Drawcia Sorceress ZX Spectrum Beeper Cover
In August, I was listening to Tim Follin's work. When I listened to Chronos on youtube, the suggested videos were for other ZX Spectrum beeper music, such as Rubber Love by Mister Beep. I was blown away! I had thought that Tim Follin getting 5 tinny voices out of the one channel beeper was the peak of what one could do, but Rubber Love had a full sound to it! I listened to a lot of ZX Spectrum beeper music (My favorites are now the fluidcore demo and Smoke Break), and was inspired to give it a try!
I thought that a cover of Drawcia Sorceress would be a good fit for the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum's identity is centered around color and rainbows, much like how Kirby Canvas Curse's worlds are named after the colors of the rainbow. I used Beepola because its interface is easier to use (in hindsight, perhaps I should've used the more up-to-date 1tracker, but it was just a small, fun project). I used the Tritone engine, because it had the most channels (without tinnyness) out of all the engines in Beepola. When making the cover, I was inspired by the aforementioned Rubber Love and its fakeout, as well as Fairlight: A Prelude's title screen music for the 48k Spectrum and its use of two voices for a Baroque(?) sound (I don't know my eras of music, apologies). I finished the cover on 28 August 2023.
I also quite liked the art made for the ZX Spectrum, and wanted to draw a piece within those limitations to pair with my beeper cover; it is the art at the top of this post. There are only two colors in each 8x8 pixel square, and it only uses colors from the 16 colors available on the Spectrum. I used a canvas of 320x240 pixels, but I stretched it to a 8 by 7 pixel aspect ratio, because I believe the Spectrum's display was usually viewed with a CRT, which stretched the image horizontally. I made sure my art looked correct when stretched. The image at the top of this post is being stretched with webpage CSS code; if you open it in a new tab, you'll see what it looks like with no stretching. I started drawing right after finishing the song and I finished the drawing on 2 September 2023.
If you want to learn more about how all this impressive beeper music is possible, I suggest reading this excellent article "Understanding Computer Sound" by Adam Podstawczyński.