WinZip Chip: A Simple Idea
I'm a long-time lover of chip music, but there was something that always bothered me about it: the percussion. Square waves, triangle waves, and everything in between can make great melodies, but traditionally the drums have been lacking in quality. I've searched hundreds of chip tunes for samples to rip, and the results are always the same. Either they use a noise sample to simulate snares and hihats, or they use a different sample for each instrument... a snare sample, a hihat sample, etc. Unfortunately this later method is very expensive in terms of filesize, so I usually use a noise sample.
I'm not rich. I don't have a sampler to hook up to my computer. Every sample I use, I rip. So when I want to use a noise sample, I rip it from another chiptune. However, I have *never* found one I liked. They were always too low quality, with buzzing in the background and whatnot.
Then one night it hit me.
The ideal white noise sample has every frequency equally represented; this means that ideally, every byte in the sample should be completely random. Well, aside from being a musician, I'm also a coder. I've worked with file compression before. And I knew that when a file gets compressed by a general algorithm, the compressed file has a huge degree of randomness... this is one of the side effects of any good compression routine. So the answer suddenly became clear to me: load up a .zip file into one of my samples in Impulse Tracker!
It worked beautifully. I replaced an existing noise channel in a song with a zip file that I had lying around on my hard drive, and listened to the results. The snares sounded MUCH better and the hihats were cleaner. I did some experimenting with different zip files of different sizes, and I found that it didn't matter what was in the zip file or how big the file was... it all sounded great. (I even used the Hugi 25 zip file.) Sometimes at the very end of the file (the last 1000 bytes or so out of 20,000), there might be a high-pitched noise, but that was easily cut out of the sample.
I also played around with different file formats. As a general rule, the more random the bytes in a file are, the less compressable it is, so I tried loading up file types which I knew to be not very compressable. I tried a couple mp3s, and they weren't bad, but they had some nasty sounding parts occasionally. Picture files didn't work very well at all, and neither did executables. By far the best file format to produce white noise was .zip, which makes sense, because zip file are about 0% compressable.
Anyway, I hope that all the chip trackers out there will read this and get some better sounding percussion into their songs. On a related note, sine wave samples make good kick drums if you use a pitch-lowering effect on them (Exx in Impulse Tracker). I love tiny filesizes. *grin*