Out today on Evel Records: Dane Law "The Black Path" A collection of pieces recorded in summer 2024 when I lived at the intersection of the boundary of the historic Danelaw and the Black Path, an ancient traders' route. Max MSP controlled sampled guitar; the last solo album with those materials.

My actual day job (one of them, anyway) is to compose 90s atmospheric drum and bass, in the custom tracker wot I wrote, for a video game. The game responds to the music data and vice versa. In 1994 I hoped I’d get a job doing this on the Amiga when I grew up - close enough. #gameaudio #demoscene

Metron Tracker standalone is a feature-complete 2.4MB exe! This example song is 2.6MB on disk and its memory footprint is 3.7MB. Playback averages 2% of audio CPU budget. That leaves me ~4GB and 98% CPU to spend on ambient fart emitters with convolution verb #UnrealEngine #middleware #gameaudio

Metron Tracker standalone is a feature-complete 2.4MB exe! This example song is 2.6MB on disk and its memory footprint is 3.7MB. Playback averages 2% of audio CPU budget. That leaves me ~4GB and 98% CPU to spend on ambient fart emitters with convolution verb #UnrealEngine #middleware #gameaudio

Wrote a new sample loader for Metron standalone so all the oldskool tracker commands are back! No DSP effects here, just sample manipulation - very cheap on CPU. Multisample instruments at diff octaves played randomly, but all share 1 buffer in mem. #gameaudio #gamedev #unrealengine #middleware

I rewrote my #unrealengine tracker in raw C++ so it’s a 3.5 megabyte exe instead of a 35GB engine/project. This is a core player engine with a Win32 wrapper and a UE plugin wrapper. Testing with my hybrid FM/phase distortion synth and waveform blending LFO, and my cheesy-but-cheap reverb algo

I wrote a combined sample reverse & pitchslide up/down command for my #UnrealEngine runtime tracker! (also optimised everything to hell - this tune inc DSP FX uses ~2% of my CPU budget and a ~500kb memory footprint - but who cares, jungle reeewind spinback is what I'm excited about) #gameaudio

Another legendary demoscener gone too soon: my pal StingRay of Scoopex. Everyone in the scene has a "StingRay fixed my shitty code" story, me included; my fondest party memories are of hanging out, hearing about his granny smuggling C64s into East Berlin, chatting industrial music & VW Golfs. RIP

A glimpse of my composing & mixing workflow in The Siege and The Sandfox. I tend to work at runtime with Metron Tracker & my mix system as #DearImGui overlays. I can override gameplay mix events or test in place, tweak synth/sample instruments, adjust quantised sync offsets #UnrealEngine #gameaudio

More than a decade ago I made a little logo for a game, now it’s finally out!!! Be free little sandfox!!!! 🥹💖 store.steampowered.com/app/653060/T...

And we're live! £10.79 introductory price, a wee bit more in dollaridoos and eurotokens

Our game is finally released today! The Siege and The Sandfox is a 2D #metroidvania with gorgeous pixelart; stealth-based gameplay; and lots of dynamic music and game audio by meee. 4pm GMT on Steam, Epic & GoG for PC store.steampowered.com/app/653060/T... #indiedev #gameaudio #unrealengine

🚨 NEW GAME ALERT!🚨 Get ready to meet a very different Narrator... Yes, I'll be your guide through a mysterious tale of adventure and exploration... The Siege and the Sandfox! I can't wait for you to experience just how beautiful this game is. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjhl...

