrack bell" took me directly here. *shrug*
Ok, also, I think what's so catchy about the bells is that at 12:08 is that the song is in 5/4 time and the bells are playing every 4th beat, so they sound urgent, but also like a sound effect playing over the music, while at 12:42 they're playing on the downbeat, every 5th beat, so they sound integrated into the music. It gives a resigned sort of feeling.
Ah yes, 50Hz. The cultured choice. I would also accept 55Hz, if it existed. From what I've heard he made it work for both but his ideal speed was somewhere in the middle between 50 and 60.
From just using ear, I think if you speed it up by 1.05 speed you can get close to the equivalent of 55Hz (1.1 works but at that point I'm pretty sure it's just 60Hz)
There's a lot you could find out more about. For example there is a fairly obscure feature for Channel 3 which almost nobody ever used. It grants each of the 4 operators its own independent frequency, so it is possible to create non-musical weird sound effects. It can essentially be broken up into two 2-operator channels or 4 pure sine waves for music as well. Also, there are two timers in the chip if I'm not mistaken, which were added to generate interrupts for the host CPU, but in the Genesis the Z80 CPU never used these because it only has one interrupt line which was connected to the 60Hz picture generator.
@@GENATARi yep, physical YM2612 or integrated YM3438 depending on which revision of Genesis/Mega Drive you have. but besides the 3438 being a bug fix of the 2612 that fixes the "ladder effect", I think the output level / impedance also changed and Sega messed up the audio circuit, so it needs a MegaAmp to actually sound good.
I guess FM music doesn't lend itself as well to this because of the constantly changing complex waveforms? But still I'll have a whale of a time "watching this soundtrack"
As great as Follin is, he really didn't give a second thought to if the music suited what was on screen or not. He seemingly wasn't remotely interested in matching it, you hire him you get a selection of high quality though entirely random music
Off-topic I know, but hopefully someone will know. Is there a comprehensive explanation of how the Sonic 3 soundtrack was even possible to be created using such "limited" sound chip? I mean... that must be the most impressive "chip music" I ever heard. Is there a blog post or something out there that explains what kind of "black magic" was used for its creation? Why does it sound so "superior" to anything else on the console?
it's very well done sound engineering lol, but i know the channel GST Channel does a lot of videos about different vgm musicians and they've done many videos about genesis music, so most likely they might have a video related to what you're talking about. I'd recommend for you to check them out
I clicked on the link for the multidumper on your other videos, and the link isn't working... Is there any other links? I would really like to use this program.
Nah it doesn't even need them to sound good. The composer was also specifically tasked to use these specific channels. In a way, it's to show just how good Genesis music can be, without even needing extra stuff.
![Tim Follin - “Time Trax (PAL MD/Genesis)” Full Soundtrack [Improved Oscilloscope View]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Cb8bEGqQWVA/mqdefault.jpg)
![Tim Follin - “Time Trax (PAL MD/Genesis)” Full Soundtrack [Improved Oscilloscope View]](/img/tr.png)
![[#2024MAMA] BIGBANG (빅뱅) - 뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG) + FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EQsYfiPR9uM/mqdefault.jpg)
This is legitimately good prog rock. It just so happens to not be by Genesis, but on a Genesis.
I wonder if there are any Genesis remixes of Genesis.
lol facts. There's some really great frequency modulation going on here.
Mega Drive*
@@SproutyPottedPlant you’re right, the band Mega Drive didn’t make this music
@@SproutyPottedPlant literally the same thing
Tim said in an interview that he regrets not getting to work with the Megadrive/Gens chip more often (he only worked on this game) as he enjoyed it and the driver he used was written by a friend and was the most flexible Genesis driver he had seen.
would love to see this driver
@@hrrmtt Same! Although I think modern software like Deflemask make it pretty easy these days,
Most flexible, but no psg or pcm support.
@@Alianger Was the lack of PSG and PCM in this soundtrack a technical issue with the driver or a creative choice by Tim?...
