truly massive savings (single-channel M8)
By Perhaps Bry on January 11, 2026 10:32 pm
M8 render, no samples. 5th place at the M8 single-channel competition at Syntax Demoparty 2025 last November (thx cTrix for organizing these year after year). I thought i'd release the tune here too, because i'm a big big cheater who doesn't respect weeklybeats rules and am evil uwaaahau
But i thought i'd break down the making of the track a little more here:
- I've made single-track tunes before but this time i wanted to make it less of an exercise in linear rhythms, and to instead sound as much as possible like there was some impossible polyphony going on. with FMSYNTH's operators you have thankfully some flexibility in manually splitting an instrument into 4 x 1op, or 2 x 2op, etc.
- a considerable amount of time went into making separate kick and kick+clap sounds, AND making them sound not like compromised versions of each other by way of reduced operators.
- relying on turning the reverb way up for those pad hits.
- most of the hihat work was extremely bespoke: cloning certain notes on a one-off basis, just to steal one FM operator for a noise oscillator that i could use as a hihat.
- In some cases, some crafty LFO usage allowed me to mix closed and openhihats at the 16ths scale in parallel with the bass note eighths.
Anyway, good fun and there's still lots more to uncover in the world of single-channel tracks, as evidenced in the huge number of impressive entries in the compo. Congratz to Dustsucker for winning it!!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
(it was on LGPT though so no FX! hehe)