I like good music. I could care less how you get there. I've heard incredible 2a03 only tracks and some truly shit tracks with expansions and vice versa, so to me it doesn't matter as long as the track sounds good.
I agree, Jayster. I prefer making pure 2A03 music, sure, but once I do that, I tend to add some N163 or similar in there. It just makes the music better. We all know that the outcome can be just as awesome with plain 2A03 sometimes, but other times, you gotta add chords, and I'm not just talking about arps. (though arps are the heart and soul of NES music, in my opinion) I care if my songs sound nice, not if they would play on a generic nes cart. I admit, expansion chips can be considered less genuine when it comes to NES music. My point is that music need not be totally minimalistic to be good music.
Also Furrykef, just to be clear, I hope all that I said doesn't come off as an attack on people who want to work with the things I don't. I'm just laying out my reasons for my own disinterest in these things.
I think multi-expansion is a really awkward way to compose music compared to the alternatives, and I wouldn't get any joy out of trying to play by all of its rules. Obviously some people have fun with it (e.g. Robokabuto, jrlepage) and I'm impressed when they have the patience and skill to wrangle a decent orchestration out of it. I.e. if I don't have to make it myself, I don't really care how shitty the tools used to create it were.
It's true that I will generally have more respect for a good 2A03 track that doesn't "abuse" the system in particular ways, but that doesn't mean I don't still enjoy it when other people do the things I'd never do. For example, moviemovies1's Zoolook cover: if it was mine, it would be 2A03 classical with an attempt to emulate the tape loop with the available instruments, but I still think he did something cool with the DPCM + VRC6.
I like good music. I could care less how you get there. I've heard incredible 2a03 only tracks and some truly shit tracks with expansions and vice versa, so to me it doesn't matter as long as the track sounds good.
This.
I'm more or less into MMC5 with only 1 instrument & using effect macros in the track (instead of using multiple instruments). And at that, I usually use my extra square channels as drone notes, so my music can definitely be reduced to pure 2A03 if I work on it a bit more, but I tend to use drone channels because of added depth.
But this is all my taste & opinion about my own work; I know others can do a better job than I do without expansion chips & I know others may simply fail no matter how many chips they use, because it's all about knowing how to convey your music (not what you convey it with, necessarily).
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I just gotta say that I don't really care. I used to be super gung-ho 2a03-only advocate who would yell at people who used expansions for cheating. Now I've written several 22 channel NSFs and several classical/2a03 ones, and everything in between, so I guess it just boils down to what I want to do at that particular time. I feel like if you're not using an expansion for something that at least sounds interesting (like wasting channels or using the MMC5 squares but not the 2a03 ones?) then it's probably not worth it.
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