@@kociemleko1 I think that's what helps make this so interesting though. The fact that he created all these sounds with just 5 channels of pure FM bliss.
No PCM samples, no square-waves channels used. All by pure FM sound. Tim Follin is a genius.
VGMMER || That would cost a lot of memory.
VGMMER || just kidding.
I don't think even Technosoft were as sophisticated as this with the Yamaha chip. Tim Follin, consider me impressed.
I think both have different styles. Can't say which one is better because of that.
True. The TF4 soundtrack is so immense as to defy comparison. Diddlywiddlydiddlybweeeee!
The FM synthesis is strong in this one.
This soundtrack easily demonstrates what the YM2612 is capable of.
I would not say easily. Follin apparently worked hard on the sounds to get that quality. I don't know many YM2612 soundtracks which are that great.
@@julienbraudel7109 it all depends on the sound drivers and who's making it
@@Sinistar1983 Not all, the musician also manufacturate the sounds. Driver is important, but you have to design the sounds also, one by one.
@@julienbraudel7109 true true
@@julienbraudel7109 I think what he meant was more like "this is easily around the limits of what the chip can produced" rather than "soundtracks like these can easily be produced on a YM2612"
Not a single sample used. All FM synthesis. This man is a legend.
.... is this tim follin a god damn time traveler? You fucking serious? It's like he took some of the best elements from electronic music years later and spit it all over the fucking Sega Genesis. Really? HOW does this sound so good?!?
VjRoboZ i've also seen you on the Plok video
lol yes, yes, in the megapost
Check the mission briefing theme from Spiderman and X-Men Arcade's Revenge (for SNES).
Aight, mobile users. Here ya go:
00:00 - Title
04:33 - Cool Guitar Track
08:39 - Track with all the Sine Waves and the Flutes and the Bells
13:46 - That other Guitar Track
18:37 - Intermission
26:09 - Game Over
H
I deeply admire follin for synthesizing drums instead of just using samples that shit must've been hard but it sounds so good
There’s a new sound module called Blast Beats which is for making beats with Ann old Sound Blaster chip. It’s not that hard.
Sampling was taken by in game sound effects but yes the FM Drums are really good.
@@iwanttocomplain This is on the Genesis for the YM2612, not the YM3812 (Adlib/various SoundBlaster cards)
@@nicco1690 there’s not much difference. He’s not a genius for making fm drums.
@@iwanttocomplain yea have you actually worked with this stupid fucking chip?? this chip is a literal nightmare to work on, adding weird as fuck saturations, constantly glitching out with incorrect timings. my god it's a miracle any track was made with this pile of garbage
If a Tim Follin poster did exist, I'd instantly put it on the wall in my room. Everyone has their myths.
Intermission...
ahh, so funky.
iteachvader didn't expect to see you here
@@GLXY23 neither did i
@@ninjacat230 Me neither
@@theblenderfiddler4434 Neither did I
@@thesamplemotion me neither
This Yamaha chip is amazing... Follin is definitely a genius.
It's hard to believe that the chip that played this was the same chip that played the DOOM 32x music
m.th-cam.com/video/d28ENdoG4fw/w-d-xo.html
"That other guitar track" is incredible
One of my favorite FM soundtracks. Some 10 years ago I downloaded the title theme from Tim Follin's website as an MP3 dubbed from tape.
I can hear that many instruments are similar to Spider Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge’s instruments, like the electric guitar and organs.
Wow, that Intermission track is over 7 minutes long with chillin jazz tunes. All that on a sega genesis, that is almost unreal. This was definitely ahead of its time and the composer a genius.
Say what you will about Tim Follin, the man knew how to make a fucking title screen.
Favourite is the bell track. It's so moody, it's borderline creepy, and those modulator sweeps are the icing on the cake for a mysterious sound.
