An Introduction to Chip Music

Posted: April 5th, 2011 | Author: Alex | Filed under: Music | 2 Comments »

Chip music (or chiptune, there seems to be some philosophical debate as to what to call it) is music that’s made with vintage sound chips, typically those used in old video game systems. Some tend to dismiss chip music as a simple nostalgia play aimed at twenty-something gamers, like those “You have died of dysentery” Oregon Trail shirts they sell at Hot Topic. Really though, there’s more to it than that. Much, much more.

When people talk about art, one of the things that comes up over and over again is the idea of limitations breeding creativity. For whatever reason, some people tend to be more creative when their toolkit is more restricted. Give someone a limitless number of Photoshop brushes, and they’ll spend all day playing with the brushes and no time actually making anything. Give them a pencil, and they have no choice but to use that pencil. Chip music is a lot like that pencil.

Today’s music, electronic music in particular, is almost absurdly engineered. Everything is really high-gloss, passed through enough filters and equalizers and post-processors to fill a small studio. Anyone can reproduce virtually any instrument ever made, that sounds like it’s being played in a room of whatever dimension or acoustic quality you want, instantly. You can make instruments that never existed, could never exist, easily on any consumer-grade laptop.

If you’re writing music that’s going to be played back on an NES, you get five sound channels. Two pulse (or square) waves with variable duty cycles, a triangle wave, a noise channel (that just outputs fuzz at varying pitches) and a DPCM sample to play back (very lo-fi, very short) samples. In a typical arrangement, you’d use the DPCM channel and/or the noise channel for drums, the triangle channel for a bassline, and the pulse waves for a lead with some basic two-note harmony.

We got some of the most iconic music of my generation from that simple chip. People have been making custom music for hardware this simple since the early days – indeed, the guys who wrote the music to games like Super Mario Brothers and Castlevania were some of the earliest chip musicians. There was also an underground music scene for platforms like the Amiga and the Commodore 64 that grew largely from the “demoscene”, a bunch of hackers trying all the dirty tricks in the book and competing with each other to get their hardware to do ridiculous things. Remember kids, no CDs, RAM measured in KB, 256 colors … and the things that they made these machines do are incredible.

In recent years, the widespread availability and affordable price of old game consoles coupled with a resurgence of music composition software development for these platforms has caused an explosion in the production of chip music. While it’s a lot more popular than it was even a few years ago and is starting to peek into the mainstream, it’s still very much the stuff of hobbyists and vintage hardware geeks.

That said, there are a lot of people make a lot of really good music out there. A lot of it is free, and the vast majority of what isn’t free is released through small labels or by the artists themselves.

If you want a place to start, check out these guys:

GOTO80: A Swedish artist and prolific chip musician, one of the elder statesmen of the chip music scene. Check out Breakfast for a bat-shit insane music video and a song with an infectious hook. Then look through the rest of his stuff.

Virt: You know how some people say that they want to write music for video games when they grow up? Well Jake Kaufman actually stuck with it, and he’s really, really good at it. His FX albums are fantastic and he contributed part of the soundtrack to the upcoming XBLA/WiiWare release Retro City Rampage (which I can’t wait to play, by the way). FX3 was on constant rotation in my car during my Google internship.

Alex Mauer: Writes in all different styles, for tons of different platforms, and does it all with an incredible amount of polish. 9999 is worth the purchase, if only for a song written for the Amiga called “OJ Finds the Real Killers”, a brilliant homage to the music of 1980s buddy-cop movies.

Anamanaguchi: they make straight-ahead face-melting rock with two guitars, a bass, some drums and an NES. They also did the soundtrack to the Scott Pilgrim video game. This is all you need to know.

EvilWezil: a friend of mine and author of some of the most original and innovative chip music I’ve ever come across. Never have you rocked out so hard to a song written in 9/8 time.

These are but a few among many talented artists out there. If any of this strikes a chord with you (so to speak), I encourage you to browse the stuff that labels like Pause and 8bitpeoples are putting out. Also, check out 8bc for a firehose of free chip music.

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