status: trying and failing to get a good semblance of a tubular bell in some Famicom sound chip other than the VRC7
the Namco 163 is looking promising, after a failure to make anything work with the VRC6 and a complete lack of understanding of the 5B
still the 163 is very... detailed, to the point that I find myself opening up reference audio in audacity to try to make a 1:1 copy of the waveform
status update: now considering opening MATLAB to run some code to generate a sequence of 64- or 32-sample 163 waveforms that closely approximates the bell sound
it's a long shot but does anyone have some experience getting bells to sound right in famitracker without using vrc7
@Felthry I wish I could help more with actual experience on this, but my FT experience is limited and 2A03-only. The FT forums are full of interesting instrument packs, though....
@ElectricKeet hey if you can get a convincing tubular bell playing F#4 in 2A03 that would be exactly what I need
Already tried searching forums, without much success unfortunately
@ElectricKeet The piece I'm trying to cover uses the bell as a major thematic element so I'd like for it to be as high quality as possible, that's why I'm not just going with the low-quality DPCM
@ElectricKeet actually, this specifically is the bell sound I want to semi-accurately recreate. Almost the entire thing will play before a repeat, so it can't be just the beginning unfortunately (the piece I'm covering is Terranigma's Underworld theme, if you're curious)
@Felthry I may try to plink at this a bit later, but it seems like it'll be a toughie.
Do you need the full decay of the note? If you only need a couple beats (something short like the bell hits in the 90's X-Men cartoon theme) then the triangle wave can be kinda smoothly attenuated from full to about half volume by setting the DPCM channel's level. (Hooray for non-linear mixing!) From there, I'd play with layering on top of that for harmonics.