Hello to the community!
I'm working on some projects nowadays. But It also please me to have a spare time for recording other kind of things or to rethink material into new one.
That's the case of the soundtrack pack that I bring to itch.io.
It's recorded taking care of what classic sound is about but with some modern approach.
First of all, it isn't recorder on a usual tracker. I use trackers at this moment only for projects that involves retro machines and have to export the sequences into assembly code or particular file type archives required by the hardware.
The software that I've used for the tracks is Cubase 10 Pro. Very happy with it. Lots of MIDI capabilities and the option to sculpt the sound a little bit before mastering.
Inside Cubase I use mainly plugs by KORG, PlogueAudio (Chipsounds) that faithfully recreates the sound of a lot of chip sounds (from Arcade to home classic consoles or retrocomputers, huge palette of sounds) and the absolutelly brilliant RYM2612 which let's you even extract the instruments of the original tracks of the Genesis/Megadrive tracks and make use of them with very little effort.
I use some digital artifacts to increase the strengh of the sonic quality and experiment a little bit. Not too much in most cases to preserve that original, crunchy and gritty sound, nothing but give more impact to the final result and detail the sound sculpting it a little more, or driven it up in other cases.
Once the tracks are done and rendered and I'm sure that loops seamlessly I make a last step mastering them to get an homogeneus and prepare it to use inside a game with the certainty that there's no gaps between tracks (it's a step further from simply normalizing and balancing the volume of the tracks).
My best ally for this task is Wabelab Elements 10, which have all the needed tools and even more to improve the sound and polish it into more musical results.
Now, let's talk about the style and intention of the soundtrack.
My first goal is to deliver tracks with different mod that can be used easy on a Game Jam or project. I'm in the search of a variety of moods, melodys that fits in diferent thematical games or genres (platforms, action side-scrolling, RPG, Casual games, Cutscences, and so on...)
Also, I've paid attention to make a non exclusive use of one chip or kind of sound. So the sonic palette is wider. In some tracks I combine the chip stems tracks with more modern sound libraries resulting on several tracks that I can define as 8 & 16 bits on steroids. More powerful and suitable for current projects.
I have another thing in mind. Not to think of the soundtrack as something finished. I refer I want to expand it. At this moment there are 14 tracks. I want the number of tracks to grow to fill more developer needs.
So I invite you all to make suggestions on the comments about new tracks to record and include in the pack with the next free updates.