Torture Your YM
Make it squeal like a pig with fake resonant effects
I'm just returning from the nice Paracon party, very well organised by the guys
from Paranoia. Anyway, my flight is a little delayed, so I am stealing a few
minutes to write this article.
The YM2149 soundchip was a big sucking feature of the Atari ST series when it
was first released. Now, ironically, it is providing the scene with the fuel for
interesting technical innovation, as well as many talented musicians. As long as
the YM sound chip exists I think people will be inventing new effects using it,
and perhaps YM2149 has the record for the most punished sound device ever!
This we all know, so lets get down to business - when I released some
demonstration sounds from maxYMiser on 505's great Atari Tracking website I was
surprised that people thought the acid sound effect was a completely new YM
effect. In fact I heard it even in old Mad Max tunes, and of course the famous
'My First Resonant Burp' by Jess/OVR. I was asked many questions about how this
is possible, and had all kinds of speculations: for example a crazy sync-buzzer
technique. Actually this effect is a pure YM effect using no timer at all, so it
should even be possible on platforms like Oric or ZX Spectrum.
In case you have not heard the sound demo I am talking about, I am refering to a
simple four bar loop with a single channel YM effect sounding like an overdriven
acid synthesiser (you can listen in the included example - YM303.SND). Of course
YM has no filter, so this is not the answer - actually the sound is a ring
modulation effect caused by the interaction between the buzzer and a square wave
being played out of tune on the same channel. If you want to try, you can
already experiment with these effects in the MusicMon2 and XLR8 chip editors
from Aura and Sentry. Its even possible in SID Sound Designer, but it needs more
work to get something useful.
So if this is an old effect, whats the big deal? In the past the effect has been
hard to set up and control in a musical way. I experimented with some techniques
and ideas and quickly found a way to use the effect painlessly and with a large
degree of control.
To generate the acid sound in the demo sequence you take a buzzer sound playing
at the frequency of the desired note. Then combine this with a square wave,
changing in frequency each VBL, starting between something like 32 and 48
semitones above the buzzer note, and decreasing by a set number of semitones
each time. The important thing is that this way the square and the buzzer are
fixed harmonicly relative to each other, so that the sound has the same
characteristics no matter what what note is played.
So now you have a nice acid tone, of course the next step is to increase the
'cutoff' of the effect, to make the sound really squeal! Again this is quite
easy if you think harmonically. The buzzer tone is kept at the same frequency,
but the downward sweeping squarewave can transposed up or down by a certain
number of semitones to vary the effect.
Very nice, but what is an acid effect without a portamento? This was the hardest
part of the effect for me to work out, but even then it wasn't that tricky.
Portamentos work by smoothly increasing or decreasing the YM's frequency
registers, which modfies the period of the wave linearly. Unfortunately the
human ear and the musical scale work logarithmicaly. This means that applying a
fixed portamento to all notes in the squarewave sweep will completely screw-up
the harmonic relationship, except in very small sweeps. To fix this I used a
logarithmic lookup table to modify each of the frequencies in the sweep in
relation to their musical note. To do this flexibly I needed to use a divide
operation, which I think is no big deal in a music driver (just one use per
VBL), but if you are really against this you could use a larger lookup table, or
use a more restrictive technique not allowing portamentos.
Its easy to use a timer generated waveforms instead of the buzzer, at expense of
CPU, but with the advantage of volume control and a free buzzer for another
sound. For an example of this listen to my competition entry for the DHS 10 year
anniversary.
I was pretty happy with my further developments of this technique, but seen in
perspective its just another sound in the YM chip composers already massive
selection.
gwEm/Gareth Morris, Nov 2004
|