From 14:06 to 15:36, there is no better 90 seconds of music on the Genesis and maybe even the entire 16-bit era.... Oh wait, yeah there is. The first 90 seconds of the video. This fuckin guy Tim Follin, man. Nothing short of legend.
shame he didnt work on a game that was great not just for the music
JTF plok
ye u right
If anyone hasn't heard them, I recommend Tim's C64 music for:
Black Lamp (Title Screen)
Agent X 2 (Level 1)
Amazing! I would extend that to 16:09
Far better if Sega hired Tim Follin, Sakimoto, Jesper Kyd among others to work on genesis soundfont and sound drivers than spend money on sega cd or whatsoever
tonmasterboy Don't forget about Matt "Hello Hacker F**ker" Furniss. He made some amazing tunes with the YM2612 too.
That's not what soundfonts are.
@@bored_person Yea, in FM we call each "sound" a patch, sound "fonts" are just wavetable samples of an instrument. A patch is basically how you are matrixing the FM oscillators, what envelopes you are using for each oscillator, etc.
@@hakemon the Sega Genesis does not use patches for it synthesizer, values are written to the registers directly buy the program. Either way, soundfonts are still specific to General MIDI synthesizers, and the Sega Genesis isn't, and the Sega Genesis has no support for Midi.
@@bored_person I was simplifying it for the guy. I've developed for the Genesis so I'm a bit familiar with it, hell I've even done the write up for replacing the YM2612 with a YM3438 while retaining full backwards compatibility, so I know my way around it. But yes in actuality, while most musicians are sequencing and composing their songs for the FM chip, we will indeed use patches to define the sounds we want, and can even go direct if we want to depending on the driver used in the game/program.
Incredible FM sounds, but also incredible musicianship, which I think was missing from a lot of Megadrive/Genesis games.
Streets of Rage series, Revenge of Shinobi, Sunsoft's Batman and a ton of others might have something to say about that.
@Eep386 yeah, I mean I just came here from the Vectorman OST, which was made using GEMS.
Some say that playing this on an actual genesis will wear down the sound chip.
Nah, just made that one up.
you got me...was hoping that was true
@@Hemios1 using it at all wears it down bro
@@bitchlasagna4720 Just like how using your body will wear it down. Better stop existing.
I've known and loved this soundtrack for a long time, but there's something really awesome, when you know at least the basics of how FM synth works to actually get to see the final waveforms for each track, and get a peak at the brilliance that went into crafting each sound!
One waveform I'm actually confused by is the dirty bass in tracks 3 and 5. All the operators on the Genesis are sine wave, and yet, this one looks like it has square in it. I get that the top and bottom could be intentional clipping due to making the channel so hot, but the ramp up looks almost straight up. I would love to know the exact operator configuration for that track! For all of them, actually! :-)
This is art, meets science, meets sick black magic - and it's excellent!
Cheers!
In a 2-op configuration just set 1:1 as the ratio between modulator and carrier, with lots of feedback. This will give you pseudo-sawtooth waveforms, and by driving the modulator's intensity you can emulate an analog lowpass filter. Actually driving the modulator's intensity with a decaying EG is what is done in that bass patch. 1:2 ratio (1 is carrier, 2 is modulator) will give you pseudo-squarewave.
mima14031985 excellent, thanks! Yeah, I knew about the 1:2 fake square already, but having seen it on an oscilloscope, it still only vaguely looks square. I actually did a blog post about "FM fake square vs PSG real square" on the Genesis. It's an interesting subject, I think. I also wondered if EG was coming into play with as fuzzy as it sounded. I think they use a very similar bass sound in many of the Cosmic Carnage tracks.
So I know about square, and now I know about saw, but what about the other basic waveforms? Is there a way to "fake a triangle" or "fax an asymmetrical pulse wave"? Just curious. I know that a triangle and a sine don't sound radically different anyway, so I don't know how useful it's really be. But it might be fun to have a big triangle bass NES-like aesthetic in a Genesis chiptune.
