Chiptunes got me into digital music

[willhelpme]

From the old 8/16 bit era. The tunes were straight up jams, amazing feats of composition on such limited tech and often had very intricate melodies. Plus they were so catchy!

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C2WFIz7ifs
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It was amazing how they did so much with basic chips. Sheer genius. After that it just kept getting better and better so when the various synths, waves and various combinations therein had a resurgence I was with it. Great video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RrQrATnXXY

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And quite possibly the most overly well produced track for a title that nobody probably paid any attention to back in the days as they couldn't wait to click past it:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGIKnn-COS4

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What got you into this lane?

 

[containercore]

I don't have a huge interest in chiptune music per se, but since I do a little bit of SMW romhacking from time to time I end up working on SNES music and pixel art. Usually I'm ripping the samples/note data from other games, mostly on the PS1, N64 and Nintendo DS and retooling them to fit into the SNES audio RAM and channel constraints. It's pretty laborious and the tools for doing it aren't the best (you literally have to code every note and its volume/expression individually) so I haven't worked on any tunes in a while, but it's really cool when you get it to work, because you end up with a recreation of the original song that's sometimes 1/10th or 1/100th the size (around 50kb when you add up the samples and code), but if you're smart about the way you do your loops and audio compression it will sound almost identical.

This is from Pokemon Black & White:

View: https://youtu.be/XPWDo6SXF4k


And one from Bomberman Land Touch:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APpwva8jDKY

 

[LostintheCycle]

I was the same, I've already talked about it on the Road that chiptune was how I began making my own music when I was a kid, and that grew into my general interest in electronic music.
I love the creativity that comes out of working in the limitations, my favourite trick was sticking two instruments onto a single channel, especially kick and bass on the triangle, as well as doing delay effects with the pulses.
If I remember correctly, the reason I got into it was I had a friend who was fooling around with FamiTracker in class so I gave it a crack myself. My friend gave up after a couple weeks, but I persevered and produced dozens of tracks, and hundreds of false starts/experiments/unfinished tracks in a couple of years. He still made music by the way, he just didn't get into chiptune and I did.

 

[Ross_Я]

What got you into this lane?

Yeah, well, obviously chiptunes were some of my first digital tracks as well. What with demoscene tunes in various old cracks and installers, and yeah, old video games on Sega and whatever else...

The Mod Archive v4.0b - A distinctive collection of modules - Satellite one. - SATELL.S3M (S3M)

modarchive.org

The Mod Archive v4.0b - A distinctive collection of modules - spacedeliria - space_deliria.mod (MOD)

modarchive.org

Captain - Space Debris - Nectarine

www.scenestream.net

Et cetera. Good stuff.

I love the creativity that comes out of working in the limitations

Golden words, really. From music, to video games, to movies, it is simply amazing on ocassion to see all the tricks humans invented to make their ideas real. If anything makes a compelling argument that some limits gotta be left in their place, it is this thing.

I persevered and produced dozens of tracks

Share?

 

[willhelpme]

Cracktros were often better than the games themselves from the POV of sheer coding innovation. What they crammed into a loader in terms of effects and music were insane. My intuition says that devs like Rare and Psygnosis were filled with people from the 16 Bit Euro scene, back when, as they had the same "Push the hardware to its limits with creative thinking" mindset that was so common in the fringe as it was all about pure oneupmanship and the whole "How the heck did they do that?" message you sent from one BBS to the next. That reverse engineering, coding without a manual that meant you weren't aware of limits shined in a lot of what they did and how as well as you can always trace the artist in his creations.

Man, the protonet was leet. Truly it was. Amazing to have Witnessed it in the flesh at its most rudimentary as all of this is pretty much a retread and we were the last analog generation...