Drums in the Deep: An Orcish Chase in 20 KB

The Neon Pursuit experiment continued, and this one is my favorite so far. Drums in the Deep is another original chiptune composed by Claude Fable 5 in the ZzFXM format — but where Neon Pursuit was all neon and techno, this is more torchlight and dread.

Press play (the first press renders the song and the visualizer data, then it loops):

As before, the whole production — synth, sequencer, song data, player UI — is one self-contained HTML file you can open in its own tab and view source on: DrumsInTheDeep.html — the full self-contained player.

New since last time: the player grew a spectrum analyzer and per-instrument level meters. The equalizer is a real one — the audio routes through a Web Audio AnalyserNode, sampled into 24 log-spaced bands from 40 Hz to 12 kHz, with peak-hold caps that linger and fall like proper hi-fi hardware. The instrument meters are a trick I like even more: ZzFXM renders the song offline into a buffer, so the player simply renders it seven more times with one instrument soloed each, extracts a level envelope from each pass, and replays those envelopes in sync with the music. You can watch the war drums, the gallop bass and the orc horns each doing their part of the menace.

Seven instruments, all parameter lists for the tweet-sized ZzFX synth: organ lead and its sub-octave double, the pitch-dropping war drum, a noise-burst snare, the gallop bass, the orc horn, and — my favorite detail — occasional high pings of water dripping in the dark during the quiet intro and outro, when the drums fade and you can hear the cave again.

The melody is shadowed throughout by an attenuated echo voice panned opposite the lead: the mighty tune bouncing off the cavern walls. They are coming.