Combatdave’s technoblog

So, you want to make an awesome chip cover of your favourite song, but you suck at picking out notes by ear, oh no! Luckily theres a few ways to “cheat”, such as by working from guitar tab or midi file.

That being said, just running the midi file through your vst of choice will likely sound like crap, as will copying straight from the guitar tab. That’s why I’ve decided to write this:

A beginners guide to cheating (pt 1)

Intro

In this part, I will be showing some nice tricks on how to go from guitar tab to chiptune – and hopefully make it sound decent. Firstly, you need to know what you’re working with and the differences between guitar/bass, and LSDJ:

Guitar:

Just one instrument in a band
6 strings = 6 notes at once
Effects such as distortion, reverb, etc
Goes all the way up to 11

LSDJ:

Has to play ALL the notes of the song
4 channels = 3 notes at once (and noise)
Goes all the way up to FF (which is EE more than a guitar)

Bass tab or guitar tab?

That all depends. Sometimes it will be guitar, sometimes bass, sometimes both. You need to listen to the song and figure out what makes it sound the way it does.

Chords:

Chords are two or more notes played at the same time, easy. From guitar tab, you know something is a chord when the notes are stacked on top of each other. The most important thing about the chord is the notes in it, and the order in which they are. For example, an E minor chord:

|-0-
|-0-
|-0-
|-2-
|-2-
|-0-

Firstly, the root note of the chord. This is the lowest note – both the lowest sounding, and the lowest on the screen. In this case, it is an E. Next, we need to get the other notes. Second fret on the A string gives us a B, second on D gives us another E, then there are the G, B, and E strings open. Collect them up, and this chord has three separate notes in it – E, B, and G. An E major chord, on the other hand, contains an E, B, and G#.

The next stage is to calculate the number of steps between each note and the root note. Basically, you get your old crappy keyboard out, and you put your finger on the root note of your chord. Then, you move up to the next note, and count how many steps this is. You can try to count with your fingers or on paper, but I’d recommend doing it in your head. Do this for each note in the chord.

For an E minor, this should give you 0, 7, 3. For an E major, this should give you 0, 7, 4. Funnily enough, this is the difference in steps for any minor and major chord. Weird.

Putting this into LSDJ

Two ways. C command or a table containing an awesome arp. C command is for chords with two individual notes, eg Smoke On The Water intro. Arps can sound more badass and can have more than one note.

C Command

The chords in the smoke in the water intro have 5 steps between the lower note and the higher note. Place the lower note in your phrase, and give it the command C-05 (ie, a chord with 5 steps between the lower note and the upper note). Easy!

D-4  C05
-
F-4  C05
-
G-4  C05
-

Arps in tables

Minor chord. Steps are 0, 3, 7. Table transpose column:

0 -
3 -
7 -
0 H00

Of course, there’s no reason why you cant do:

0 -
7 -
3 -
0 H00

But, the most important thing is that the first step has 0 transpose – this is the root note and it has to come first!

To make a fuller arp, try going up and then back down, or up more than one octave, or both, or neither, or something totally different!

Then, where you need to place your minor chord in your phrase, you place the root note along with the A command and the number of your table:

E-4 A01
-
-

Minor chord arp, hooray!

Thats all for now, more later… I promise!

Music Chiptune, Music, tutorial