« Chiptunes »
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 Since we moved house last year, I’ve played a fair amount of Rock Band with the kids, which has kept my occasional urge to compose music at bay; but I haven’t even unpacked my keyboard/controller
So, I did, and now I’m in the “read up about everything possible in this area, but don’t actually accomplish anything yet” phase of my quest, focusing on experimenting with the 8-bit chiptunes sound. If you’re not familiar with the “chiptunes” sound, might I recommend a few sites:
- 8bit FM
- 8bitpeoples — I especially love the work here by trash80.
- Reformat the Planet, a documentary about the chiptunes movement, which came out of the…
- Blip Festival, a 3-day festival in New York devoted to chiptunes.
- True Chip Till Death, a blog which follows the chiptunes scene.
To that end, here’s a few links for those of a similar bent:
Fake-n-Bake Chiptunes in Reason — A three-part series on YouTube from Judson “Tettix” Cowan that shows how to get an 8-bit-like sound from Reason, which isn’t quite capable of limiting itself to a real vintage 8-bit sound, but you know what— I’m not sure that’s what I want anyway. Making myself a slave to the limitations of the vintage hardware isn’t what I’m looking to do. There’s no harm in taking that 8-bit baseline as a jumping-off point for further experimentation.
For those who would rather limit themselves to vintage hardware (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), here are a few other options:
- MIDINES turns your NES console into a MIDI-controllable “rackmount” synth.
- Little Sound DJ runs on GameBoy and GBC with a sequencer/synth interface. The cartridges are no longer being made, but you can buy the ROM and load it onto a homebrew backup cartridge, or run it in an emulator.
- Nanoloop is a synthesizer / sequencer cartridge for Game Boy consoles, including a 2nd version that now runs with the more modern GBA cartridges.
- KORG DS-10
turns a Nintendo DS into an emulated Korg MS-10 synth, complete with patch cables. I plan to play around with this one as well.
Mark
Just found the Magical 8bit Plug, which is a freeware synth that plugs in to any AU-compatible DAW on the Mac — that includes the cheap-n-easy GarageBand — and via VSTi on Windows. Kick. Ass.
Also found this demo Reason song file that shows NES-like sounds produced in Reason. Excellent for pulling apart to see how it was made.
Reader Comments (1)
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