oh you are quite welcome, i've loved every piece of yours i've seen. you're very talented

well I am glad that you are now and I hope you enjoy my future works :v

I actually use a tracking program called Renoise. Trackers are old programs used back in the days of Amiga and Commodore. I don't like fruity loops, but I don't use super expensive programs either. I can attempt to explain.

In order to understand how 8 bit music works you just need to know a few things.

-- the NES tone generation system has 3 possible tones, two pulses of varying width, and one triangle wave. A "wave" signal is just a tone that is straightforward digital sound. It's generated in real time, so it's not like a sample. A pulse wave is also known as a square wave, and that's what you hear as the louder, sharp sounds in NES/Game Boy music. The NES can produce 2 at once, so you can have two playing at any given time. A triangle wave is a sharp sine wave, it just goes up /\ and down \/ in a soft pattern with peaks. So it's not as sharp as a square wave. The NES can only generate one triangle wave, so it can only play one tone at once (i.e., you can't play two triangle waves at once to create a harmony, for instance.)

-- ANY analog synthesizer will generate these waves. Fruity Loops has some built in synthesizers that generate all of these tones and more. at the end of this i'll point out a simple synthesizer which can do what you need it to.

-- The NES also had one PCM channel. It could load and play *very* low quality samples for things like drums, and other stuff that can't be properly created with just tonal sounds.

-- The NES sported one noise channel. All the 'hi hat' sounds you hear in 8 bit music, or the explosions and stuff, are all generated using the noise channel.

So at any given moment, the ONLY things an NES will be doing are:

Pulse Wave 1
Pulse Wave 2
Triangle Wave
Noise Generator
PCM Channel

Some later games gave more possibilities but just for the NES that's the breaks.

It's not really easy to explain through an SA comment, but the VSTi program Synth1 ( http://www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth/synth1v107.zip ) will do exactly what you need it to. It takes some tweaking to make it sound right, and if you like, I can walk you through it over AIM or MSN.

really now! that's neat. :v I don't even maintain that site, it's done by fans, so I can't correct that actually.

All the music on here is relatively old. I don't post much to SA anymore, it's really rather a droll place for music in honesty; but there's not many other art sites that support it so I am stuck! I hope that I can get signed by a label soon and be whisked away into the night romantically.

I'm glad that you came back to SA and posted more of your art. It will probably end up being a great inspiration to me, somehow.