It looks vaguely like a pure squarewave in an oscilloscope but the harmonic content is very similar, so it can be a good surrogate of a true square.
To "fake" a triangle wave in FM is simple too, as the harmonic series of a triangle wave it's the same of the squarewave (f + 3f + 5f, etc...). What changes is the amplitude of each partial. In the square wave we have f + 1/3*3f + 1/5*5f etc... so the 1st partial will be 1/3rd of the fundimental's amplitude and 3 times its frequency, the second one 1/5th the amplitude and 5 times the frequency, and so on as the series continues. In the triangle wave we have f + 1/(3^2)*3f + 1/(5^2)*5f etc... with the first partial being 1/9th of the fundimental's amplitude and 3 times its frequency, the second one 1/25th the amplitude and 5 times the frequency, and so on.
The partials decaying much faster in a triangle wave than in a square wave (thus making the triangle wave having a lot less high frequency content) will give its typical, more soft and "flutey" tone. In FM synthesis to approach this tone you just have to set your operators as if you're doing a pseudo-squarewave, but with a lower modulator's amplitude. This will give you a good approximation.
For pulse waves the matter it's being more complicated because they have a more complex spectra, and FM synthesis is unsuitable for the purpose of "faking" PWM waves. The only FM synth which can do "true" PWM is the Yamaha OPL3, because its operators are able to output other waveforms rather than just the sine, one of these being a true squarewave. By slightly modulating a squarewave operator in a 1:1 ratio with its modulator, you can obtain pulse waves, as this tune, entirely done on OPL3 shows very well: www.adlibtracker.net/files/encore_-_the_absence_of_julia.mp3
The idea behind FM synth is that you can recreate any sound by layering multiple sine waves.
Ostra Diemgi right. I know. But the more limited a chip is, the further away it gets from the "any sound" ideal it's going to get. To be sure, there are chips that are well more basic than YM2612, and I'll be the first to say that YM2612 is capable of truly incredible stuff - such as this track! But in the grand scheme of things, it's not a spectacularly advanced chip.
And while two sines can fake a square tone very believably, they don't actually look that much like a square on an oscilloscope. So when I see what looks like an actual square on an oscilloscope on an FM channel, it perplexes me because while 2612 can "fake" a square just fine, as we've already established, it can't actually "make" a square, a real square, that is.
My knowledge of the YM2612 is far more academic than it is experiential, though. My only chance to have actually used it, and tried playing with its operators, and algorithms, and envelopes and envelope generators, to have actually gotten my hands dirty with it was a few hours monkeying around with deflemask. So maybe a more experienced craftsman will be able to poke holes in my theory for various reasons. But the only thing that makes sense to me is that the levels on the voice are cranked to past the clipping point causing the curves of the sine form to cut off at the tops and bottoms of the scope. That would also explain the wonderful distortion on what otherwise sounds like a pretty basic tone.
Any chipsmiths out there who can confirm my suspicion, or shoot it down and provide an alternate one?
Thanks!
this soundtrack should be on spotify
This music is timeless
18:37 is DEFINITELY my favourite track on this whole project! holy wow! Fucking gives me chills!!! I'd put it up there as my favourite Genesis track of all time with go "Go Straight" from Streets of Rage.
Literally!!!
Fun fact: October of 2021 I had lost my job due to covid related issues. I skateboarded home that night surrounded by stars with this track playing at full volume. Gave me the feeling of starting a new chapter in my life, biggest mood ever
Sublime. Only a complete genius can make something so sodding difficult to pull off sound so effortlessly musically accomplished. So much innovation, time, blood sweat and tears wasted for an unreleased game. Kudos to whoever uncovered this. Stunning work, especially 'Intermission'
this is absolutely incredible, it's making me want to give another shot at FM synthesis
This soundtrack is insane. Remember - what you're hearing is Genesis music.
Track 2, holy shit, that sounds like it should be impossible on the Genesis.
