How do you make two notes play simultaneously in the same channel?

[Tetrachroma]

Forgive me for not being too familiar with musical terminology. I'll try my best to explain;

I'm trying to make two notes play simultaneously within the same channel. It's not the 0xx effect I'm looking for, I'm talking two notes playing at the same exact time. For example, rather than having C-2 play in the Pulse 1 channel and C-3 play in the Pulse 2 channel, is there an effect or some other method I can use to make it so C-2 and C-3 both play in the same channel?

Thanks for your time.

[Raijin]

No, that's not possible.

[TheNoobHunter]

Technically, this is possible with a trick using N163 where the wave itself mimics a harmony.

viewtopic.php?t=2645

This is the only time I've heard it be used and personally I don't really see a point in using it other than as a cool trick.

[Lum]

Unfortunately no, you can only play one note per channel. The reason for this is because that's how it worked on the original NES - if you listen to a lot of old chip music, you'll notice there's only a small number of notes played at once. This is because they had so few sound channels to work with.

There are a few ways people get around this limitation, however.

The most common way is to use an expansion chip. These are based on actual chips that were embedded in Famicom cartridges, with the purpose of adding more sound channels. You can add expansion chips by going to Module > Properties, and choose a chip under the "Expansion sound" dropdown menu. Each chip has different capabilities, and most sound very different than the standard NES channels, so you'll want to do research on each chip before using it.

The second way is to use arpeggios, which I see you already understand.

Those are really the only options. It would be nice if you could play multiple notes in a channel, but I guess Nintendo didn't think about that when designing the NES's sound system.

[w7n]

Those are really the only options. It would be nice if you could play multiple notes in a channel, but I guess Nintendo didn't think about that when designing the NES's sound system.

Designing that is certainly not worth it. In fact, technically the 2 square waves on the NES are on the same pin, it's just that we call them two separate channels. To play multiple notes you need multiple sets of addresses to write etc., and after that everyone would still call them 'SQ1, SQ2, SQ3, SQ4' etc. as if they were different channels.

[HertzDevil]

The very assumption of a track in a tracker is that only a single monophonic channel is represented, especially if each track maps directly to a hardware sound channel. There are some notable exceptions:

• "New Note Actions" in sampled trackers allow overlapping of a note's release with the next note's triggering;
• Klystrack and Renoise do allow multiple notes on the same track;
• Technically, this counts if a "global" sound generator is shared across multiple tracks without its own dedicated track (e.g. 5B noise, OPLx percussion channels in some trackers);
• Some sound engines tie one music data stream to multiple hardware channels, but FamiTracker / 0CC-FT isn't one of them.

A channel by design cannot play multiple notes simultaneously, at least not without acoustic tricks. (MIDI channels are really just tracks.) Even with that it is not hard to imagine importing DPCM chord samples that contain multiple pitches.

[Xyz]

Nope, "tracks" in ImpulseTracker can have NNAs which make the single channel polyphonic.