Cheese For Your Quest

I’m going to start at the end: Here! It’s a free album of chiptunes!

Right-click to download kasatochi1.zip (179.17mb)

Now let’s rewind to the beginning.

A few days ago a friend of mine on Facebook posted a link to a really rather impressive NES-style cover of Yes’ “Roundabout”. It was truly impressive.

Then I did some digging and figured out that, really, anybody can do this. Only a select few can do it well, but if you’re wondering about the proliferation of “8-bit cover song” channels on the ‘tube, here’s how it works.

There’s an old program called GXSCC. You start it up. You select, in the broadest terms, an NES sound palette or a Sega Genesis sound palette. You can tweak things from there, a few parameters. Then you drag-and-drop a MIDI file over to it. And you’re done.

No, really. You’re done. That’s it. Whatever instrument/voice specs are in the MIDI file, GXSCC ignores them and assigns sounds appropriate to the “voices” of the sound chip being imitated instead. Then it generates a .WAV file; I pull that into Nero WavEdit, drop a few effects on it to punch things up a bit, and save it as a nicely tagged MP3 file.

EDIT: Here’s the track listing for this collection:

01 – Break My Stride
02 – The Logical Song
03 – Night Fever
04 – Video Killed The Radio Star
05 – Hey Nineteen
06 – Fly Like An Eagle
07 – Wonderful Land
08 – Too Much Time On My Hands
09 – Stop! Stop! Stop!
10 – Superstition
11 – We Don’t Talk Anymore
12 – Last Train To London
13 – Drivers Seat
14 – Turning Japanese
15 – With Your Love
16 – She’s Not There
17 – Popcorn
18 – Urgent
19 – A View To A Kill
20 – Could It Be I’m Falling In Love
21 – Walk Away Renee
22 – Off The Wall

(If you see a song title and ask yourself, “Wait, isn’t that that song by…??”, the answer is, “Yes, it is, but now it sounds like it’s played on a Nintendo Entertainment System.”)

And I’m done. The album you can download up there? 22 songs? I started on that six hours ago.

I used to have a Nokia phone that handled MIDI files gracefully as ringtones – far better than it could handle MP3s – so I had a heap of songs in MIDI form laying around (considering how long ago I had to replace the phone, 3 or 4 cell phones ago, it’s amazing I hadn’t deleted it all). I selected the ones that survived the transition to “video game music” the best; some of the ones I thought would be perfect weren’t, and some of the damnedest stuff turned out kind of awesome – who knew that The Hollies could’ve made really cool game music?

Most everything covered is from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. There’s Motown, there’s new wave, there’s British Invasion, there’s disco – it’s all good cheesy music for your questing pleasure. (Or making out with that princess in the other castle.) It all works surprisingly well as chiptunes.

I don’t pretend to be up there with anyone like 8 Bit Weapon – not by a long shot. (They write/code their own material, which leaves me goggling in admiration.) But “Kasatochi” over here, on the other hand? Not even on the same planet with that league. This is a drag-and-drop process, so at best I’m an operator and tweaker-of-parameters rather than a musician here; I didn’t even write the MIDI files. I lay no real claim to any of it. (Someone else probably will, and they’ll probably post it on Youtube. 😆 )

It was fun to mess with, so I’m sharing the results. It’s Monday, you could use a free tune or two. Level up.