Status update and another CTM video (Patreon)

Nope.

Well, even though the FX have improved, it's not perfect yet. Turns out this kind of thing takes quite a bit of fine tuning. I forgot to change the version number too? Drat. Oh well, whatever! =]

The video definitely shows off some cool stuff CTM can do, though; if you watched the last video you got a look at what I've called "quickmap" where I can quickly assign a tracker instrument to a specific number when being sent to a board. This will soon be made more flexible to, for example, change instrument number when sent to a new/different board. 

Why am I babbling about this? Back in the day, a fair number of MODs used one of two common ways to do modulation on an instrument, and I want to take a look at them: 

Option one is to store a single "pad" -- a big loop of the instrument going from one extreme to the other -- in a single MOD instrument and then use the "sample offset" feature of the MOD tracker to jump to specific points in the sample. Since CTM won't be replaying samples, I've re-appropriated the sample offset as a pulsewidth modulation like you heard in the AHX video. I have plans to extend it in the future, since that's not the only popular use of the command. Oh, and since nobody guessed in the comments, that's one of the features that seems to be working best. Ha!

Option two -- and might I add, the more relevant one to this video -- was to have a bunch of short, one-shot, looped, similarly tuned instruments and just change the instrument being played. So, say, have instruments 1-7 and pick whichever one suits the modulation amount desired. This is the method that's most useful with my quickmap; I can map any of the modulation instruments to increasingly powerful or thick sounding instruments and get a not-bad approximation of the way the MOD sounds.

Soon (!) I plan to do some weird stuff to attempt to automagically come up with waveforms, but I think my next goals with the tracker are going to be:

• Ignore the tracker and complete some paying work
• Implement "envelopes" (in quotes because...uh, I'll explain later)
• Fix the FX handler

Speaking of paying work, I've got some! I'm working on some tracks for this incoming crazy top-down sportsball type thing. It has a wacky-hijinks rule-rewriting dynamic where the players can do it ingame or they can even let folks watching on twitch mess with the rules for them. 

And lastly, I'm featured in another game that will be out (we hope) by around easter... A hint: I transcribed a bunch of audio from PC to SN76489.

Lastly, hey! Are you going to be at PAX East? Because if you are, I'm playing a set in the Jamspace room on Friday around 6. I would love to see you there. I hope to have some new tunes ready for everyone's ear-holes, and I'll probably have the synthesizer with me if you wanna check it out.

That concludes this mess of an update, talk to you all soon!