The shreak-y pained chiptune synths is a part of the core to me (chiptunes and pixel art are really exactly medium-equivalent tools between audio and visual yeah?)
–moving further into the idea though, I’m very cautious not to just produce a ‘genre piece’ by picking a dubstep/techno/ whatever kind of people and arranging
I find myself wanting to actually write a unique story; and work write something ‘deconstructed’ in rhythm – got a few examples of ‘deconstructed’ type tracks below
I think more melancolic fluffy ‘witch house’ type detuned pads / bass heavy atmos combined
That Megaman soundtrack has alot of sentimental person significance to me - but
As far as percussion and in general, even though all that art is 8-bit ish (and may even be able to exist on old hardware) - for doing a musical-take on the general I feel I would not limit myself to 8/16 bit sounds, but rather feature them but also have sound design at ‘full bit-depth’
That being said specifically in reference to percussion - I would use a combination of 8-bit and full-bit but also try to avoid full ‘typical’ drum kits - i.e. I would almost always want to have some synthetic (zaps; white / FM noise) elements to any beat (except for maybe very crunchy / downsampled breaks. Would still use alot of individual ‘normal’ drum sounds, but again never without an element of it being pulled through some synthetic / virtual world.
(of course this whole discussion is just personal taste / opinion – and maybe these are good ideas to try / rules to bend)
Sounds right. Something else that stands out to me about these animations; they have a distinct ‘minimal’ feel, so I’d want to reflect that in the percussion to. I’ve thought some about what ‘minimal percussion’ means to me, but it’s different things in different cases. Mainly things like fewer distinct sounds, or more sparse rhythms, or maybe more staccato/no space fx (no reverb, no delay).
An interesting thing about gifs as a medium is that they have no audio (maximally minimal sound/percussion, ha!).
This is something I been thinking about recently w.r.t. Instagram stories - the 15s limit on a given story ‘frame’ presents some interesting limitations/opportunities for creativity.
I could definitely imagine a set of low-bit noir insta stories that were sort of like these gif examples, but set to music. Either a short looping gif (just a few frames) repeated out to 15s with a soundtrack, or maybe even a 15s low-bit noir short, again w/ music.
I’m working on a workflow in adobe animate or processing (this was done 100% in procreate) to do the kinda of coded / geometric designs he’s got (the ‘sparks’ in mine are by hand).
Was playing with loading gif data into processing the other day; using the color change of pixels to trigger midi events(with a few more sound layers for good measure) sounds like an awesome way to make this kinda thing full AV
