pretty eight machine - chiptune tribute album by Inverse Phase

[Shnoorum]

My god the album is brilliant. I wasn't too sold on the concept when I heard about it but I've been listening to some of the tracks on the site and it's fantastic. Never knew I had such a boner for chiptunes untill now. When I get paid, I really have to pick a copy up. Preferably a cd copy but I live in the UK so I'm assuming shipping may be a bitch. CD or otherwise however, I'm gonna totally buy the hell out of it. InversePhase, I salute you, ya talented sunnabitch!

[InversePhase]

Thanks for the kind words! International shipping is currently 8 USD so the minimum you'll be able to get a physical copy for is $18. If that's worth it to you, go for it, otherwise I won't be upset if you get the digital!

[Shnoorum]

Ah thats not nearly as bad as I was expecting. I've been hit pretty bad by international shipping in the past so I always assume it's gonna be upward of £10. Awesome sauce, you got yourself a sale (when I get paid)

[InversePhase]

Ah thats not nearly as bad as I was expecting. I've been hit pretty bad by international shipping in the past so I always assume it's gonna be upward of £10. Awesome sauce, you got yourself a sale (when I get paid)

Yeah... crazy things have happened with postal rates here lately. In the US we have a flat-rate "regular post" shipping option here called Priority Mail, which is really a great option for sending anything within the country. You can put anything in a priority mail box up to 31.8kg and ship it for whatever price is attached to the box; the small boxes start at 5-6usd so even though you're unlikely to be able to get that much in a small box, you can see the price of shipping is very competitive.

So, we have another similar option called Priority Mail International, which used to be around $14 for the smaller boxes, same box sizes, etc but recently that rate shot up to $30 or $35 in one price jump. It's insane. I'm pretty sure that's where your shipping woes are coming from. With my CD distributor, I have two Air Mail options (although I'm sure Priority Mail International is also shipped by air...hmph). I haven't had any complaints yet, so I try to use the cheapest one to keep costs down.

Hope this helps!

[InversePhase]

Hey everyone, here's some automatically-generated previews of the physical product. They're mostly accurate, although I know for a fact that these guys do not actually slice the image around the hub of the disc, so that image will be continuous without breaks towards the center of the disc.



If you want to see a sample disc image (of a real disc scan) from these guys, try this one. You'll see the lack of break around the hub.

I've ordered my sample copy. Assuming they're good, I'll begin shipping worldwide. If you don't care to wait and you already ordered a CD, contact me on this form and tell me you don't care if there are errors. I just don't want to have to deal with the hassle of returns, but I triple-checked the master before uploading it and I've actually never gotten a bad disc from these guys.

[ManBurning]

This is really well done! Amazing work. I really like the artwork as well. My faviourte track was SIN, thought that one was really awesome. Overall the whole package was great though.

Really appreciate the effort that went into making this project. Chiptunes have the tendency to get annoying after a lengthy period of listening, However I did not feel that was the case with this at all. Probably because the songs were recognizable enough to something I really enjoy (NIN) that it was a pleasure to listen too.

I wouldn't mind a physical copy, I Live in Canada, so i'm guessing the $8 international shipping would apply? It's not a huge priority at the moment, but it's something i'm going to consider if I have some spare ca$h.

[shagg_187]

Umm... yeah. This is fucking amazing! Commodore 64's beats are so recognizable and amazing. I can definitely tell what sound configuration is used where. Great work!!

[jmtd]

Did you get any interesting insights into the construction of PHM whilst studying it for P8M? Sounds you hadn't heard properly before, or structures that you hadn't considered but - when analysed - caught your attention for some reason?

[InversePhase]

I Live in Canada, so i'm guessing the $8 international shipping would apply? It's not a huge priority at the moment, but it's something i'm going to consider if I have some spare ca$h.

Canada shipping is 6 USD.

Did you get any interesting insights into the construction of PHM whilst studying it for P8M? Sounds you hadn't heard properly before, or structures that you hadn't considered but - when analysed - caught your attention for some reason?

That's a really good question. Overall I think I had a few "oh shit, I didn't notice that" moments...let's see... this is half answering your question and half post-mortem.... hope you don't mind:

