CarboHydroM

Punk rock video game music arrangements.

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Rocking

Hi ! My name is Christophe Blondel. I currently live in Marseilles, France. I'm basically a guitar-maniac who works as a sysadmin in real life. I just make music for fun, as a hobby. Because of the time that requires my actual job, I usually end up sacrificing my social life and a significant part of my sleep in order to produce songs.

How did I end up doing that covering stuff ? Well. It all started when I was ten, and used to love so much the music from games like Mega Man, Duck Tales or Zelda on NES, that I recorded them on tape and listened to that instead of radio or commercial songs, like normal people would have done I guess. It seems now that I'm not the only one in that case.

Around that time, Madd Murdock made me want to replay every single game music I found, but in a guitar-driven way. I sort of wanted to continue what this band (who they are) had started.

I was already not too bad at replaying songs by ear, and at thirteen decided to learn playing guitar, both to achieve what I wanted to do and - I admit - to impress girls (what I never could do in the end, but I don't really care). With my fresh computer I got onto tracking and making songs more and more complex. Today thanks to the Internet and all these people doing the same stuff and sharing tricks, I got better. I even started lately to properly produce my original songs, and I'll release them on a separate site when they are ready.

Gear

Computers

Instruments and other music hardware

Software

FAQ

Why "CarboHydroM" ?

"CarboHydroM" is my video game remixer nick, as well as a general purpose internet one. It simply stands for "CHM", but using chemical elements for each of these three letters. That's a bit weird but at least nobody else had this idea.

"CHM" is my 3 lettered video game record name, I used to enter this in games as a signature when I was younger. But it really doesn't have anything to do either with my real name, compiled html format, or the "Centre Hospitalier de Moucron".

Why do you use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3 ?

OGG audio files sound much better than MP3 ones at lower bitrates, that's a fact. So you may get MP3 equivalent results with smaller files. And as far as my music is concerned, it's easy to check. "Unsealed" in OGG (15.8MB) sounds as good as a 20MB+ MP3 rendition. Ogg Vorbis is better, period.

But even so, that's not the core reason. I simply use Ogg Vorbis because it's an open and patent-free format, and I like it. MP3 has been patented.

Also, since the release of Firefox 3.5, Ogg Vorbis files are directly playable by that browser, which is very convenient. You can go get it if you don't use it already.

I can't read OGG files. How can I do so ?

All you need to have is a decoding software, plugin or filter. Whether your operating system, you should easily find some software supporting the Ogg Vorbis format on this page.

I'd still like to get your music in MP3 format.

Well you can either convert the OGG files available on the site to MP3 using the software of your choice (just dump them to WAV files and proceed), or grab some MP3 that I uploaded to VGMix, OCR, or the Dwelling of Duels contest.

I've also released MP3 files for my latest works, check out the links.

How do you get your guitar tone ?

I plug my SG into my GM-200 module, tweak a few EQ settings, and record the guitars lined-in. The sound is definitely poor and hard to mix right. A mic'd guitar sound is way better, but make sure that the neighbors' baby is not sleeping while you're recording... Seriously. There are still some little things I try to do : never record guitars with headphones, because they have to resonate with their own sound. The feedback loop is a good thing.

How do you get those drums ?

My drums are sequenced, not live. First, I can't play drums that fast, and then even if I had drums at home, it would be too noisy (guitar and bass already help much to get high on the "f*** the noisy guy next door" scale). Yet, there are a few tricks that can make sequenced drums sound live and good...

First you mustn't use loops. Drums should be differently played all along a piece, at least if it's meant to sound live, of course.

Then you write them as if a real person had to play them. That's to say, don't forget that a human only has, on max, and as far as I know, two arms and two legs. And he can't instantaneously switch from a crash cymbal on extreme left to another on the extreme right...

Use dynamics to add more feeling to your drums, and they will be at the same time way more enjoyable on listen, and way more supportive for the rest of the instruments. Choose your dynamics accurately, taking into account the mood of your musical parts.

Last but not least, hehe... Use as realistic sounds as you can ! I used to limit myself to free samples found around the web, and I can say that you can already achieve pretty good realism with that. But if you really want the best drumkit in the world... Well I haven't found any one yet that entirely sounds as I want. I actually use several kits together because they sound good only for one element or another. The actual thing is it's not necessary to use a incredibly realistic drumkit if you blend in tons of other instruments, unless you can mix it right...

The final part to get a punchy sound is to apply compression on the different elements to add even more dynamics. A trick I usually use is to set a pretty low threshold on the snare.

I have a request. Do you grant them ?

Sometimes yes. But the work must look fun to me, and I especially must have the time to do it. I won't answer yes if I'm already working on something else. I used to manage a request queue, but it's definitely the best way to get overbooked, so I gave up on that method.

Are you up to collaborative works ?

Definitely. They are way funnier than solo works, and way more interesting because of the style sharing aspect. The drawback is that I often encounter problems to manage such projects, and that a piece can take me several months to come out...

What the ... is Madd Murdock ?

Madd Murdock is the French band of Patrick Giordano, the guitarist and former Player One magazine journalist. They were mostly active during the nineties and were the first people covering video games themes that I heard of. They were playing the opening theme from "Televisator 2", a TV show about video games and stuff, back in the nineties. All I can say is it rocked so hard that I never forgot it and told myself that I would do the same some day. Then I heard new covers from them later, played in clips on the Game One video game channel. This time it was the Corneria theme from StarFox, and Zelda. Consistently awesome. I didn't even have any mean to get their music or anything, though. So I kept looking for one, until I finally found some mp3 files and a video, years later. Hearing again those covers I had been needing from the bottom of my heart really thrilled me out. Check out the links page if you want to hear that !

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© Copyright 2004-2010 Christophe Blondel