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[Synthoid]

I never could understand why people spend a lot of time trying to adapt old video game units for musical purposes. Aren't those old Nintendo (et al) systems cheesy and noisy sounding?

Guess I'm missing something here. Of course, I never understood circuit bending either.
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M3, Triton Classic, Radias, Motif XS, Alesis Ion

[citrus]

Ah, let me share with you this wondrous link, the stuff a gameboy can do with a simple sine, triangle or square wave can be phenomenal:

http://8bitpeoples.com/discography_txt.php

I think of it as more retro than cheesey, reminding me of those lovely simple, very pop art graphics of 80s computer games. I am primarily a classically trained violinist, having now played bach, brahms, mozart etc since i was about 7, the chiptune stuff is very distinct, its not really trying to emulate other sounds, in other words it is very simplistic. I do however find replica synth violin sounds awful (many folk i'm sure will disagree with me but after playing so long I feel i'm allowed to be a violin snob). Synth sounds that try and emulate violins seem very cheesey to me. There has been heaps of development in replica piano sounds but sadly everytime I hear strings I can pretty much tell if they're fake and make me want to be sick. Thats why I guess i like chiptune, doesn't sound like anything else and isn't trying to, has that crappy 80s lo fi feel but to me its individual and unique, and is memory laden stuff from my childhood. The music can range from the very complicated to beautifully simple, also alot of the musicians look at composing chiptune from a mathematical perspective, programming in code sequence by sequence and building it up, it takes an incredibly long time and usually is extremely well thought out, give it a try, the link provides heaps of free downloads from some of chiptunes most prolific contributors (chiptune is generally a non profit medium).

[Brad B]

Ah yes ... chiptunes - heavily memory laden indeed! The age of C64! (from my perspective . The Commodore 64 'PC' was the best you could get in terms of audio compared to other available alternatives. Still it was ofcourse almost nothing - and thats what makes chiptunes soooo special; making something out of almost nothing!

My alltime favorite chiptune programmers are Rob Hubbard and Steve Rowlands from which the last also did the music for the game Retrograde. (find SID player and Retrograde tracks here http://www.jumpwise.com/download/SteveRowlands-RetroGrade.zip). It was amazing, and still is if you remember that the C64 only had 3 voices or something but it was topnotch back then!

Sound: MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID
3-channel synthesizer with programmable ADSR envelope
8 octaves
4 waveforms: triangle, sawtooth, variable pulse, noise
Oscillator synchronization, ring modulation
Programmable filter: high pass, low pass, band pass, notch filter

Bob Yannes who designed this for the C64 later co-founded Ensoniq.

Yes, chiptunes is more then just a bunch of squible-sounds put together - it was all about getting the absolute most out of hardware and could only be done by the most passionate/dedicated individuals. Today mentality has changed somewhat I think - if it isnt enough, just slap some extra hardware or memory towards your goal. I believe that almost no-one really delves into any piece of hardware so much as to get the absolute maximum out of it anymore. And that's probably the commercial market to blame really - why invest all your time in figuring everything out if something new is about to come out anyways? In the time of the C64 things were a bit different still

Brad

[Synthoid]

[Timo]

"Zombie... Zombie.... Zombie.... Zombie Nation".

Zombie Nation with the massive international club hit "Kernkraft 400" on the year leading up to the millennium, using the C64 SID sound chip (housed in an Elektron SID station) as the main synth line, spawning a million and one bootlegs. (Incidently, the main melody of Kernkraft 400 was also lifted from a sub-tune of the C64 game "Lazy Jones", but I digress...)

Personally I love chip music, having fond memories of the C64 but moreso the Amiga, especially the cracked games intros ("cracktros") on the latter in addition to the predominant tracker module format (created using programs like OctaMED).

The SID chip of the C64 in particular had a character all of its own, though. A very phat, gritty, nasty, aliased, lo-fi type sound, huge detuned, pulse-width modulated leads, crazy ring, sync, and interlacing modulating mayhem, and blippy wavetable percussion, and the synthesis and sequencing capabilities shaped the sound further, such as the characteristic bubbly, rapidly arpeggiated chords to save other channels from being used, and these techniques were brought over to the Amiga too, especially in the game, demo or loader/cracktro chiptunes.

Just like it's so easy to make an Access Virus sound cheesy, a great number of chip tunes are cheesy too, but the good ones stand out by a mile. It's absolutely amazing what these programmers did with just 3 channels of sound synthesis (in the SID), or four channels of synthesis and samples (using the Amiga's Paula sound chip). The Turrican stuff by Chris Huelsbeck on both the C64 and later the Amiga are sublime.

Two of my other chip-tune favourites, from different computer platforms:-

Rambo First Blood - Part II - by Martin Galway (3.3mb MP3) on the C64 (SID)

Angels (aka Comic Bakery) - Jochen Hippel (4.4mb MP3), on the Amiga (Paula) using four oscillators/channels. This version by Hippel was a cracktro to the game "Superfrog" on the Amiga, but the song was originally made by Martin Galway on the C64 for the game Comic Bakery. I prefer Hippel's version, though, even if he did re-title it!

There's no doubt about it that chip-tunes and "tracker" modules are an absolute goldmine in musical innovation and can offer huge inspiration. It just shows that a restriction of audio tool possibilities can provide a rich envelope in which people will push the capabilities and techniques to the limit.

If you're into the C64 stuff, check out the free High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) available freely on the net (about 34,000 (!) SID tunes [250mb uncompressed!] to date, including most of the major game and demo releases. You can use a free player such as DeliPlayer to play SIDs and other chip or tracker tunes such as Mods, XM, etc, or you can obtain codecs for WinAmp to play them. For the discerned there's SidPlay v2.

Something I found out a while back, after a lot of digging: If you've ever heard the very early 1990's techno tune "Das Boot" by the group U96, the characteristic electronic vocals throughout the tune were created using the Atari ST using a program called 'ST Speech'. You can use an Atari emulator for the PC to simulate it, and it works ok, but it lacks the metallic-type resonance of the original, I'm going to have to grab an ST off of ebay one day and sample the hell out of it.

Didn't mean to ramble on, don't mind me...
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[Synthoid]

Thanks for the info.....I'll check out the tunes as well.
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M3, Triton Classic, Radias, Motif XS, Alesis Ion

[Synthoid]

Sure is quiet down here.
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M3, Triton Classic, Radias, Motif XS, Alesis Ion

[Vadim]

[Synthoid]

Well, I don't know all the facts.....but what I heard is this:


1.) E-MU buys out Ensoniq....all goes well for awhile.....then

2.) E-MU drops Ensoniq

3.) E-MU drops its own hardware synths & modules

4.)
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M3, Triton Classic, Radias, Motif XS, Alesis Ion

[Vadim]

[Synthoid]

Yes.....tears and sadness.
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M3, Triton Classic, Radias, Motif XS, Alesis Ion