how to do chiptunes?

are there special DAWs that are used to create them? is it worth to buy some old amiga to do them? what about trackers? Does it make sense do reduce the samplerate in ableton to get the sound?

Use 8 bit vsts?

use pulse wave

Bitcrushed square waves

PWM

white noise beats

Chiptune is pretty vague, it depends on if you're trying to emulate any chip in particular. Generally, act as if you have about four instruments, all of which are monophonic. Play fast arpeggios for chords. As others have noted, use simple, periodic waveforms (square, sawtooth, triangle, sine) and white noise, preferably with no filtering, and bitcrush any samples you use until they're barely recognisable.

It's not really worth getting an Amiga over. You can achieve the same effect by using Scream Tracker and making a mental note to only use four channels, then buy Impulse Tracker for about £30 to render all your tracks out to CD quality .wav files. Even tracking only emulates chiptunes (Paula itself was too advanced to really "count" as far as I understand). You might as well just stick with your regular DAW and cheat by putting on a little reverb and other luxuries real chiptune artists couldn't attain at the time.

Think yourself lucky you don't have to write real chiptunes!

i thoguht the whole thing about chiptunes was that they were made with gameboys and stuff

i mean, making a chiptune with a daw just kinda seems like adding fake hisses/cracks to achieve a "vinyl" sound, or attempting to make your digital tracks sound "analog" just cause it is cool.

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:46 PM, hardcode said:

i mean, making a chiptune with a daw just kinda seems like adding fake hisses/cracks to achieve a "vinyl" sound, or attempting to make your digital tracks sound "analog" just cause it is cool.

Difference is that vinyl noises aren't something computers can perfectly emulate. Chip sounds are.

well i guesss that's what i misuderstand about chiptunes. i was under the impression that the whole draw of them was similar to that of using old analog equipment, in that the gear itself with all its difficulties is what provides the challenge and experience, moreso than the actual musical content.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID

Check out 8bitcollective if you're really interested in this stuff if you haven't already.

List of software on their wiki

https://8bc.org/w/index.php/Software

  On 8/9/2011 at 4:14 PM, hardcode said:

well i guesss that's what i misuderstand about chiptunes. i was under the impression that the whole draw of them was similar to that of using old analog equipment, in that the gear itself with all its difficulties is what provides the challenge and experience, moreso than the actual musical content.

I think it's more about aesthetics, like people who emulate 80s pop or 60s psychedelic music or etc.

so is there as much aesthetic value to boring ass chiptunes as there is to 80s pop and 60s psychedelic or is it just a hipster fad?

If you want to go the C64 chip-tune route then this is the tracker for you - http://sourceforge.net/projects/goattracker2/

(It's hard as nails though ...)

There are a bunch of trackers that emulate specific chips though if you want to do some keygen sort of stuff I'd just grab MilkyTracker and a pile of XM files to learn how to do things.

Probably nobody would be able to tell or care if you made tracks in Ableton though.

Lots of little fun trackers about if you search Pouet etc http://kkfos.aspekt.fi/projects/nes/tools/pornotracker/ http://code.google.com/p/klystrack/

It looks like you can get LSDJ for about 2 dollars. I've used it on the computer and the GB. Sounds nice to me!

http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/

http://www.delamancha.co.uk/miniSID.htm

:sup:

  On 8/9/2011 at 4:26 PM, Dan C said:

Check out 8bitcollective if you're really interested in this stuff if you haven't already.

 

List of software on their wiki

 

https://8bc.org/w/index.php/Software

That really helped :)

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:54 PM, Cryptowen said:

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:46 PM, hardcode said:

i mean, making a chiptune with a daw just kinda seems like adding fake hisses/cracks to achieve a "vinyl" sound, or attempting to make your digital tracks sound "analog" just cause it is cool.

Difference is that vinyl noises aren't something computers can perfectly emulate. Chip sounds are.

Not true at all. Show me a dsp emulation of a SID 6581 that actually sounds like a real 6581 and I'll eat my hat.

http://www.plogue.com/?page_id=43

Also there's this, not sure if it was on the list I posted earlier.

NES:

http://www.tweakbench.com/toad

http://www.tweakbench.com/triforce

http://www.tweakbench.com/peach

ATARI:

http://www.preromanbritain.com/ymvst/

c64:

http://www.delamancha.co.uk/basic.htm

Here's some inspiration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_K5DHZlfg

  On 8/10/2011 at 2:38 AM, MrSparkle666 said:

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:54 PM, Cryptowen said:

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:46 PM, hardcode said:

i mean, making a chiptune with a daw just kinda seems like adding fake hisses/cracks to achieve a "vinyl" sound, or attempting to make your digital tracks sound "analog" just cause it is cool.

Difference is that vinyl noises aren't something computers can perfectly emulate. Chip sounds are.

Not true at all. Show me a dsp emulation of a SID 6581 that actually sounds like a real 6581 and I'll eat my hat.

The distortion & playback filters in the player I use (SidPlay 2.5) take things down to circuit-based/cycle accurate level so I'd say it's pretty darn close - http://www.bel.fi/~alankila/c64-sw/index-cpp.html

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:46 PM, hardcode said:

i mean, making a chiptune with a daw just kinda seems like adding fake hisses/cracks to achieve a "vinyl" sound, or attempting to make your digital tracks sound "analog" just cause it is cool.

 

Yeah, it's exactly like that (and, as in another thread, sampling Mellotrons). People used tools which had technical limits, and now that we have better tools, we sometimes emulate those old limits because we think they have "character." I don't think there's anything wrong with recording some vinyl crackling and laying it on top of a pristine recording to give it some charm, or using simpler waveforms than you need to in order to give some music a simple feel. (The bleeping in Girl/Boy Song, for instance, works beautifully.)

I wouldn't do it to be "cool," but I would do it if it sounds nice in the context of a given track, or if I was making a soundtrack that was supposed to evoke a particular era or style of music.

  On 8/10/2011 at 11:33 AM, ZoeB said:

  On 8/9/2011 at 3:46 PM, hardcode said:

i mean, making a chiptune with a daw just kinda seems like adding fake hisses/cracks to achieve a "vinyl" sound, or attempting to make your digital tracks sound "analog" just cause it is cool.

 

 

Yeah, it's exactly like that (and, as in another thread, sampling Mellotrons). People used tools which had technical limits, and now that we have better tools, we sometimes emulate those old limits because we think they have "character." I don't think there's anything wrong with recording some vinyl crackling and laying it on top of a pristine recording to give it some charm, or using simpler waveforms than you need to in order to give some music a simple feel. (The bleeping in Girl/Boy Song, for instance, works beautifully.)

 

I wouldn't do it to be "cool," but I would do it if it sounds nice in the context of a given track, or if I was making a soundtrack that was supposed to evoke a particular era or style of music.

you also do not rent a classical orchestra for making classical music. Its totally ok to do it with a vst plugin. If it becomes very successful you still can use your 3000 bugs synth or a 30 person classical orchestra