1. Head Like A Hole, not really... I'm pretty familiar with this track.... picking apart the filter guitar and coming up with a suitable arrangement of it was kind of a challenge.
2. Terrible Lie. Leviathant pointed out that my synth notes in the chorus weren't quite right before release and I fixed those. I always heard them differently.
3. Down In It. I think I'm more intimately familiar with the inflections of the spoken parts than I ever wanted to be. Oh well.
4. Sanctified, so many nuances in this one that had to be very closely analysed. But in this case it's less about the structures and notes and more about the specific sounds themselves since the sound configuration on this one enabled me to more closely imitate waveforms.
5. I definitely didn't realise how closely the industrial percussive things in Something I Can Never Have sounded like Sega Master System whitenoise until I actually wrote the song. I'm surprised how other cover artists could get the piano notes wrong in this one...?
6. Kinda I Want To took a bunch of retries on certain parts. Lots of nuances in this one too. I didn't realise the three guitar blasts at the very end of this went on for so many patterns before I paid attention to it. I originally thought the little quick beeps (around 2:50) were slightly different notes (I think one note was off in my original version). I originally didn't realise Trent hit different notes in "To" when he's repeatedly singing "I... Want....To...!" at the end (hope people didn't mind the interpretation there). Although I always noticed it, the synth slowly getting more and more dirty was a big challenge.
7. I didn't realise how complicated the farty trumpet/whistle/whatever thing was in this and that it changed with each iteration. I started over on this track over a dozen times probably. I didn't realise how FUCKING LOUD the guitar blasts were, my original had more "faithful" levels (that is, volume of guitar blasts compared to rest of song) but they were kind of painful at those levels so I equalized them out. Someone on reddit mentioned that arps make them think of "song rainbows" so I gimped this image together in a flash for them:
8. That's What I Get. This song just came together beautifully. I never really studied the sort of weird glassy (?) percussive sounds and the tones they made very well. And, embarassingly, I think I left a few of them out. Also, until I wrote the track, I never realised how many notes with one instrument lined up with another. This was a saving grace towards the end of the song where I could make, say, the voice a part of another instrument because they shared notes.
9. The Only Time. Man. That 80's synth chord thing is so much more prevalent in the version on Purest Feeling. I think I also screwed up and some of the drums aren't exactly perfect. The white noise on the Game Boy is better than the NES, but it's got an interesting timbre I'm not used to working with as much. I threw in the towel on stereo on this one, I didn't feel like it was worth it to have one stereo track and nine mono ones, even though GB is capable of stereo.
10. I guess I didn't notice how much is going on in the end of this track at first. Then when I went over everything, even though with the OPLL I had more channels than usual, I still had a lot to pack in. More than I thought I'd have to deal with. I did notice a good (well, "good") way to imitate the "short in the guitar cable" effect though...!

OVERALL (or at least applying to multiple tracks) there are two things that I really noticed once I started working on P8M.

1. Chords. Like if I just take one specific part of the song and just play the notes on one line, you get something that I like to think is a signature sound of Trent. I knew about and noticed these before, but working on a song that aims to emulate every part of it brings a new appreciation to what's going on. This might be a "duh" item, I'm just saying I feel like I level-upped here, and also it gave me ideas for original music.

2. Do some of the PHM songs last forever, or what? This is probably again more apparent to me because I was doing covers, but when you get to the end of the song, it just....KEEPS GOING! And you're like "fuck, what changed? what do I have to do to keep the song interesting? what did Trent do to keep the song interesting? I don't fucking know!" and you go and sort of reconsider everything you did for awhile.

Hope this entertains and answers you some!

[screwdriver]

1. Chords. Like if I just take one specific part of the song and just play the notes on one line, you get something that I like to think is a signature sound of Trent. I knew about and noticed these before, but working on a song that aims to emulate every part of it brings a new appreciation to what's going on. This might be a "duh" item, I'm just saying I feel like I level-upped here, and also it gave me ideas for original music.

could you expand on that? I'm not sure I follow. Either way, thank you so much for your amazing answer and the amazing work you put together!

[jmtd]

That was a really great answer. Thanks!

[InversePhase]

could you expand on that? I'm not sure I follow. Either way, thank you so much for your amazing answer and the amazing work you put together!

Sure. Let's use this image. Even though I don't really work in Milky much -- and this isn't my screenshot or song or anything -- but it is an environment that looks similar to what I wrote P8M in, and it'll suit us just fine for explanation purposes.



The light-blue background box is the cursor. You move it around with the arrow keys to enter notes, instrument/volume/effect data, and so on. The columns are individual sounds that can be played at the same time, and the rows denote time (so, there's no rests or anything and you space your notes out to get them to play for longer periods of time, etc). In this case, playing a note in any given channel will interrupt the previous sound. So, even with modern software you can recreate the behavior of old sound chips as long as you do it right.

Anyhow, in the tracker I'm using, I can tap a "preview" key so that everything on the current row sounds off at once. It doesn't play the song, or even a few bars worth or anything like that, JUST the line I'm on. So, I can move up and down throughout the song and just tap the preview key to make sure certain notes are accurate or check how certain waveforms sound together. I don't use it incredibly often, but it's handy from time to time.

In this example, tapping "preview" would play an A in the second octave with instrument 1 and an F# in the fifth octave with instrument 2 at half volume so I could hear what they sound like together. And if I didn't like the way something sounded, I could just edit the line and tap preview again to hear the difference. Or, I could go back and forth between the two. The notes don't fade out or get cut off or anything, so it's still very useful in that regard.

So, what I'm saying is, very simply, now that I have all of these NIN chiptunes written by hand, I can walk around the songs at any pace, forwards, backwards, whatever, and just tap preview at any specific point in the song and hear those notes, played on their own, all drawn out. Which gives me some cool ideas for new songs and chord progressions that I never had before.

Hopefully this makes a little more sense!