That’s a hell of a bass note at 2:08. Hardly anyone would have heard that through a tv or crap headphones...
Yeah, I hardly heard it myself. Didn't even notice it until I saw this comment
How can people still actually say the SNES had a better sound chip. Just listen to that bass, holy...
Because it did.
Listen to some of his SNES work
Snes is technically superior , no arguing on that. See what follin did on SNES "X-Men and Spiderman vs arcade"
BUT timetrax is fabulous indeed, it gets clear that only a few composers were able to make fair use of Genesis FM chip.
I don't really blame anyone for "ignorance". There is a critical mass of badly handled audio on the platform, beyond technical limitations, and there is also the barrier of many people just not liking the way FM sounds, especially from lower end parts. Even the superior YM3812 and YMF262 (OPL2 and OPL3) had the problem of composers not knowing what to do with them. But now we have Diode Milliampere's Adlib Tracker tunes to cure the ignorance.
As a kid I called Genesis "the farting system" because of the audio.
People who say that are correct, technically speaking. Personally, I prefer to focus on the artistry of the soundtrack rather than the technical specifications of the hardware.
I used to watch songs play back in FastTracker like this.
saxxonpike same now Its with MilkyTracker
I still do it on my old DOS machine sometimes
Tim is good on both the Mega Drive and SNES.
Fortunately he was good on everything he touched.
Waaooow this soundtrack just recently came to my attention. There's a lot of great Genesis/Mega Drive soundtracks out there but this i definitely one of the best sounding one's. Seriously this is even better sounding then the first to Sonic soundtracks and i'm a big fan of those. Amazing work on the YM2612 chip here!
08:40 big Akrillic vibes, amazing
Ironic
man there's all these Tim Follin tracks on other systems I'd never heard.. what a treat... incredible musician
This is literally the best choice of a soundtrack to do something like this for imo, but unfortunately it seems a little bit desynced. Thanks so much for making this though, I've actually wanted to see a visualizer type thing for this soundtrack for quite a while!
No muffled or harsh audio like you do get with compressed & speeded up adpcm sound on the snes, fm is sounding fully dynamic and crystal clear,,
These sound tracks are amezing, because it looks like i also do hear guitar sound effects in it.
The first vídeo i saw on your channel, excelente job! This title track is the best that i've heard on genesis!
"Title" and "Intermission" are my favourites :)
Anyone else have problems with this soundtrack distorting on their Mega Amp-modded Model 2 VA1 Mega Drive (/Genesis)? No other soundtracks have that problem.
This Music and Streets of Rage 2 tracks are awesome!!
Dude, Sega Genesis had the grestest tunes back then...
This version of this game was cancelled and wasn't actually "released" until 2013 but yeah
Funny that I have had a collection of old VGM music forever, to me it just sounded like prog with synths, I thought it was amazing, now, 20 years later, normal people are getting into it. Glad to see it wasn't just me that appreciated these old VGM compositions and composers :)
Tim worked miracles. While I know he works best under limitations I would absolutely love to see him work on a modern "retro" styled game using such limitations. He did amazing things in both sample and FX. Check Plox to see what he's capable of on the SNES side.
Would be interesting to get an FFT of this to take a peek into the modulation.
Modern producers will never understand what making music for these old chip was like. Ask any one of them to make something similar to this using only sine waves and FM between them.
It's pretty amazing that he managed all this with just the 5 FM channels and no PSG or PCM
Those were used for the sound effects in game, so he had no choice but to only use those 5 FM channels.
Genesis Does!
What Nintendoes
Genesis was superior to SNES in Music. Believe that.
@@damitosodapop *press x to doubt*
Follin does what Kondon't
@Ale Mon Tim Follin and Koji Kondo, two game composers. Tim Follin made this and other amazing soundtracks
One of the best genesis ost
21:37
Isn't that a sample from the NES Pictionary game that Follin also composed?
