Echoes on Stone Walls by Autumn Altair, entire album rendered by dual-SIDs using MIDISID


Last year, Autumn Altair published Echoes on Stone Walls. It is "is the soundtrack to a DOS game that doesn't exist". For a limited time it was available on floppy disc but even if you only buy the album digitally, you still get the .mid files as well as audio.

I love the album, I love Skoddie's compositions - I like the way they play with time signatures and cross-rhythms, and the way they use all of the sounds/instruments available, particularly the percussion. I love the fact that it was published as MIDI. Using a notation editor to read the music while listening really does enhance your appreciation of the music.

Making the tracks work with MIDISID wasn't straightforward. They weren't written with six voices in mind, so in some cases I've had to edit them down or at least make sure that the important parts are heard. 

Some of the instruments play chords, eg harp and harpsichord. In some cases I've spread out those parts over multiple channels so that the notes are heard. In some cases I've just used MIDISID's arpeggio effect (if you switch it on, you get the effect when there are multiple concurrent notes on a channel.)

There's also liberal use of unusual sounds; bowed glass, vibraslap, reverse cymbal - the list goes on and on. As I've worked through the album I've had to make sure that these sounds are implemented in MIDISID and sound as good as I can make them.


The SID has trouble if one note begins immediately after the previous one ends (gate off / gate on for a given voice). The ADSR isn't always triggered in that case. I don't understand the technical details fully, but sometimes I think it takes a gap of up to 40ms to be sure of the envelope being triggered again.  

If a MIDI file has notes 'butted' against one another, particularly if it's a repeating note, or if the envelope is important (percussive sounds) then you have to shorten the notes very slightly. That's just a 'select all' and a little drag. This was the case with a lot of the instruments in this album, particularly basses.

The sound is captured from the back of MIDISID and I'm very happy with the quality of that.

Some tracks have worked very well, some not so well. I'll let you make up your own mind. Each track is a separate video in a playlist.

Here's a link to the entire playlist.

Below is one of my favourite tracks.



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