[InversePhase]

And while I'm here, this is the "actual" disc preview image without the breaks in the hub for anyone to see:



I've shipped out every last CD except for one Ukraine order, my fulfillment house doesn't ship there for whatever reason so I am sending it out by hand.

[SM Rollinger]

I just heard this for the first time and i love it. Genuis, pure genuis! The chiptune format is perfect for an album like this, i totally agree with you on Ringfinger reminicing one of the tunes from Wolfenstein 3d and other old school DOS games. Man this brings me back, back before computers came with soundcards!! Can i still buy a physical copy from your site?

[steelnails95]

Wow, I really love this, sounds Amazing! Hope you can figure out the white shirts...

[fettdog]

Just heard this, and just bought it! (Along with the Retrocovered album as well.)

Really good stuff here :-)

[DigitalChaos]

Yes, getting some shirts of the album art would be awesome.

[Conan The Barbarian]

I am really digging the Atarible Lie cover. Its fucking jammin.

[InversePhase]

Hey guys, there will definitely be shirts, and they'll be for public sale. Most of them will be black, I'm not sure how the white ones will come out (I find out tuesday, fingers crossed). If they're good, I might print more, right now I just printed some quickies for friends because realistically the black ones won't be ready for a month or two.

Mr. SM Rollinger Esquire, you can totally still purchase a copy on the site, and everyone, thanks for the compliments. =]

[DigitalChaos]

someone on remix.nin.com is trying to pass off your stuff as his: http://remix.nin.com/play/mix?id=26153 and http://remix.nin.com/play/mix?id=25487


http://remix.nin.com/member/glitchy_flame

One of them was posted back in January. Perhaps one of the kickstarter donors?

[InversePhase]

someone on remix.nin.com is trying to pass off your stuff as his: http://remix.nin.com/play/mix?id=26153 and http://remix.nin.com/play/mix?id=25487


http://remix.nin.com/member/glitchy_flame

One of them was posted back in January. Perhaps one of the kickstarter donors?

Groan. I don't mind the whole putting music up on youtube thing or whatever as long as they link back, but this is one thing I don't stand for. Time to send a polite request and see what happens. I don't really think it's a kickstarter donor, though. The Only Byte has been up on my bandcamp since last year for free download.

That reminds me, it's time to give away a CD.... uh.... gotta do the dishes though, I'll post later tonight!

[InversePhase]

CD GIVEAWAY TIEMZ!

The RNG (Random Number Gods) currently favor:

jmtd

and barring that (if jmtd already has a copy), they favor:

Conan The Barbarian

PM sent to jmtd to claim, if not, I'll message Conan.

[DigitalChaos]

Groan. I don't mind the whole putting music up on youtube thing or whatever as long as they link back, but this is one thing I don't stand for. Time to send a polite request and see what happens. I don't really think it's a kickstarter donor, though. The Only Byte has been up on my bandcamp since last year for free download.

That reminds me, it's time to give away a CD.... uh.... gotta do the dishes though, I'll post later tonight!

looks like he took them down!
I commented on each of the songs when I posted that. Within a day, ALL comments for those 2 tracks were gone and the songs were no longer associated in his main profile. The direct links still worked and he was attributed to them. now even the direct links look dead. yay!

[DigitalChaos]

CD GIVEAWAY TIEMZ!

The RNG (Random Number Gods) currently favor:

jmtd

and barring that (if jmtd already has a copy), they favor:

Conan The Barbarian

PM sent to jmtd to claim, if not, I'll message Conan.

If you haven't gotten a response, you may want to resend the PM's. Email notifications were NOT going out for the last few weeks. We just got that situation fixed within the last few min.

[InversePhase]

looks like he took them down!
I commented on each of the songs when I posted that. Within a day, ALL comments for those 2 tracks were gone and the songs were no longer associated in his main profile. The direct links still worked and he was attributed to them. now even the direct links look dead. yay!

Yeah, I took a recommendation and tweeted at rob. NIN mods guilty and swimfin jumped in and did the disassociation thing and banned the user because apparently this was his second offense at uploading others' mixes. They said they were working on manually purging the songs; looks like they succeded.

Thanks for pointing out the uploads, I may not have seen them otherwise.

If you haven't gotten a response, you may want to resend the PM's. Email notifications were NOT going out for the last few weeks. We just got that situation fixed within the last few min.

Yeah, I pointed that out to Matt a week or two ago. =] Anyway, all is well, jmtd got back to me and a CD will soon be on its way to the UK. =]

[Conan The Barbarian]

damn lol, I was all like yay, and then all sad lol.

Still hooked on atarible lie. The chorus kicks.

[InversePhase]

damn lol, I was all like yay, and then all sad lol.

Still hooked on atarible lie. The chorus kicks.

Sorry buddy! But thanks for the compliments, there were at least 3-4 refinements of that before the final version. =]

[Jumprof]

I like that sound, too. It's great :-)

[BenAkenobi]

received my copy today. looks nice indeed!

[InversePhase]

Awesome, Ben!

Also, anyone that ordered a CD should have gotten it by now. Please contact me (PMs are fine) if it's been more than two weeks and you do not have your package yet.