Maikeru Nezumi
Certainly sounds like it.
It sounds like NES Pictionary Move Piece almost.
It’s just a coincidence, actually. He didn’t use any samples in the Time Trax soundtrack, all the sounds are FM synthesized
@@eX0dusmods he meant rhythm
@@SuperShadow Theres definitely reuse from older tracks in newer stuff, either unintentionally or not. Parts of High Score from Ghouls and Ghosts on the C64 sounds very similar to the Main Theme for the Amiga version of the same game he also worked on.
Im positive there's more similar stuff if you really dig through his stuff
Wait the first one was a TITLE SCREEN?!??
The fact that he only used up 5 (6 for the title and the game over jingle) FM channels alone without any additional use of samples or the PSG chip for this stellar soundtrack is amazing! Follin’s a genius!
One of the most impressive things to me is how he crams complex, four-part chords into only two channels in the Title Screen music. I don't think I've ever seen this trick used outside this collection of songs. This must have been a valuable skill when you only had 6 total channels to work with and refuse to use the PSG or PCM channels.
In my limited experience playing around with FM synthesis, I've figured out that he's probably doing this by using an op configuration with two carriers and setting the one op's frequency multiplier to 2 and the other to 3, making it output a fifth harmony.
As long as the interval between any two notes in the chord is a fifth (i.e. 1 and 5, 3 and ♯7), you can play a pair of notes on one channel and another pair on second channel and only tie up two channels instead of four.
They were playing that track at 8:40 during this past SGDQ and I didn't get a chance to look at the name of the song/game. I thought it was going to bug me for years trying to find this song, but googling "genesis soundtrack bell" took me directly here. *shrug*
Ok, also, I think what's so catchy about the bells is that at 12:08 is that the song is in 5/4 time and the bells are playing every 4th beat, so they sound urgent, but also like a sound effect playing over the music, while at 12:42 they're playing on the downbeat, every 5th beat, so they sound integrated into the music. It gives a resigned sort of feeling.
I love the names for the songs you gave
Creativity 100
Dude... Am I right in assuming there's no PSG in this? If that's true, like omfg this is amazing!
I think psg 3 is used at times
The Magic of FM synth
Dammit. I really need to do some stuff, but I just can't stop listening to this.
Ah yes, 50Hz. The cultured choice.
I would also accept 55Hz, if it existed. From what I've heard he made it work for both but his ideal speed was somewhere in the middle between 50 and 60.
From just using ear, I think if you speed it up by 1.05 speed you can get close to the equivalent of 55Hz (1.1 works but at that point I'm pretty sure it's just 60Hz)
Wonderful soundtrack. Always liked Tim Follins' tunes. Thank you for sharing.
dude thanks for this. super cool
Ah, I recently got a stock of YM2612 chips off ebay... Should make for some interesting experiments. XD
There's a lot you could find out more about. For example there is a fairly obscure feature for Channel 3 which almost nobody ever used. It grants each of the 4 operators its own independent frequency, so it is possible to create non-musical weird sound effects. It can essentially be broken up into two 2-operator channels or 4 pure sine waves for music as well. Also, there are two timers in the chip if I'm not mistaken, which were added to generate interrupts for the host CPU, but in the Genesis the Z80 CPU never used these because it only has one interrupt line which was connected to the 60Hz picture generator.
Amazing that he gets this much mileage out of just six channels
A custom sound driver can go a long way
This is very cool
I like the typical sound generated by fm synthesizer ym3812 or ym2612 i dont remember but nice video.
dawid2001 YM2612/YM3438 :)
I think 2612
It's the 2612. The YM3812 was the one used in the Ad-Lib and SoundBlaster PC sound cards :P
@@GENATARi yep, physical YM2612 or integrated YM3438 depending on which revision of Genesis/Mega Drive you have. but besides the 3438 being a bug fix of the 2612 that fixes the "ladder effect", I think the output level / impedance also changed and Sega messed up the audio circuit, so it needs a MegaAmp to actually sound good.
