readme.md

Fake SID Tutorial – A Basic Song

Bass

Let's start by creating a nice bass instrument. Open Fake SID, switch to INSTRUMENT view, and configure instrument A like so:

Wave	Filter

Here is a brief explanation for my reasoning behind these settings:

• Envelope: We turn everything down except sustain. This way, sustain effectively controls the instrument's volume. Also, we want hard restart enabled, so we can clearly hear, when a new note starts.
• Wavetable: We start off with a pulse wave of relatively narrow width and we want the width to increase over time.
• Filter routing: We will put the bassline on the first voice. But we also want to play around with the bass in JAM view. So we enable the filter for voices 0 and 3.
• Filter table: The bass gets a low-pass filter. We start off with a rather low cutoff frequency and let it drop even further down over time.

Switch to EFFECT view and delete the two rows of effect A. Rename it to bass. Finally, switch to JAM view and play some notes to hear the sound of your bass instrument.

Switch to TRACK view. Make sure, track 00 is selected. Enter notes like so:

Track view	Notes

You can press play to listen to our bassline. Let's make the song a little slower. Switch to SONG view and set the tempo and swing of row 00 to A2. It should look like this:

Tempo select	Song view

This is how it should sound: basic-0.mp3

At this point, it's a good idea to save our song. Switch to MAIN view and set the song title and, file name. Then hit SAVE. Notice the new file in the song file list.

Main view

Arpeggios

Let's add a second instrument and create some arpeggio effects to go with it:

Instrument	Effect 1	Effect 2	Effect 3

We use H for the instrument and H, I, and J for the three effects. Having configured the first effect, there is a nice opportunity to employ the copy and paste functionality. We copy the effect with the copy button, then switch to effect I and press the paste button. Now we only need to do a few adjustments. We proceed with effect J in like manner.

Notice that we select both pulse and triangle wave to be played simultaneously. How does that work? The SID chip will somehow combine these two waveforms, effectively multiplying them. The result will generally be more quiet, the pulse width affecting the overall volume. I arrived at these settings after some experimentation. (Please note that combining of waveforms is one aspect of the SID emulation, that is not at all emulated correctly.)

It's time to add a new track into the song. Switch over to SONG view. and set the track reference on the second voice on row 00 to 10.

Track select	Song view

We could now manually switch to TRACK view and select the track reference there again but there is a shortcut for this: Press and hold the track reference button you just pressed to set it to 10. Now, enter notes like so:

Track view	Notes

Press play. It should sound like this: basic-1.mp3

Again, don't forget to save your work.

Snare

Let's add a snare drum. We set up an instrument-effect pair like shown below. Feel free to experiment and play around with the settings.

Wave	Filter	Effect

Conveniently, we won't have the bass und the snare drum play simultaneously, so we can add the snare to our bassline and save the third voice for the melody.

Track view	Notes

The result will sound like so: basic-2.mp3

Kick

It's boring to have a snare without a nice kick. I like having kick and bass play at the same time. We need an extra instrument-effect pair for that:

Wave	Filter	Effect

Now, we need to revisit track 00 and apply minor changes.

Track view	Notes

We want to replace A with D at certain rows. This can easily be achieved by first making sure we have selected the right instrument and effect (D), and then double tapping the right instrument and effect buttons in the track.

The resulting song will sound like this: basic-3.mp3

Melody

TODO