A little while ago, composer Akari Kaida tweeted about the music of the Battle Network series. Particularly its inner workings, the intricacies of working on the GBA, and her opinions on the soundtrack’s quality. Kaida worked on BN1, EXE4.5 BN5, and Star Force 3.
This is a rarely seen commentary straight from the composer herself, and English fans can read a translation for them in the jump!
All terms are changed to their English localization. Extra side notes are also added in, denoted by brackets.
This is the 1st part of her Twitter thread, which can be found here.
- [Why is Mega Man Battle Network’s music so blippy? I may have already said why it uses a PSG [Programmable Sound Generator] in a CD jacket, but there were quite a few people who didn’t know why the middle sound channel was so blippy, so I’ll try to explain.
- The first reason is that the PSG’s specs mean that it can only output three sound channels, as well as noise. That means that with both the bass and melody using one each, along with noise being used for the rhythm, it can only output one more. In other words, that last channel has to cover the entire backing.
- Thankfully, the GBA was able to use an ADPCM [Adaptive Differential Pulse-Code Modulation] as well, so it’s not like the PSG could only output one tone at a time or anything, but this meant that since the PSG was so helpful, we had to use it really effectively or it would go to waste! But with only one tone, chords were impossible! Okay, then if we do arpeggio, it’ll give that chord-like feeling, right? If we make it fast, even better, right? …So that’s the first reason. [Sample of ADPCM/compressed sounds]
- The second is that when the PSG plays a sound effect, it’ll erase the low-priority sound from the BGM [background music] to play it. Yes, this means that playing a sound effect will get rid of that sound in the BGM. If that sound keeps playing, it’ll stay gone from the BGM. It’s pretty bad for the game if the BGM disappears completely. So we up the priority of the melody a little, which we want to make sure remains the most.
- Anyway, now if we can just have the bass play, we’ll manage to make music. So we up the priority of the bass a little. With this, the noise and the middle sound will be sacrificed (lol), and noise is used often for sound effects, but… What if we use the middle channel for a maintained lead instead of an arpeggio?
- But even if the sound effects are really short, until the next note comes, for the time that the lead’s previous note would have taken, it won’t come back as part of the BGM. In order to get the BGM to come back as soon as possible, we need a trick to make the next always come immediately. The blips perform that job.
- For those who composed on the original NES, this is probably old news to them, but those are probably the reasons in relation to the PSG’s unique characteristics. That’s all. ♥
- Bit of an addition. As for why MMBN4 sounds really different from the other games… Some of that is because it was a different composer, but the fact that different composers utilize the PSG differently is big as well, I think. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure without asking them, but the following is my guess from listening to the music.
- Regarding sound effects, rather than setting the ones that would be easier to remove to the middle channel, and making use of arpeggio to get the middle channel to come back as part of the BGM faster, I think 4 used low-priority sounds for the delayed and harmonized sounds in the melody so you wouldn’t notice if they disappeared, and left the backing mostly to the ADPCM.
- I think there are parts that varies on the arrange, though. Personally, I think it sounds fantastic if you apply a track delay, but you lose a sound that you could use for the backing! So I prioritized that stingy line of thinking and only used a track delay in the less heavy songs like the title theme (lol).
- In the end, no matter what the reason, I think maybe those blips were part of what made MMBN what it was, maybe. It was kinda weird, but it was interesting, and I think I’m glad that I did it. Alright, that’s it! (/・ω・)/
Some time later, Kaida followed up on the thread. This is the 2nd part, which can be found here.
- Somewhat a continuation of yesterday but… writing about how Mega Man Battle Network’s music becomes more classy as the installments’ numbering progresses. I for one, believe this solely depends on the efforts of the artist.
- As a maker, I want to create something that surpasses the previous installment. Although I think I get consumed by this. In a design context, the sounds made are few, the available data memory is sparse. It’s all about how to overcome this. These sort of stories are the exact same with the NES or SNES.
- With PSG, even if you mixed noise you still only got 4 sounds, but [then] came ADPCM, a feature of the GBA that could sound magnificent sound sources. When considering the [music’s] share of the processing of the game itself, the number of sounds able to be made simultaneously is 2 sounds. Slightly heavy on the overall processing but in the case of light processing [on the gameplay side], 3 sounds with the overlapping of the release of the previous sound it easily goes to 12 sounds simultaneously. Even though this is bad…
- After thinking about it a lot, the result was I cut off all of the sounds’ releases with a delay, putting out the feeling of a release; chord items were recorded and played as APDCM. And even though only 1 sound is playing, it still feels like 3~4 sounds are playing -> the ‘thickness’ of the sound was increased… And so on, that’s the result of the author studying various things like that ->
- It [the OST] felt like it was really evolving. With data memory being few, I had to brainstorm aspects, [such as] increasing white noise. ADPCM’s musical instrument sounds were adjusted for optimization with the GBA’s sounds and such… They were games filled with authors’ ingeniuity even in parts other than the musical composition! 3 or 6 [as such] are really amazing.
- This will become a story about music but the thing that I attempted in 5 that was fun, was preparing 2 chords in major and minor. Doing this allowed them to adapt to most chords. Domiso-only chords too, with a different sound such as a bass with a ‘La’ added at the bottom means a quick change to Am7. Putting ‘Fa’ at the bottom it becomes F9. How far could I take this? So I played around with it (lol).
That’s it for her commentary from Twitter! As a bonus, here’s some extra remarks related to the music of the series.
This one is asked by a fan on a QA site.
Q: What sort of synthesizer did you use for the Battle Network and Star Force series? I really love the magnificent work in the OST’s for both series. Thank you very much.
A: Thank you for your question. Battle Network was mainly the RolandXV1080 and its expansion board, I think. Star Force was more-so the selection of the main composer Aoki-san, so you should ask her♪. Battle Network especially, practically didn’t have much memory allocated for the instrument data on the GBA ROM cassette. So it was originally a cheap old sound source that could be recorded easily, edited easily, and used easily. With that being said, I feel we recorded from a number of SC-88’s and such. (^^)
And one more! Kaida also tweeted which Battle Network pieces she enjoys the most. Do you agree with her picks?
For Mega Man Battle Network, my own tracks that I like are the regular battles for 4.5 and 5, 4.5’s tournament battle, 5’s ‘Seek a Cord’ [game’s first dungeon], 1’s room interior, I forget the rest! Overall, my favorites by far are 3’s end credits roll, NaviCust, 6’s Title and Last Boss! There’s still more, but I forgot (lolol).
Part 1 translated by Jumi.
Part 2 and extras translated by Dark Net.
Special thanks to MaxieDaMan and MaxRock.