Chip Explosion

How it's made

Source

an 8-bit console explosion has three parts. (1) A noise burst, the chip's noise channel: white noise whose cutoff falls from bright (about 9 kHz) to dull (about 600 Hz) as the blast loses energy. (2) A stepped pitch-drop tone: a narrow pulse wave that falls through eight discrete semitone-ish notes, the way a chip sequencer would step a frequency register. (3) A short sine sub-thump that supplies the weight of the blast.

Body

both the noise and the pulse tone pass through a bit-depth quantiser (the "bitcrusher"), which adds the crunchy, grainy distortion. The tone is quantised harder than the noise. A low-pass after the crusher removes the harshest alias-like fizz above the sweep.

Envelope

a 2 ms attack avoids a click, then a fast initial drop into a long exponential-like tail. The noise decays slower than the tone, so the final part is a dull crumbling hiss. A final fade reaches zero by the end of the render.

Spectral movement

the noise low-pass sweeps down over the decay; the tone steps down over eight steps.

Variation

the seed shifts the starting pitch and the step times slightly; presets change the size of the blast, the bit depth and the amount of noise against tone.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.