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View topic - Tomy - FM Series 11 (YM2413)

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  • Joined: 07 Sep 2013
  • Posts: 60
  • Location: Finland
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Tomy - FM Series 11 (YM2413)
Post Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2025 10:52 am
https://tomy.bandcamp.com/album/fm-series-11


Entering the unknown: Flashing lights and sounds of the FM cyber world.

~90 minutes of YM2413 music.
I decided to challenge myself and make an album using the YM2413 FM chip.
I knew it had some serious limitations, but I really wasn't expecting that it could do this much! This is all full of custom instruments and I do not use the rhythm mode in any track. It's amazing to have 9 channels of sound, that way you can stack sounds together to make them more impressive. I felt the drums were very difficult to do at first, but by the end of the album I started to get happy with what I managed to do.

This is a hardware recording from PowerBase Mini FM.
fms11.png (1.08 MB)
FM Series 11
fms11.png

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  • Joined: 09 Jun 2014
  • Posts: 421
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2025 11:54 am
Last edited by slogra on Sun Jan 26, 2025 7:50 pm; edited 1 time in total
Thank you for 90 minutes of catchy tunes!

I can imagine a shooter game on the SMS with this amazing soundtrack.
Cotton Candy could be the ending or hi-score theme.

Well done on the (layered) instruments. I especially like bell instrument and the voice instruments. I also heard vocoder instruments. Not sure if they are layered instruments or custom instruments or both.

The drums sound interesting. I know it's very hard to make a snare on the melodic channel. Is the snare layered as well, or just one channel?
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  • Joined: 30 Jun 2016
  • Posts: 204
  • Location: Australia
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Post Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2025 5:49 pm
I FINALLY listened through all of it, after several days of being busy as hell - and I honestly still am hahaha.

This is absolutely wonderfully well done, I love this so much. You did some amazing reverberation with the instruments, you really took advantage of what the YM2143 could do!
I'm super glad you produced this album.

If you're considering doing oscilloscope printouts, I know you might be a bit picky over how the waveform locking goes. You might be able to set an external sync with purely sine wave forms of the instruments, whilst having the visual ones not lose track. I've done so before for FM printouts with good success.
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  • Joined: 07 Sep 2013
  • Posts: 60
  • Location: Finland
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Post Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2025 1:29 pm
slogra wrote
Thank you for 90 minutes of catchy tunes!

I can imagine a shooter game on the SMS with this amazing soundtrack.
Cotton Candy could be the ending or hi-score theme.

Well done on the (layered) instruments. I especially like bell instrument and the voice instruments. I also heard vocoder instruments. Not sure if they are layered instruments or custom instruments or both.

The drums sound interesting. I know it's very hard to make a snare on the melodic channel. Is the snare layered as well, or just one channel?


I love shoot'em ups, they definitely have an influence on my music.
I'm happy with all the different instruments I managed here. At first I wasn't sure because in my mind the 1 custom instrument limitation seemed so severe but you can use that same custom instrument in any channel, any frequency and any volume. You can make the sound so much more "big" with detune and reverberation!

The snare is layered, the kind of heavy drums I like I cannot do on a single 2op channel I think. Kick drums are a bit tricky with the preset instruments too because they all have some release on them, what this means is if you play a series of kicks on the same channel rapidly they will "bleed" into each other and that will alter the sound.

Flygon wrote
I FINALLY listened through all of it, after several days of being busy as hell - and I honestly still am hahaha.

This is absolutely wonderfully well done, I love this so much. You did some amazing reverberation with the instruments, you really took advantage of what the YM2143 could do!
I'm super glad you produced this album.

If you're considering doing oscilloscope printouts, I know you might be a bit picky over how the waveform locking goes. You might be able to set an external sync with purely sine wave forms of the instruments, whilst having the visual ones not lose track. I've done so before for FM printouts with good success.


Thanks Flygon! Loved making the instruments sound as nice as possible. The half sine waveform was new and amazing to me as YM2612 doesn't have it. No promise about the oscilloscope as I would like to do the view from hardware and being 9 channels that will mean a lot of work. Haha.
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  • Joined: 30 Jun 2016
  • Posts: 204
  • Location: Australia
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Post Posted: Yesterday at 8:12 am
TomyS wrote
Thanks Flygon! Loved making the instruments sound as nice as possible. The half sine waveform was new and amazing to me as YM2612 doesn't have it. No promise about the oscilloscope as I would like to do the view from hardware and being 9 channels that will mean a lot of work. Haha.

If someone made an automated dumping sound driver (and subsequent automatic separation of the recording app PC side) for that, it'd be very helpful. But I feel like the niche may be too narrow for this sort of thing, alas. :P
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