Chiptunes

Doing it wrong...

The term Chiptune refers to the chiptune-scene which is made up of nerds who miss the late 80s and early 90s. In order to fulfill their retro appetite for all things pixelated and blippy, they make and listen to a form of music known as "Chiptunes".

History

Typical Chiptuner Workstation

Chiptunes originated with the advent of video games as an audible accompaniment to hours of fun alone in your basement. The chiptune scene emerged from the demo scene which was made up of Scandinavian people who would make fancy screensavers with music which they touted as a “demo”. These demos would usually be some form of shitty electronic music (mostly crappy NES tracks since they only listen to Nintendo) to go along with some colorful pixels moving around, which supposedly demonstrated their programming prowess on the Commodore 64 or whatever ancient personal-computer they had at the time.

Eventually 9/11 happened and hordes of white nerds yearned for the days of yore throwing barrels, eating blue dots or being a red Italian plumber from Japan. And so this retro fandom spawned a new scene known as chiptunes centered around electronic beeps that even technofags run from.

Style

If you thought Morrissey was already shit...

Chiptune music basically sounds like old video games. Since everyone on ED is under the age of legal consent, ask your parents what Super Nintendo was and for them to show you a video on the YouTube featuring an old ass video game like Space Invaders or something.

Chiptunes are supposed to sound like the technology of a bygone era and are centered around ancient technology, kind of like how the steampunk fags hump brass hardware. This old shit includes the Commodore 64, the Amiga, Gameboys and anything else electronic incapable of making real sounds. However, most chiptunes are made using tracker software or emulators, since the real thing would require a trip to the Goodwill or your parents' basement.

Synchs to The Wizard of Oz!!1

Chiptunes have a signature timbre (noise) due to the ancient devices that chipkidz try to emulate in their tracker warez. The main noise of chiptune is the blip. The blip refers to playing the notes of a chord really fast one after another, really fast, but it is not an arpeggio. This is because early computers could only make a few noises at a time and so instead of playing a chord they would just play the notes of a chord real fast hoping you wouldn’t care. It sounds like a blip and gets really annoying after a few minutes and may cause bleeding of the inner ear, loss of hearing, or worse, loss of musical taste.

A key aspect of the chip sound is the use of elementary waveforms of the square wave, triangle wave, and gated white noise (this was mainly used by shit consoles like SMS and NES) which goes back to the technology of early computing mainly from the Commodore 64 and its fanboy-tastic SID chip that had only three voices that could each make one of four noises. You could then run that shit through the multimode filter to get those fatty gamer thighs pumping.

The Scene

Chiptuner just doin his job 8)

Chiptunes used to be part of something from Europe called the demoscene which was before the internet as we know it. Part of this chickenshit was ASCII art which usually looks like pixelated comic book stuff but now is just tits and ass formed with letters and punctuation. This subsequently evolved into isometric pixel art. The demo scene has vaporized as nerdy Scandinavian people manchildren moved on to play LARP and make metal about Vikings.

Chiptune artist congregate at the 8 bit collective. They call it 8bc (eight bee see) and it receives over a 16.7 million new song posts a fuck’n day with dithering enabled. It's considered being an asshole to say you don't like somebody's work or giving any sort of constructive critisism what-so-ever. Chippers hold contests called compos in which they make a song, and the winner is the one with the least fail and largest library of pre arranged melodies in midi form; the losers rim his e-pucker, then talk shit about it on the 8bc IRC channel. Chiptunes shows are usually held in garages, basements or hipster coffee shops intermixed with other abominable genres of electronic music. You can tell a chiptune is about to happen if you see a gameboy and guitar effects pedals but no guitar. Other places to experience chiptunes live include outside of video game conventions or at your local Pizza Hut’s arcade.

What game r u playing mister?

How to make Chiptunes

THE ULTIMATE CHIPTUNE MACHINE

1. Join 8 bit collective.
2. Pick your weapon – Fasttracker 2 on your Macbook with Linux, Gameboy with LSDJ, Commodore 64 or Amiga with flash card adapter.
3. Enter random notes; don’t forget to enable the blip effect arpeggio with the proper hex code.
4. Post song on the 8bc; bonus views and comments if you put title in all caps or say that you were high when you wrote the song.
5. ?????
6. FAIL

Did your song sux? Of course it did, and now they are all talking shit about you and your abortion on the IRC. How did you make your song? On your Macbook? Well reboot in OSX and use Ableton or torrentz Traktor and join the hipsters as a DJ. Used a Gameboy? Do you have that taco mod thing? Get a soldering iron and triforce screwdriver and do it. You used a real old computer? Relax, you used a real old computer so it's legit no matter how shitty it is. Just add moar blips and run it through some guitar fx pedals.

How to Steal Chiptunes

There have been many "claims" of thievery over the years with this style of "music," from famous record producers to just other 'tune-makers. For example, the most famous of these thefts was done by none other than, of course, a nigger by the name of Timbaland.

Obv. it's too late to apologize...it's toooooo laaaaate...

DJ asking questions he already knows answers to; Timbaland trying to pull a little language gap between him and the Vikings.

Not that this is the only thing he's ever stolen while bringing Sexy Back, nor even the only style of music. There's a court proceeding for most of his '07/'08 tracks, and he's about one more lawl-suit away from getting bounced off his label like shit bounces off his stomach while he gorges (btw he's fat). Indeed, there are more people trying to follow his examples; Linkin Park was accused of it at one point or another, Kanye West has half-done it with Daft Punk, and many recent styles of music have probably studied the art of video games to tap into the markets of people with way too much time on there hands.

External Links

• Continued coverage of the case against Timbaland and Universal as a whole (btw, the Finn's actually WINNING so far) Disregard that.
• If you want keygen music but are too pussy to download an illegal DRM-circumventing softwarez
• Lots of chiptunes here from real scene d00dz

See Also

• Nerdcore
• Nintendocore

Chiptunes is part of a series on Music Visit the Music Portal for complete coverage.