I grew up as a gamer. Luckily my aunt was into games too, so I got the chance to play oldschool systems from before my time such as the Atari 2600 and the NES. All of this cemented my interest in electronic music from a young age. (For what it’s worth, my ongoing fascination with drum & bass probably came by playing Rage Racer on the Sony Playstation).
Some years ago, fueled by the nostalgia of umpteen million nerds, the chiptune music genre took off and is still going strong today. For some, the only way to make this music happen is to record from the original hardware itself. For others, it’s good enough to cheat and use VSTs which recreate the sound. Today I want to share one method of writing microtonal chiptune music using a VST called One-SF2.
One-SF2 is a free soundfont player VST for Windows, and it has microtuning features baked right into it. Actually, it supports the MIDI tuning standard, so it can load all of the crazy scales I’ve been collecting in my tuning packs.
Remember the NES only had 5 sound channels. 2 are pulse/square channels, 1 is triangle, 1 is noise, and the last was used for low-quality digital sampling. You could recreate this capability by using 4 instances of One-SF2 (each using the Famicom soundfont), plus one audio channel with a bitcrusher effect. Read the technical specifications of the Famicom/NES sound chip if you want to strive for the most realistic result.
Here’s some xen chiptune drum & bass I cooked up a few years ago, in a game boy style.
Now, if only someone would make a version of Clotho from Columns tuned to a beautiful meantone, I could die a happy man…
Here’s a collection of soundfonts from various game systems.
And here’s a mother lode of soundfonts ripped from SNES games.
Plogue Chipsounds supports Scala tuning files, emulates several oldschool chips, and opens the door to microtonal chiptune on Mac OS X and Windows (32/64-bit). Costs about 95 USD (as of early 2017).
Plogue Sforzando is a free and simple soundfont player much like One-SF2, but it works with the SFZ file format instead.
Pick up a second-hand console system and do it the old fashioned way, with tracker software and a soldering iron. Some trackers support microtones natively!
One-SF2 has a big brother, XenFont. This free, 32-bit Win-only VST adds heaps of synthesis functions on top of the basic soundfont player. A plethora of options exist for creating deep sound designs, so my own work always features XenFont instead of One-SF2.
I recently purchased Plogue Chipsounds for its advertised compatibility with scala files. Unfortunately, when I load the tuning files, they don’t seem to do anything. I’ve tried a variety of things including alternative 12 tone tuning schemes, but nothing seems to work. Any idea on how to get it to work?
Hey Jason,
I might be able to figure out why for you. Could you open up one of the scala files that doesn’t work, then copy and paste its contents here?
In the meantime you can also try to take this question to the Xenharmonic Alliance II group on Facebook (if you use fb that is). It’s a very active and helpful group.