Magical 8 Bit

How I learned to love making music

Very quickly before we begin — I am never going to charge for my Substack, but I am really enjoying writing on here, and I feel like if I can get a couple hundred subscribers, I might be able to start doing it more regularly (also I am not employed full-time at the moment so every little bit helps). If you feel like contributing, I would really appreciate it. If not, I still appreciate you reading. Thanks.

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First, a little housekeeping. Last week, I wrote about my anxieties regarding the state of the podcasting industry. And then on Monday, Spotify laid off 200 people, and shuttered Parcast and Gimlet. Dozens of people I worked with at Gimlet were affected by this layoff, including former Reply All employees. Part of my severance from Spotify was signing a non-disparagement agreement, so please believe I have a lot of feelings I can’t legally express about this, but one that I am willing to express is that this was not an inevitability, and it wasn’t the fault of the people doing the work. Many people who are, in my opinion, the best audio producers to ever do the job are unemployed as of Monday. And it didn’t have to happen. My heart goes out to all of them, and I really hope they (and I) land someplace that can grow deliberately and foster projects that highlight their talents. In the meantime, if you want to pay for this Substack, it’s kinda my only job right now. Alright, on with the show.

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Everything I know about music I learned from the Nintendo Entertainment System.

That’s kind of a lie. I took two years of guitar lessons from 1991-1993. But I think passively consuming music for hours a week on a loop might have had a more profound effect on my musical brain than music lessons. Nintendo music is borne from limitation (the sound chip only allowed a couple notes to be played simultaneously), but the deceptive simplicity of the music, and the literal simplicity of the sounds themselves made it easy for me to deconstruct the songs I was hearing into constituent parts, and while I may not be able to describe the musical principles being applied to the music, I know how to describe what sounded cool.

So let’s talk a bit about the limitations of the Nintendo, and what made it great. The Nintendo shipped with a sound chip called the Ricoh 2A03. It had 5 channels.

• 2 Square Waves

• 1 Triangle Wave

• 1 Noise Channel

• 1 Sample channel

The sample channel sounded like fried dogshit and people barely used it. It was like 1985, and the sample quality was a fraction of what you would get with, say, a CD. So that left composers with only four channels to compose with.

Now if you don’t know what a “square wave” or a triangle” wave is, think about what you know about sound. Sound travels in waves. The shape of those waves affect the timbre of the sound, and people making electronic music realized they could generate waves with different shapes to make different sounds. Also, waves with simple geometry like a square or a triangle are easy for electronic equipment to generate. So a triangle wave is a soundwave that literally looks like a triangle on an oscilloscope, and a square wave can look like a square or a rectangle.

Triangle and Square Waves on an Oscilloscope

Square waves are very crisp and bright generally made up the melodies to songs in NES games. This tune is a perfect example of 2 square waves working to create a rich an complex harmony.

The next channel is the triangle wave. Triangle waves have a much softer, more resonant sound. On the NES, they were generally used for basslines. Here’s the Super Mario Bros 2 overworld theme with the melody (the square waves) removed.

For comparison, here’s what it sounds like with square waves included.

The last channel is the noise channel. Which is literally what it sounds like. It’s a channel of white noise. If you aren’t a synthesizer nerd or a musician, that might sound totally useless. But if you play some high pitched white noise very quickly, it can be a hi-hat or a snare drum. Take this song from the first stage of Bionic Commando. All those snare drum rolls are just well deployed noise. You can again, hear the two square waves, making the melody, and the triangle wave as a kind of syncopated bass deep in the background.

That’s it! That’s all they had! And you have to keep in mind that EVERY sound on the Nintendo was made on those four channels. Not just the music. Any time the Mario jump sound effect is triggered, it’s stealing a square wave from the music that’s already playing. The block breaking sound effect was made with the noise channel, so it robbed the music of its percussion. And while you can make snare drums and hi hats with the noise channel, to make a really punchy kick drum or toms, you need to use the Triangle or Square wave. Making a triangle wave ratchet down in pitch VERY fast is a good kick drum sound. In short, it’s a miracle that they could use such limited space to make things that sounded like this:

So why am I writing about this? Well, for two a couple reasons. One is that I love this music. To the point where I am a subscriber to The Legacy Music Hour, comedian Brent Weinbach’s podcast about 8 and 16-bit video game music. I find the inventiveness of these compositions, as well as just the quality of the music itself to be really wonderful, and the degree to which these composers could make so much out of so little to be incredibly inspiring.

But I also think that it’s instructive. Separating the two part square wave harmonies, the triangle wave basslines and the percussive noise is a great way to learn about music. I still use all of these sounds in music I make today. In fact, while most of the time I’m just using the synths I have kicking around my office, I actually use a free program called Magical 8bit, which emulates the sounds of the Ricoh 2A03. I made this 30 second song using Magical 8bit, and while I definitely used more than four channels, but I tried to keep the spirit of NES melodies. I think I did ok.

If you have even a passing interest in music, I’d strongly recommend downloading it and trying it out. There are some handy tutorials on how to use it on YouTube. And if you need inspiration, here’s a 45 minute YouTube video of some fantastic NES music. And if you have any questions, just reach out and I’ll do what I can to answer them.I will leave you one of my favorite NES compositions, the escape theme from Metroid. If you want to talk about music in the chat, I’d be happy to talk there as well. Happy composing!

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I have been playing Tears of the Kingdom nonstop for the past month, so since I don’t have anything new to recommend, I’ll recommend something old: Bionic Commando for the NES, or as it was known in Japan, Hitler no Fukkatsu. You play a cyborg with a robotic grappling arm that has to stop the Nazis from resurrecting Hitler. You think I’m joking?

When they localized it for the US, they changed his named to “Master D” and the Nazis to “The Badds,” but you still get to (very graphically) blow Hitler up. And independent of that, the grappling arm mechanic is one of the most kinesthetically pleasing in the history of video games. You can play it for free here.

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I have been listening to a lot of catalog music from the 60’s and 70’s lately - catalog music was music that was created essentially in bulk so that television shows and movies could use it for scoring. There was a British guy named Alan Hawkshaw who made some incredible catalog jams, but it has affected this week’s jambox in that most of what has ended up on here (aside from the first two tracks) is very instrumental and incredibly 60’s and 70’s coded. Enjoy.