This article will cover some cool tricks you can do with GB Studio tracker and hUGEdriver in order to get the most out of your songs. Make sure you’ve reviewed the effects commands in the previous articles before attempting these tricks.
To hear some of these tricks in action, we’ve provided example tracks that you can download below.
One-Time Intro
You know in Super Mario, Sonic or Megaman X games how there’s a little intro to the song that never plays again after the song gets going? You can do this with GB Studio UGE songs as well.
First make your song as you normally would but leave the first pattern blank. Once you’re done, go back and make an intro. In the download, demo-intro.uge has a drum intro and roll into the sample song from previous lessons.
If you play it like this the intro will play again when it reaches the end of pattern 2. But if we had a B02 at the end of pattern 2, this tells it to jump to pattern 2, effectively bypassing the intro, which now will only play once. You can make the intro as long as you want. For example, if the intro is 4 patterns long, just put B05 at the end of the song.
If your intro is short, perhaps just a few notes of a drum roll, you can use a D01 in the last row you use to skip ahead to the main song too.
One Time Play Jingle
Sometimes we want a jingle to play once and then for the sound to sit quietly until the user does something. A great example is a game over jingle, like sportsgameover.uge, from my free jingle pack. It’s been included in this article’s download too.
Basically the same thing is happening as the One time intro but pattern 2 is silence.
You can even combine a jingle with a loop to do an RPG style post-battle victory plus a little loop like in free-victory-loop.uge.
Swing Beats
For jazz, swing, funk, and hip hop, a swing groove is often used. A Swing Groove means some notes are a tiny bit longer than other notes. It can be a subtly funky swagger or a jagged choppy rhythm that somehow stays together. You can do these tricks but temporarily changing the tempo with a Fxx command and then putting back on the next beat. This example showed a common swing beat. By putting the two F values further apart you can make a more subtle or more powerful swing groove.
You can hear this in swing-demo.uge.
If you haven’t already, be sure to download the examples below to hear some of these great tricks for yourself! There are lots more tricks we will cover in part 2 of this article.
Beatscribe has composed and produced soundtracks for games on Nintendo DS, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox1, Sega Genesis and numerous iOs and Android games for over a decade, but his true passion is creating epic moods on ancient hardware like the Game Boy and NES.
