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Chiptune softwares

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12 comments, last by Madhed 9 years, 3 months ago

Hello!

I'm making a mobile game with retro style (8 bit) and I wanna make a music for my game with the same "style", I saw some forums that this 8 bit music are referred to chiptune music, something like that, and I wonder what softwares may I use to make this music.

I don't know if someone already asked that, but thanks for the answers!

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You can make chiptunes wither either genuine chips, or by creating a track with the limitations/capabilities of of the period hardware. The DAW you use doesn't matter as much as the synth. Native Instruments Massive and Waves Element are both good choices for a digital synth.

This is a straight-up chiptune I made a while ago

https://soundcloud.com/cch-audio/8-bit-chiptune-racer

CCH - nice tune! smile.png

there are a bunch of free vst that promise to deliver the "chip" sound, amongt them are those made by odo, who is a hardcore c64 enthusiast. they pretty much all sound the same to me tongue.png i know about them more from chatting with the developers than using them.. and while i have great appreciation for odo and others work, in many cases they're tainted by their era, eg. people are trying to produce 8 bit sounds using antialiased oscillator tech.. sigh.. ..there is a very, very old vst called "chip32" which i am absolutely certain will alias appreciably smile.png

given all of that, i think it would be more astute to implement your own oscillator routines in the code. once you've done it once, you'll see how easy it is to do rather than be dependent on prerecorded audio hereafter.

writing your own audio routine would also allow you to select appropriate settings for the soundcard, instead of eg. recording lofi music to a hifi file then playing it back at hifi rates to depict lofi smile.png


perhaps the greater amount of work is not the synthesis but the composition... 8 bit composers develop various techniques to keep the medium interesting, these are reflected in our perception of 8 bit music.. so to produce something appreciably "in style" will take a fair amount of practice to identify and use these techniques.. and may be a great subject for a thread or search..

neither a follower nor a leader behttp://www.xoxos.net

In addition to the free collections or doing it yourself, there's this commercial library: http://www.plogue.com/products/chipsounds/ I used it on the Hot Tin Roof game soundtrack.

Nathan Madsen
Nate (AT) MadsenStudios (DOT) Com
Composer-Sound Designer
Madsen Studios
Austin, TX

ReFX also has QuadraSID - C64 based sound generator.

I usually write my chip tunes, by creating the samples myself - basic wavform generation, and then use trackers to write the music - openmodplug or renoise.

Game Audio Professional
www.GroovyAudio.com

I use Audiotool and set the synthesizer to a Square wave. Most old video game sound engines used square waves

Stay gold, Pony Boy.

Hi all, I do recommend composing chiptune music as it teaches you a lot about music compositions and gives you a head start in music composing.

Here are my playlist

Chiptune

https://soundcloud.com/charliearmour/sets/chip-machine

A really good program to use is Famitracker. It was used for the soundtrack to Shovel Knight and emulates the NES soundchip.

Famitracker is a great program to use, I have used to many times for previous projects. There is a lot Famitracker can do as well, good choice!

I love NES VST and NeoChip for writing chiptune music.

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