Man I love composing chiptunes. They give me such a nostalgic feeling because of the hordes of classic videogame soundtracks that I have heard throughout my life. They’re also a great exercise in composition because they force you to be as creative as possible with few sounds at your disposal. It’s easy to make a song “interesting” (though not necessarily good) by throwing in a ton of random sampled and synthesized instruments in a modern DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Chiptunes, on the other hand, due to their limited range of sound types, get boring quickly unless composed in a unique, interesting way.

Having said all that, I must admit that I have never composed a true chiptune. In a true chiptune (according to Wikipedia), “the sound textures are synthesized or sequenced in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip.” While I certainly use textures that are synthesized by a computer chip, the computer I use is exponentially more powerful than the computers that were used to create the original chiptunes of the NES and other systems. Early computers had very simple tone generators and often could only play one note simultaneously per channel. Again, this forced composers to come up with a lot of creative solutions, a prominent one being the use of arpeggios (chords played as a quick run as opposed to all at once) to make it sound like the notes were almost being played together.

I write chiptunes using emulators. There are countless VST’s and plugins that can be used to create a rather believable chiptune sound. One of them is the ES1, which comes bundled with Logic Pro. This is a relatively simple but powerful synthesizer that can create a variety of waveforms and modulate them endlessly. The problem with the ES1 is that because it is so powerful, I often find myself messing with it too much. I’ll end up with a really cool synth sound but then I’ll realize it sounds nothing like a chiptune instrument anymore. If you’re interested in getting started with the ES1 but have no idea how to give it a chiptune sound, there is a great collection of 8-bit presets for it over at LogicProHelp.com.

Another plugin I use all the time is YMCK’s Magical 8-Bit (the site is in Japanese but it’s pretty obvious where the correct download links are, and it’s free.) The pros and cons for this little plugin are the same: it’s simple. It can’t do a ton, but it gives you some great limitations to work within. And as I mentioned above, limitations with chiptunes is generally a good thing. I probably use this little guy the most when composing chiptunes (although I admit I sometimes have to add some vibrato or other effect that it lacks as a channel strip insert.)

Another plugin that deserves an honorable mention is Chip32. I don’t use this one quite as much as the others but it is really cool because it allows you to completely mess with the waveform, and also has some of those all-important limitations I was talking about.

If you haven’t yet, go check out http://ocremix.org/. There are countless awesome chiptunes there.

Keep checking back. I’m in the process of composing a bunch of chiptunes for an upcoming awesome game. I’ll be releasing them in the next few months when details emerge.