Chiptune

Chiptunes form a genre within the computer-generated music, which is characterized by a distinctive sound. Its origin is in the home computer and video gaming era. The original chiptunes distinguished in that the sounds with sound chips - are generated and output synthesizers that generate the names of the notes in real time - by today's standards quite simple. Legendary is the SID chip of the Commodore C64. The term Chiptune was known in the Amiga scene where you generated with the help of trackers music with sound samples of different instruments. Compositions, which attempted to retain the style and tone of sound chips were called chiptune, to distinguish them from the classic mod files. For this very short samples or defined notes loops were used.

Chiptunes have the advantage that the generated files remain and see why to use use in demos and intros from the demo scene and Cracktros of Releasegroups from the warez scene, where it matters, as little space very small.

Chip tuner

True chiptunes are still in a niche outside of techno, electro, Industrial and Others, but remember often these genres. Even compared to ringtones the scene demarcates and do not want to be brought into connection. The ambition to make music with modern trackers from speech samples and effects that go far beyond that.

Some chip tuners seen in the techno or in the techno wave of the 1990s only an offshoot of their work, an inflation of their earlier work and the degeneration of the original chiptunes for the mass taste, although some have found again successful there.

Chiptune design

Characteristic of chiptunes is the rare occurrence of actual multiple stops in the classical sense. In chiptunes chords are usually formed over arpeggios to save tracks. This restriction is based on that the first sound chips could rarely play more than three audio channels in parallel - to play a chord would often take up all the available channels. Because of these "voices scarcity " have many tunes a very complex structure. To sound more than just three instruments, the gaps in a melody, such as the bass, used to be there sounded another instrument or an accompanying voice. Thus are located on a canal two or more melodies or voices. This technique is particularly in favor of using rhythms with many favorite elements. In the area of ​​SID tunes so a very funky style has developed.

Another technique to incorporate more voices is often found on the channel where the bass and the drums are heard. Before the individual bass noise is set for a fraction of a second. This creates the impression of a kind of hi- hat in a drum. Examples of this style can be found in the High Voltage SID Collection ( HVSC ) under the composer Mitch & Dane.

A related genre is the Bitpop.

Presence

By lifting the channel boundary modern Tracker there for tech-savvy composers today largely no more restrictions.

By any mix of self-defined notes and instruments - as opposed yet to MIDI format - and the possibility of even simple samples upgrade to human voices (assuming phonetic knowledge, see also Vocaloid ), each composed polyphonic piece of music can be theoretically Mod realize.

However, work on an MP3 -to- mod converter fail usually because the computer already played instruments and samples can not clearly delimit. However, if the notes played by the orchestra compositions present in the notes, an exact rebuild as mod is only a matter of time invested in it.