The Unpaid Gamers Interview The Mastermind of Pretty Eight Machine, Inverse Phase

We scored a great interview with Inverse Phase about his recent release of “Pretty Eight Machine”. If you didn’t see our post before, Inverse Phase remade the Nine Inch Nails album “Pretty Hate Machine” track by track using vintage computing and console sound boards. You can grab the album here. It’s great.

It’s obvious that you share a passion for the gaming industry, what are some of your favorite titles?

Excellent question! There are so many good games out there, but I tend to like obscure and/or underrated games. I can pick some greats out of a hat: California Games, the Earthbound/Mother series, the Katamari series, Nethack, Paper Mario, Ys….

 

It seems like quite the undertaking “remaking” an entire album.  When you approach a product of this scale, where do you typically start?
It’s definitely a challenge. The best way (for me) is just to figure out where I can get the most work done at any given point in time, and then just work there. In P8M’s case, I just kind of cycled through the track list in order and worked on a little bit of each track, going back to whatever I felt like as time went on.

 

Being a Nine Inch Nails fan myself, I can really appreciate this album.  It seems that Trent’s music is a natural fit for this style, but what inspired you to choose Pretty Hate Machine over any of his other work?
In short, I think PHM already sounds a bit gamey and I could already hear synthy things that matched up with some of the timbres that consoles put out. That inspired some of the track choices, as well. It was still a challenge, but being able to “hear” what the song would sound like in your head really helps you get it down.

 

There are a lot of different elements and tracks to Trent’s music.  Is there a particular track that presented a challenge?  If so, what kind of obstacles did you face?
I would venture to say there was a challenge (or three) in every track. You’re welcome to “treasure hunt” on my bandcamp; just as there are liner notes for the album (as you mention in your next question), there are also liner notes for each individual track (just click on the tracks or “info” next to them in the tracklist)! Just in general, though, I can pick out a few things that I had an “interesting” time with:

 

1. The guitar blasts in various parts of the album. Imitating rhythm guitar, chug, and power chords is not always easy to do, compared to, say, lead guitars and solos where the tones are more pure. They often end up sounding cheesy instead of “metal” and it takes a lot of work to get them remotely right. Hell, my guitar blasts still might sound a bit cheesy anyhow.

 

2. Imitating Trent’s screams. How do you make a game system scream? The answer is a really fast dissonant arpeggio. Basically, just cycle random tones. Do noises that sound like powerups. That sort of thing. Same with speech. Though it was a different technique, it’s still something you don’t really imitate on simple sound chips.

 

3. I never really analyzed the background noises and nuances until I played each song over and over again in headphones, so that was a lot of cranking volume and listening for little things.

 

4. Making consoles sound “dirty”: File under “screams”. Due to the pure tones you get out of these things it’s hard to get notes that are distorted, but still the right note.

 

5. LENGTH. Sometimes, right when you feel like you’re getting close to the end of the song, you realise you’ve got 30 seconds left of material that sounds like it loops but it has little nuances and you have to keep things interesting, because, well, it’s a chiptune.

 

Then there are the usual suspects of what makes chiptuning challenging, but some of us actually like the challenge:

 

– Channel limitations: With 3 sounds at a time for a lot of systems and so much stuff going on in NIN songs, it’s a challenge to fit complex music in such a small space.

 

– Getting the right sounds out of a system: I sort of “worked around” this problem by using multiple systems to find the right sound for a particular track and keep things fresh, but you definitely still run into sounds where you just have to make something up and hope people like your “imitation”.

 

In your notes for the “Pretty Eight Machine” project, you mentioned that different classic sound configurations were used.  How do you determine which system’s configuration to use when you re-imagine a track?
Half planning, and half listening, I’d say. Sometimes I would just hear a sound in the NIN original that would get my mind going and I’d match that timbre with the console that did it best. But I also laid out a bunch of systems that I wanted to tackle / try my hand at, so it was kind of like putting together a puzzle!

 

With a project of this scale did you set a deadline for completion or was this a “done when it’s done” kind of thing? On average how long did it take you to complete each track?
Ugh… I wanted to be able to set deadlines and meet them, and last year I struggled with that quite a bit. Then I eventually realised it just wasn’t going to happen because too much was happening in my life all at once. I took a step back and said “I just need to work on each track a little bit every day and let people know I’m still working”… determining the finish date was difficult because sometimes it was big progress one day and little-to-none the next.

 

If I do another album I will definitely NOT set a deadline at all. This might upset some of the folks that support me if I do another Kickstarter, for example, but hopefully people will look at my track record and say “oh, ok, he can do this”. It’s much easier to work when people believe in you. =]

 

What motivated you to start doing something like this? Was it the love of video games, or the love of Nine Inch Nails, or a bit of both?

Well, it all started when I was talking to some friends at a convention about how NIN would translate into chiptunes. I’m a huge NIN fan and I’ve been writing chiptunes for a while now, so I thought it would be a no-brainer. After spending at least a few hours looking for a good Head Like A Hole chiptune and not finding one, I decided to do about 2 minutes of one that night, and played it the next day. Everyone that heard it said “YOU HAVE TO DO MORE OF THIS”. Eventually I kickstarted the project, and that succeeded too. So, I pressed on!

 

Who are some of your other favorite musical artists and what kind of
inspirations do you draw from them?
I get a lot of inspiration from random progressive metal and other game tracks, but if I were to name any artists, it would probably be fellow chiptuners like Jake Kaufman (virt), Dino Lionetti (Cheap Dinosaurs), RushJet1. Also, oldschool demoscener/chiptuner Mat Simmonds (4mat) and chip-hop buddy Mr. Esquivel (A_Rival).

 

We would really like to thank you for taking the time out to speak with us. This is an amazing album and we can’t wait to hear more from you.  Are there any upcoming projects that you would like to mention?
This is the part where everyone asks me if I’m doing The Downward Spiral, or The Fragile, right?

 

Anyway, I can’t commit to more tribute albums at the moment, but I am currently working on music for four (!) different independent game projects, one of them is repeat work for Embraceware, a studio I did another game soundtrack for last year, so that’s pretty awesome. I guess the blatant plug is the best one… Follow me on twitter or Facebook! All of my future projects are announced both there and via my email fanclub thing. I love talking to people and hearing from people, so feel free to comment/reply/whatever. Thanks for your interest!

 

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