[Synthpop] Outline Bees (it/ogg)

[Saga Musix]

This coop by bacter and me won the newskool music compo at Outline 2016. This is the final version, with slightly better mixed vocals and some other small fixes.

Download
There is also an instrumental version available at The Mod Archive.

Lyrics:
Riding in the van on our way to Outline
Suddenly we spot the bee on our hand
Riding to the party in the sunshine
The bee is calling us from Atari land

Bees! Bees! Bees!
Bees! Bees! Bees!

We're all covered in bees, we're calling
They have bitten our knees, we're rolling
A-YA-YA-YA-YAAAA we're shouting out
To have us garbage-trucked

[Brozilla]

Stuff like this make me realize how so much more the program can do and it appears as though I might need to finally put the nail on MilkyTracker and fully learn how to use the program. 41 channels is a heck of a lot but I noticed you did a lot of your effects by utilizing the channel space such as stereo and reverb. Interesting that you named them too
Can't expect anything less from a OPMPT developer. Nice sound!

[Saga Musix]

Interesting that you named them too

It's the key to keeping the channels manageable.

[Brozilla]

Usually use headphones but went back to take another listen and noticed the reverb channels are in surround which might've been what you meant by

I guess most people (including me) just use that effect for extra stereo space on mono samples anyway.

Seeing as though you "stereo-ized" the samples with extra channels do you think it'd also have been possible to edit the samples directly and faked out a stereo? The caveats are probably that it'll increase file size (larger samples) and potentially less flexible. The non-vocal version is still 37 channels and honestly it is still a bit daunting. I do plan on purchasing an orchestral library but even then it's hard to imagine using more than 32, yet alone filling it. Seeing as though you did it apparently it's not hard but currently the way I track it's no easy task.

[Saga Musix]

Surely I could just have applied a reverb effect on the samples (I do that most of the time), but this was also a bit of an exercise to keep the size down (okay, it's still huge but only half the size of my usual modules ) and to work with those early 90s sample CD samples as-is and get some nice sound out of them without heavy processing. Flexibility is not an issue - actually stereo samples with reverb are somewhat more flexible because you won't have to fight against little details like the retrigger effect not resetting envelopes (which I use on the "reverb" samples).

I do plan on purchasing an orchestral library but even then it's hard to imagine using more than 32

If you're talking about a  VSTi, then most likely you will definitely spend less channels because you don't have to take care of fake reverb / delay / etc.

I used to get close to 64 channels when mostly using mono samples, but with stereo samples I'm more in the 30-40 channels range these days.

[Brozilla]

Surely I could just have applied a reverb effect on the samples (I do that most of the time), but this was also a bit of an exercise to keep the size down (okay, it's still huge but only half the size of my usual modules ) and to work with those early 90s sample CD samples as-is and get some nice sound out of them without heavy processing.

Never really did extensive sample editing but merely it seemed like a good idea assuming file size weren't an issue. The library I was talking is the Garritan Suite. Basically what I was thinking of doing is ripping/recording samples from the library and using them in a more direct manner (the EULA I could find is for the ARIA player.) It's kind of a roundabout method (have to check legal as well) but the idea of having music playback in "real-time" whilst being accessible is much more appealing than a streaming format. They no longer provide it but EWQL orchestra had a free version which, alongside with the proprietary vst files, included the .wav of the instruments.

[Saga Musix]

I guess this might differ between various libraries, but from my experience just ripping the raw samples from orchestral libraries can be more work than sampling the VSTi directly, because the raw samples are often unprocessed, may have leading silence bits and other issues which are "fixed" by the plugin itself. At least that was the issue I had with the EWQL free samples you mentioned.