More aggressive optimisations for my #UnrealEngine FM synth, which now has this beast of a LUT-based waveform blending LFO that can be cheaply mapped to per-operator params. It's 'only' 4-op, but all ops have feedback, multiple waveforms and can optionally use phase distortion borp clang fart plarp

Wrote a custom LFO for my #UnrealEngine FM/phase distortion hybrid synth. It precalcs lookup tables to keep it cheap, and can blend two waveforms. This is triangle vs interpolated noise and looks nice and hairy on the scope. It’s just very slightly modulating the pitch of one operator. #gameaudio

The FM Synth in my #UnrealEngine tracker DAW plugin hasn't had much love for a while, so I added a phase distortion synthesis option to each FM operator. Sort of a hybrid of Yamaha-style FM via PM and Casio-style PD via...trial and error. Sounds ok! Just needs some modulation hookups. #gameaudio

I wrote this effect for the NTS-3 Kaoss Pad using Korg’s open source Logue SDK. Cool, you’re thinking, they made it easy so everyone can get involved? No, of course they made it a total pain in the arse! But if you know some C and don't mind faffing about with weird toolchains it's fun.

I needed to get a #FinalCutPro timeline into #Reaper for a dialogue editing job today, so I wrote this FCPXML to RPP converter. It worked for me, eventually, but only once various stars aligned, moons bled, grim portents befell sailors etc. echolevel.github.io/Fcp2Rpp/ #gameaudio #audiopost

I needed to get a #FinalCutPro timeline into #Reaper for a dialogue editing job today, so I wrote this FCPXML to RPP converter. It worked for me, eventually, but only once various stars aligned, moons bled, grim portents befell sailors etc. echolevel.github.io/Fcp2Rpp/ #gameaudio #audiopost

I added an allpass filter to my #UnrealEngine Karplus-Strong synth with a random coefficient per note. It's everything I hoped for and more. #gameaudio

Genuinely forgot I wrote this hardware->virtual MIDI routing app over Christmas, because it's just been chugging along in the system tray, merging and filtering 3 hw controllers into one multiclient loopMIDI port that I can use in #Reaper and #UnrealEngine simultaneously github.com/echolevel/Gl...

I wrote a #Reaper script that explodes multichannel BWF items from my Sound Devices 633 to child tracks while preserving the metadata (it's discarded by default), muting the source, and appending item names with track names and circled state from SD's iXML tags. Niche but ninja. #locationsound

You should only let your 13 year-old have a smartphone if you're willing to exercise near forensic levels of supervision, and while there are many good reasons to do so, this sort of shit ranks pretty high amongst them

Absolutely love doing audio on skate videos. I've always considered them one of the most sublime forms of vibe since falling in love with those hypnotic city trip sections in late 90s vids. My body's now too derelict and unfit for human habitation to be out skating in it, but I can enjoy vicariously

Introducing my IWIAB (irritated wasp in a box) physics model. You can shoo it away with a gesture and lure it towards an attractor, but ultimately it's an irritated wasp in a box and your control of the situation is illusory. Finally got what I want: an XYZ pad but weird. #gamedev #sounddesign

Added a janky physics model to my #Roli Lightpad app. It already had spring lerp per axis, but now you can stott the thingy off the edges like a DVD player logo, in case you’re too famous and important to modulate your own parameters #gameaudio #sounddesign

Added a minimalist transport mode to my 3XYZ app for #Roli Lightpad - record, play/stop and jog/scrub via MIDI. Ideal for when #Reaper hasn't got focus, or mouse and keyboard are out of arms' reach while playing instruments. The scrub strip measures gesture speed for short or continuous action.

Extremely handy list of #gameaudio #Reaper tools here, thanks to @bolttracks.bsky.social! Take some time to explore them - don't whack them all in at once, be selective so you're not overwhelmed!

I wrote two #Reaper scripts that do extremely niche things exactly the way I want. Way faster and more satisfying than the nightmare of writing python remote scripts for Ableton Live. First is the elegantly named 'Arrange items sequentially in time by ascending track count', with custom offset/fades

I've also been trying to make Reaper more central to my workflow. Reaper gives you lots of niche options for controlling, but not quite niche enough for my insistence on being able to do nearly everything with an 11-button mouse hence this elegantly named script (not shown: byzantine AHK scripts)

Animating a DIN-5 MIDI plug in the system tray to show that my MIDI port routing/merging app is trafficking data was well worth the massive hassle. GlueMidi is coming along nicely - copes with hotplugged devices, is thread safe (in places), and I'm already using it instead of MIDI-OX #gameaudio

lil Saturday #amiga #ansidelivery for my pal @echolevel.co.uk <3 #ansi #textart

I love how useful MIDI-OX can be, but sadly it’s a bit crashy for the one thing I absolutely rely on it for: routing multiple h/w devices into one virtual loopMIDI port. So I’ve made my own app that does literally just that! It can just live in the sys tray being quietly useful.

