Music and sound effects in Pico8.

Introduction

I started working on some projects and all that is left to do is to create the music and sound effects.

I watched some tutorials about getting started with making music in Pico8, took some notes and tried playing around in the music editor. I learned the basics of the editor and can find my way around it, I just get stuck trying to make music. This is the first time I'm making any kind of music so I'm quite new to all of this.

I just started learning about music theory to help me understand more about how to create music and or sound effects.

Beside following tutorials, taking notes, playing around in the music editor with both channels and trying to re-create some simple tunes and or sound effects of games (all 8bit).

I plan to learn about playing from ear in the future, after I feel more comfortable with my ability to write music in Pico8.

My questions

I saw people talk about how you can compare the notes in Pico8 to piano notes:

White notes | Black notes

"Z = C102_" | "S = CH105_"
"X = D102_" | "D = DH105_"
"C = E102_" | "G = FH105_" etc.

Would it help if I were to also learn about the basics of how the piano works or will music theory be enough with enough practice in Pico8?

Are there thing I might have forgotten about that I need to learn or are there things I don't need to learn in order to write music in Pico8?

If you have any advice please tell me.

resources

I have listed some of the rescources here that I have used.

• Gruber
• Nerdy Teacher
• Dylan Bennett
• Reddit
• Lexaloffle forums

Thank you

• OffensiveWare

If you haven't come across @bikibird's excellent PICO-8 music theory tutorials they are a great resource even for music beginners, teaching from the ground-up directly in the PICO-8 environment. Highly recommended!

Seconding @bikibird's course. Getting some of the basics of music theory has helped me immensely. There is other great content like gruber, but I'd do @bikibird's course before that. You'll get more out of gruber's content having the music theory stuff first.