That's fucking GREAT! FM synthesis galore... yum :-)
18:38 still my favourite by farrrrr!
Show me a solid 5 seconds without every sound channel being used.
Go on, I'll wait.
Around 5:00
1:24
every song after song 1 uses only 5 channels
If you count the PSG channels, 00:00 to 26:23
The very first five seconds of the video, then all of the channels get used since then
Oh my god. Please upload the NTSC version of this song. I will love you until the end of time!!
destroyerofcomedy || Tim Follin said this was meant to be heard at 50hz. But every person with your preferred version.
Reminds me of Giorgio Moroders style of music
Really? That's more dance type stuff?
I guess FM music doesn't lend itself as well to this because of the constantly changing complex waveforms? But still I'll have a whale of a time "watching this soundtrack"
Is there any way I could get this separated into each individual instrument/track? Also, I don't suppose there would be a MIDI of this?
Magical !
im not sure what is going on in channel 1, but i lake it a lot
in which track...? the channels swap around...
Also, this is the best FM bell synthesis since Atari Games
That hammond patch is superb. Anyone know any other tracks that use something similar?
bro is flexin hard. nice nice
If his NES work was Dream Theater, this is TOOL.
As great as Follin is, he really didn't give a second thought to if the music suited what was on screen or not. He seemingly wasn't remotely interested in matching it, you hire him you get a selection of high quality though entirely random music
That's not true when he was making soundtrack for Ecco and Equinox IIRC though
This is like an actual EP, how did he do it, and why didn't Tim Follin start making actual music and releasing it?
Little appreciation IIRC
Most of the games he worked on were bad, so he got little attention and, well he has to eat.
very nice
Off-topic I know, but hopefully someone will know. Is there a comprehensive explanation of how the Sonic 3 soundtrack was even possible to be created using such "limited" sound chip? I mean... that must be the most impressive "chip music" I ever heard. Is there a blog post or something out there that explains what kind of "black magic" was used for its creation? Why does it sound so "superior" to anything else on the console?
it's very well done sound engineering lol, but i know the channel GST Channel does a lot of videos about different vgm musicians and they've done many videos about genesis music, so most likely they might have a video related to what you're talking about. I'd recommend for you to check them out
There is a guy who deconstructs the Sonic music. Search for Sonic 3 soundtrack deconstructed. It’s not technical as much as musical theory though.
How is he creating the noise on the bass drum?
ewreiucx high feedback noise on fm operators 1 and 2, sine on last 4 operator
Bliss.
Most Genesis games didn't sound remarkable at all. Sure, Streets of Rage 2 or something.. Follin, as usual, makes this sound chip shine.
the beginning 0:20 is clearly inspired by donna summer's "i feel love" : th-cam.com/video/yEbaeLv-aOo/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=DonnaSummerVEVO
Nice! music one would only expect from the mega drive's successor, the saturn.
eh...?
@@RWL2012 eh?
More like Timeless Tracks.
Intermission is the shit
slaps
21:58
Pictionary jumpscare
This is like prog rock Giorgio Moroder! On my Genesis!!!
Time Tax
the better is that he didn't used the 4 psg channels...
I clicked on the link for the multidumper on your other videos, and the link isn't working... Is there any other links? I would really like to use this program.
No SN channel or Sample. Missed opportunity
Nah it doesn't even need them to sound good.
The composer was also specifically tasked to use these specific channels.
In a way, it's to show just how good Genesis music can be, without even needing extra stuff.
why 13:46 sound like hip to -fuck bees- be square
how’d you get to record all the channels? i really wanna break down this OST by the layers
I used a Multidumper application. Look up SidWizPlus my Maxim Zhao, it comes with a Multidumper inbuilt, and can also print this stuff out.
Why did this game never come out again?
The company went under IIRC (was it Malibu or something?)