Argonfunk's Blog

Argonfunk's Blog

Super Precise Cooking since 2022

(2024/01/03) Happy new year!

Summarizing the success of 2023

The year 2023 has been a fantastic year in experimenting with unlocking new roads of writing,
being able to fulfill more challenge and reaching limits more reliably which is still continuing as possible.

With 42 originals, 21 covers and 3 whole soundtracks being published within the first year of our existance,
it has been an overall net positive as a musician and sound designer, and I hope to improvise the
recognizable styles of it's era in the next few years, even when the atmosphere changes over time.

In response to recent events, I'll be focusing less on music making this year in favor of
archiving the remaining parts of our favorite chiptune format which still haven't been
documented to this day, a lot of uncover shortly after and the following months.

(2023/11/26) An original development within Super Famicompo 5

The latest works in SPC world

With the SNES contest concluding a month earlier this time around, it's now time to talk about the results and development of original music.
I've become more active in hardware music creation this year around, expanding our efforts into multiple categories,
coming up with brand new original songs, renovating different types of covers and collaborative writing into a fun adventure.

While the covers have certainly became more competitive this iteration, I still managed to recieve another achievement medal with Atop Nearton's Tower,
one of my solo entries that I wrote within the last contest week in order to compete myself with the other collaborations that I've encouraged over time.

One of the notable twists within the latest season is that it's more favorable to pull off more textural covers than extended writing,
so it's unlikely we'll see and cover any long-term songs like Galactic Funk without notable cuts in structure (for comparison, the interlude cover
that would've been replaced by city pop with more time ended up competing with the likes of Pizza Tower and barely overcoming the bullet point)
The flagship cover I've worked the most on ended up placing as one of the weaker halfways due to the challenge of replicating acoustic instruments on waveforms.

In the process, we've also switched to a more stable and modular sound engine with a newly written compiler this time around which allows one to think
more strategically about hardware adaptations, seeing memory shortcomings ahead of time through visual representation and SPC data analysis.

I'll also reconsidering some of the new methods of adaptation and music conversations next time around if time allows our favors.
A lot of fun to be had with all entries, competitors and collaborations where we changed and adapted diffrent tracks with each other in one song.

(2023/11/11) First year of YouTube: 350 subscribers

Halfway through the .700

In late 2022, we have opened up the first Argonfunk channel on YouTube for the public creation of quality era-accurate SPC700
covers which are available to be listened in your chiptune player of choice
and are open sources for readability and hardware injection within SNES homebrew.

It was the first step in getting our art and chiptune's hardware capabilities to be heard and utilized in the public after being locked down for years,
with a simple yet wide encompassing goal of utilizing our favorite sound chip, the SPC700 to it's fullest yet authentic and era-representative extent
which allowed for much and ideas to be made and pulled off within the next few months of our existence.

Throughout the first few months, I've been mainly focusing on remaking and releasing a bunch of our existing songs to showcase our natural evolution,
covering low-poly fun and fusion from all sorts of sources, ranging from video games to demos to album releases.

In the later months, our team have been focusing more on soundtrack writing and sound design while
covering the latest games and soundtrack releases we have on inventory, eventually increasing our fanbase
from 36 to 300 subscribers within the summer period and resulting in a new following.

There have been quite a few experimental moments and rocky releases that happened throughout our new publishing session and emphasized rulesets
for both types of music, and we're continuously aiming for our community with more interactable features in the near future!

Some ideas include the addition of community polls with multiple paths of direction, a more personalized blog (here)
and a live-action server to continue faciliate the creation of early 90's SNES music that are both exciting for us and the audience alike.

~ Argonfunk

See also