Welcome to the world of chiptune music creation with Famitracker! Whether you're a seasoned musician looking to explore the unique sounds of 8-bit music playing back on a real NES, or a beginner eager to craft your first melody, Famitracker is an incredibly powerful tool for truly authentic 8-bit music creation.
This is a guide to walk you through the process of my own approach to creating a song from scratch in Famitracker, and assumes you have remedial knowledge of the program. It is also a process that could somewhat be applied to any DAW or music making program. If you’re looking for beginner or advanced tutorials, I have those in a number of places elsewhere and more on the way. Let’s check this one out:
Step 1: Create Your Instruments
The first step when you open up the program and are greeted with something that looks like a spreadsheet, is to create some instruments that will form the backbone of your compositions. These are not limited to, but often include:
Kick drum
Snare drum (both triangle and noise layers)
HiHat/Percussion
Tom toms (use the triangle channel if you want the "MegaMan" sound)
Bass
Lead
Harmony
Arpeggio
Start by creating these instruments one at a time. Once you've got some stuff to work with, you can save individual instrument patches to a folder on your computer, but I'd also advise saving the Fami file as your starting template to open (and save-as) any time you start a new song. This way you'll have some instruments already ready to go and can start composing immediately. You can of course always refine your instruments and your starting template with each new song you create, building a personalized library of sounds that cater to your style.
Step 2: Choose Your Starting Point
With your instruments ready, it's time to start putting some notes down. As songs are generally just a combination of drums, melody, harmony, and/or chord progression, pick one of those and go, the rest usually follows. Approach songwriting in a way that best suits your creative process… if you have an idea for a bassline, slap it in. If you want to explore a melody idea, go for it. Whichever you start with will usually inform the other parts.
Step 3: Frame Management, Size, and Row Highlight
A unique aspect of composing in Famitracker vs a traditional DAW is dealing with frame management, and the size of the frame to determine the overall tempo of your track. Fami works in “ticks,” each line in the pattern editor being 1 tick. To determine the tempo, you’ll have to figure out how the ticks are going to be subdivided.
Personally I like to leave lots of space for fills and effects, so for 4/4 time my measures are usually divided into 8 or 16 ticks. Adjust the row highlight and the number of ticks per frame to figure out how long you want each frame to be, or how many measures.
Protip: during this phase, I usually put a kick drum on the downbeat of every quarter note, so I can adjust tempo, row highlight, and frame size while it’s playing to get a feel for the speed and tick resolution I’m after.
When it comes to the frames themselves, each number is unique to each channel. Repeating frame numbers at some point in the song might be useful, but can easily become confusing, so my advice is to assign a unique digit to each line of the frame editor.
With this method, you can easily copy-paste an entire line to new frames if you want to repeat a section, rather than just repeating the frame itself. Doing it this way allows you to make small (or major) changes to each section without affecting the other parts of your composition, encouraging a more dynamic and evolving piece of music.
Step 4: Composition Techniques
While there are many approaches to composition, one particularly effective method is subtractive composition. This technique involves starting with what I sometimes call a "fat sausage," which is a super dense 8 or 16-bar loop full of all the layers, harmony, and busy percussion you can dream up.
With the fat sausage made, you can gradually taper off pieces of it to create the different sections for the arrangement of the song. Your arrangement might include an intro, verse, chorus, hook, and outro (or no outro and it just loops forever, it's up to you) with subtle variations introduced in each repeating section to keep the listener engaged (see step 3).
Step 5: Add Ear Candy
To truly elevate your tracks, incorporate "ear candy" into your compositions at the post-arrangement stage. These are elements like fills, breaks, mutes, and sound effects that are sprinkled throughout the rhythm and melody, adding texture and interest to your music, elevating transitions and giving each section its own atmosphere.
Frame management is critical at the beginning, and why I prefer to copy-paste rather than reuse older frames, because when you get to this phase:
You don't want to think you're removing the drums at the beginning of the 2nd verse only to realize you just removed the drums from the beginning of all the verses.
You want to have space to add fills or effects
I've made these mistakes before and it's annoying
You dig?
Wrapping Up
Famitracker opens up a world of possibilities for creating true-to-form 8-bit music, and if it's Nintendo-sounding music you're after, there's no better software in my opinion than something that can play your song on the real thing. At first the program can be daunting to look at but once you wrap your head around the different parts of it and realize how straightforward it actually is, you'll be well on your way to crafting Real Authentic Chiptune™ with ease by following these steps. Then you can export your .nsfs and burn them onto a cartridge, but that's a tutorial for a different time.
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