Hey ho, here it is! My first foray into the legendary MT-32! More like legend-arily bullshit amirite hehehh. Discovering this part of Roland's History has been pretty cool, seeing its stock sounds, and a light dabbling in patch editing was quite fun, and a pretty interesting break from what I'm used to with the Sound Canvas boxes, particularly the 88Pro.

Its drums are delightfully 80s, and its sounds, while perhaps not as natural as a Sound Canvas, have their own synthetic charm, it's kinda halfway between a ROMpler and a more traditional synth, which makes sense, given the way the MT-32 works. But, as fun as it can be, this cover felt more like a chore than something fun and explorative like the ones I make with the Sound Canvas, or even MSGS. Mainly patch editing, despite being one of its primary features, trying to get the thing to register the SysEx you've sent, at least in my experience, was a nightmare.

Good lord, between having to fuck about with multiple programs to even get FL to talk to MUNT (MT-32 emulator), and then getting the patch editing tools to talk to MUNT, and then getting that to work only to learn that changing parameters doesn't change the sound immediately so you have to go and click a button to send the changes and even then MUNT doesn't register them immediately so you have to pause and play the music again, then there's a chance you'll hear your changes if neither MUNT or your MIDI-routing software crashed aaaaaaAAAAAAAA

Tbh, idk what in the chain is causing this, whether it's FL Studio, MUNT, my MIDI-routing software (Falcosoft MIDI Player 5), or the patch-editing program (MT32Edit), though I suspect it's one of the latter two. MP5 won't let FL talk to MUNT unless I play a MIDI from it first, then MT32Edit introduces stuttering when it's just connected to MUNT, not even sending data to it. So I have pretty little faith in either of them, but perhaps the MT-32 is just like this, idk.

I was looking for another routing solution, but my old standby, loopMIDI, uses a kernel driver that doesn't work in WINE, and any of the other ones either costed money, or couldn't open their config menus. So in terms of alternatives, I'm shit outta luck atm.

So it's for all these reasons that I probably won't make another MT-32 cover any time soon. Its been a fun nut to crack, but when it came to actually sitting down to make the cover, I couldn't just sit down and get lost in the creation of sounds. In fact, once I'd so much as made minor tweaks to the Slap Bass and E. Piano sounds, I couldn't be bothered with patch editing anymore, and just stuck to stock sounds for everything else.

The thing also has some annoying limitations, reverb parameters are quite limited, it only has one drum kit, you only have 32 voices, which sounds good until you consider that just one patch can use up to 4, leaving potentially only 8 notes to play with, it often stretches one low-quality sample beyond its range, it has no easily-accessible cutoff/resonance knob, and did I mention it just ignores SysEx and crashes half the time? I don't think I did!!!! :)))))))) Plus, on a personal note, there's no convincing electric guitars and the acoustic piano sounds are not acoustic in the slightest.

I might return later on, just as a challenge, see how far I can push the thing and make it do a little more. I know I've done that time and time again with Sound Canvas boxes, and now consider them serious pieces of electronic music production kit. Plus, it's the MT-32, for all its faults, its got such a lovely, charming sound, and it brought about a seismic paradigm shift in how people make music on their computers within the walls of their own houses. To have something like this in 1987 would've been nothing short of incredible. It's also kinda funny to think that the games with the highest-production-quality music at the time weren't namco or SEGA scaler games with their fancy PCM chips, but rather Sierra Point-and-Click adventure games lol

[MT-32] - Thunder Blade (Arcade): "Burning Point" MIDI Cover

Hey ho there, I make the chippy and non-chippy bois!!/??1/

Avi: @KayllaCat on Twitter

Chippy Toolz:
Furnace
FamiTracker 0.4.6
FastTracker II (FT2 Clone)
Milkytracker
OctaMED Sound Studio 1.03c (OctaMED V7)
OctaMED V4

Non-chippy toolz:
FL Studio 21
Renoise

[MT-32] - Thunder Blade (Arcade): "Burning Point" MIDI Cover

Sixtyforce