How Music Was Made On Super Nintendo

SOURCES

MUSIC

Matt Cherne, "PRISM"

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The Nerdwriter is a series of video essays about art, culture, politics, philosophy and more.

[DavidWise]

Sadly - there was no tracker. It was a text editor called Brief and the code was then assembled and sent to the host PC. No luxury of real time editing. Fortunately, things have moved on with audio technology.

[SNESdrunk]

A game's entire sound isn't just crammed into the soundchip all at once. It does it one level (or one room, or whatever) at a time.

[ItsMikeArre]

The Donkey Kong country soundtrack taking me back to the good old days thank you Evan

[clarissamcpigeon]

It's incorrect to say that SNES games had to fit the entire audio into 64Kb. That's just the audio RAM on the console itself - you could store extra soundbanks on the cartridge and swap them in and out.

The audio subsystem also supported a number of other effects such as echo etc.

[FamiliarGecko]

0:15 *"Super Mario World"*

_Plays music and footage from Super Mario All-Stars..._

[SleepingCocoon]

your content usually seems pretty well put together, but this one was... lacking.

- majority of developers didn't use trackers, including Wise. don't know of any devkits with one. as far as i'm aware, a lot of music was written in Music Macro Language. if anybody can correct me on that, please do so! i'm more familiar with the 2A03 and YM2612, and have only converted tracker files to SPC format rather than write in anything traditional.
- the 64kb of sound RAM isn't an entire game's sound data. you can load in a new bank when needed, and most games do between music tracks, scene transitions, etc. a number of games have quite a ton of sound data. as much as you want, really, given you have the storage. Star Ocean's entire opening is voiced.
- two source misattributions in the first 22 seconds is pretty bad. the first example is Mario All-Stars, and the one attributed to CV4 is Dracula X.
- the video is realistically just about David Wise's work and is an extremely shallow look into how music was actually made for the hardware.

the amount of misinformation here sets a pretty shoddy precedent for somebody who seeks to produce informative video essays. i encourage you to edit the description with corrections.

[jacobwilliams]

Big thing that you need to take into account is that the 64kb was ON THE SYSTEM RAM, the cartridge could hold more storage

[minutodoalerta]

After watching this video I continue without knowing how the super Nintendo music was done

[edhc]

DKC 1 and 2 had really stellar music, I never realized that Rare had pushed the SNES to its limits in all departments. Man, I miss Nintendo's Rare so much...

[mauswaffles]

Super Mario World
*shows gameplay of SMB1 all stars*

[SpeedySPCFan]

Interesting introduction to how the SNES works, but there's some inaccuracies.

0:16 That's Mario All-Stars, not SMW.
0:22 It says Super Castlevania 4 but it's showing Dracula X.
0:36 All of the channels in the NES, besides the first two, had a different function. 1 & 2 were pulse waves of variable width (4 unique total, 3 audibly different), 3 was a triangle, 4 was white noise, and 5 was DPCM sampling.
3:28 Not every composer used a music tracker. Only some did. Many of Ocean's musicians like Dean Evans used their own tracker called Medit, but other than that, I don't know of any other confirmation that other SNES developers used a tracker or that Nintendo's dev kit came with one.

I think you also should have brought up some of the extra features the sound processor had - namely the echo effects that a LOT of games used.

[jevansturner]

There's a much bigger story behind that sound chip. Ken Kutaragi (yes, father of the PlayStation) developed the chip in secret. His superiors at Sony were very upset that he used manpower and resources without authorization, but they pitched it to Nintendo anyway. Nintendo adopted the sound chip -- which was a huge benefit to Sony. It also led to an agreement that would allow Sony to make a CD-ROM add-on attachment for the Super Nintendo and an all-in-one system for cartridges and CDs (much like the Sharp Twin Famicom had done for the previous generation). Later, Nintendo killed off the CD-ROM add-on deal because they realized the agreement with Sony basically gave away all the profits for the CD-ROM based software releases. Sony had basically completed development of the "PlayStation" SNES add-on, but the engineering team ultimately had to build a whole new system to salvage the work and investment they had already put in. You can definitely see how the SNES influenced the design of the original PlayStation controller. :)

[VashStarwind]

Its really crazy to think how they had way less to work with back then, but still created some of the best tunes even by todays standards. I wish that all composers now a days, had to make at least one song using limited resources like that so they would know what it was like. I also wish someone would create some new sound tracks using the EXACT same programs and methods as they did back then, that would be very cool to see

[cotelo]

Back in the day, even as a kid I realised that DK's OST was something else compared to every other SNES game available.

[NateandNoahTryLife]

Amazing what they were doing with such limited resources. Created the soundtracks to so many childhoods.

[Nikku]

The 64 kiB of ARAM can be switched out, actually. Most games would load in a different song into ARAM, and some load different samples for that song. Some games actually stream notes into ARAM, constantly changing what's in ARAM every second. Some games like the Lion King and Tales of Phantasia stream samples into ARAM as well.

[amarguitar]

Nerdwriter new video days are the best days

[FullFledged]

I remember playing the stickerbush level back when it came out and I was in awe..
There was something magical about this emotional and big sounding track coming out of little electronic box. Nowadays its a novelty but back in the day the idea that this came from a tiny chip was like magic. Remember this way before mp3 players or even a pc with a 16bit sound card.

[MZMDev]

The music for "Super Mario World" you showed in the beginning was actually the Super Mario All Stars rendition of the original Super Mario Bros. Theme. You know that, right?

[legendtaco]

Fun Fact, Kanye West wanted to become a video game programmer when he was 13 so he bought a turbografx 16 and had his mom take him to college classes to learn programming. He made a game but then discovered that he could program music onto the computer for his game, sparking his passion in music, which led him to his career as a producer, then years down the line as a solo artist