Boléro

I perform Maurice Ravel's Boléro on a variety of homemade 8-bit instruments.

Download

• Linus Akesson - Maurice Ravel - Boléro.mp3 (MP3, 26.2 MB)

Some stats and details

• 9 hours and 42 minutes of footage
• 52 mixer channels
• 13 neck- and bowties
• 9 different instruments
• 1 crazy automaton
• 0 regrets

This project took me a bit over half a year to finish.

I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.

It was fun to put my tools and methods to the test with this huge undertaking. When I started out I had no idea if my mixing and video-editing process would work at this scale, but it turned out to only need a few tweaks here and there.

The nine instruments are: The Qweremin (breadbin / regular C64C / dark C64C), Qwertuoso (breadbin), the Paulimba, the Tenor Commodordion, the Family Bass (albeit not as a bass this time), my still unnamed floppy-drive noise instrument (1541 / 1541-II), the C=TAR, the Chipophone, and a newcomer: NES timpani.

The timpani sound is based on the famous NES staircase triangle wave. But there is no register for controlling its volume, and yet we can hear an envelope with a release phase. To achieve this, I rely on a neat trick that was used already in Super Mario Bros.: It turns out that the triangle channel is mixed with the ADPCM sample-playback channel and then fed through a non-linear resistor network (the output is proportional to ((adpcm + triangle)⁻¹ + C)⁻¹). Therefore, adding a constant DC offset via the sample channel makes the triangle more or less compressed.

In nearly every part of this video, what you see is what you hear; the audio and video were recorded at the same time. But the automaton is different: Thanks to its 100% repeatable performance I could capture the sound of each individual section of the hardware, with the microphone up close, and then mix the parts according to taste and combine them with the visuals from a separate take.

Fun fact: You can't see it in the video but the automaton is supported by original C64 boxes: