8bit music on gameshell

Hey everyone ! I’ve always been interested about 8bit music and tried many times but without attempt my goal , i wanted to know how can you do 8bit music with Gameshell and what tool are needed thanks all for your help :smiley:

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Glad to see you’re interested in music production! I’m not aware of many synthesiser programs that are suitable for the GameShell’s hardware, but these are the ones I know of:

Sonic Pi - This produces music through coding rather than a graphical interface. It’s a unique concept which is easy to set up on the GameShell if you attach a keyboard, but it’s not particularly intuitive if you don’t have much experience in coding and/ or music production.

TronPi - This is a Mellotron emulator for Raspberry Pi which should be easily compatible with the GameShell. It has some stock sounds which should be fun to play with, although I don’t think they’re very chip-tune style. Also, you will probably need a MIDI keyboard that can connect to the GameShell via USB

I’ll let you know if I find any other solutions for sound synthesis on the GameShell. Alternatively, you could use the GameShell as a portable recorder for other instruments to layer them in a DAW-like setup (I’m not sure what software would work well for this, but I’m sure something exists). If you’re interested in that method, let me know; there are some great cheap synthesisers for making chip-tunes (have a look at the Pocket Operators by Teenage Engineering)!

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There is SunVox too which can be use to make “8 bit” like sound.

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I was thinking about this too! From what it looks like the music engine on the pico-8/tic-80 is really similar to LSDJ which I guess you could also probably run. You can look up a ton of great tutorials on this program to make chiptune/8-bit music. Also Nanoloop is a cool program for live chiptune creation.

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Just run the lsdj or nanoloop on the Gameboy emulator

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I don’t understand how the gameshell can be a portable recorder please teach me more

OK, wanna use the gameshell to work as a synth, just plug in my midi keyboard, select a sound on the GS and make a sound when I hit a note, please guide me on how this can be possible, I don’t even need sequencing, just a midi controller and a game shell.

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I’ll devise a method as soon as I can (still waiting for my GameShell to arrive), in the meantime I would suggest investigating how to use SunVox and TronPi, as they seem like solid options.

Concerning using the GameShell as a portable recorder, I’ll have to investigate some software and hardware solutions, as the 3.5mm jack on the GameShell probably can’t take input (correct me if I’m wrong, anyone who has received theirs!). I’ll let you know as soon as I come up with something!

It doesn’t receive inputs, and tronpi is not a real thing, the guy who made it didn’t officially release any sources.

Picoloop looks interesting… it’s open source version of nanoloop.

https://github.com/yoyz/picoloop

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Somewhat related, but if you enjoy 8-Bit music, or at least listening to it, the music player on the Gameshell comes with the GME plugin, allowing you to load 8-Bit nsf/NES extracted music files. It supports a lot of other file types, including spc/SNES music.