Fader3 is kinda utilitarian, whereas the Roli Lightpad is great for sound design when I need to control 8 multitouch params at once in 3 axes. I wrote this app for it that offers two XYZ pads and an XZ pitchbend strip (sideways & pressure!) and an alt mode for easy mapping github.com/echolevel/Ro...

Fader3 controlling Reaper params with 14-bit resolution. I wrote a little editor app to configure the hardware - it doesn't need to be running while you use Fader3 but it has a handy MIDI monitor for troubleshooting. Also it's cute. All open source: github.com/echolevel/Fa... #gamedev #gameaudio

Take my money. Everything that helps make Reaper look like less of a dog's breakfast is worth it.

Wrote a very cute little editor app for Fader3, which is now cheerfully controlling my Reaper envelopes in smooth 14-bit thanks to ReaLearn mappings. Finally got the MIDI controller I want! (The app is also a MIDI monitor because why not?) #gameaudio #gamedev #dearimgui

Leaked pitch document for the netflix biopic about me and @basspope.bsky.social

Can't stop thinking about H.P. Lovecraft's extremely normal way of writing "we heard a penguin". Big 'they're paying me by the word' energy.

I added a true 14-bit MIDI mode to my controller and it's very smooth indeed. Ableton Live maps it with no issues and while I had to make a slight compromise on speed, the high resolution accuracy over a 100mm fader feels great. Boring details to follow. #gameaudio #gamedev #screenshotsaturday

But what if it sent 14-bit MIDI instead of boring old 7-bit? RasPi Pico's AD converters are 12-bit and noisy, so I have to discard the lower 4 bytes to avoid jitter: that leaves me with 8 bits, which is ok for 7-bit MIDI (0-127). But with an external 16-bit ADC, I can send MIDI values from 0-16383

Fader3 by echolevel. I designed this over the weekend to be a 3x fader USB MIDI controller with 100mm travel and the smallest possible footprint, and to cost me less than £40 in parts. I can’t make you one, but I’ll share the schematics so you can make your own. #gamedev #gameaudio #filmsound

Modelling is what I always used to hate about 3D printing - baffling tools with aggravating UI - but Tinkercad is actually...good? I was able to hoy together this case quickly and it was almost...fun* * (it's possible I'm misremembering what fun feels like, and how to recognise it when it happens)

Pi Pico’s ADC might not be up to it, but this old Teensy 3.1 does fine at 13-bit resolution. Every MIDI CC value 0-127 read with no skipping or jitter. I’ll compare against an external 16-bit ADC on the Pico. Dream controller reality is within reach!

Sick of the perfect #composer MIDI controller not existing so I’m making my own. Three 115mm-throw faders, two for expression/dynamics when scoring and one for ad-hoc automation mappings. No buttons/LCDs/nonsense and as little desk space as possible wasted. 14cm x 7cm x 3cm #gamedev #gameaudio

lo-fi recycled jazz christ beats to yule/tide to #chiptune #retrocomputing

Just making some #DeathInSpace character sheets in a deeply irritating and ostentatiously convoluted way. My players will have XP deducted for tuts, heavy sighs and eye-rolls. #ttrpg

A while ago I added Atari YM emulation to my #UnrealEngine tracker DAW, implementing stuff like SID-voice, buzzer effects & mod matrix. It can go thru realtime DSP fx like my other synth engines, but it's register-compatible with the hardware chip...in theory! #ScreenshotSaturday #chiptune #gamedev

Added 'The Spins' to my drunk walking sim prototype. The Spins makes foot placement and balancing more difficult. You can squat down for a breather to decrease The Spins temporarily. Try not to vomit. #ScreenshotSaturday #gamedev