I wanted to get into chiptuning to create backing tracks I could play guitar over, since at this point, I don't have enough spare time to ever consider putting a band together and I really love the sound of chipmusic. I had recently found my GameBoy Pocket (I know, it has its critics, but it works fine for me) and ended up picking up a Drag N Derp cart before they disappeared from Kitsch Bent.

Over the past several months, I had been writing songs on both my guitar and LSDJ, usually figuring out notes on the guitar, then transcribing it in LSDJ. I recorded everything in GarageBand, though at least one track was made before I had my Derp cart and was exported from an emulator.

Well, after obsessing over mixing the guitars to blend right with the chiptune, I finally got 5 tracks I'm pretty happy with and put them together for an EP, titled "Reasonably Priced" - because it's a pay-what-you-want download on Bandcamp and a $4 Kunaki CD-R-on-demand. I'm going under the name Portopak, named after the infamous commercial scene from Abel Ferrara's THE DRILLER KILLER (I had sampled it in my first experiment with LSDJ and GarageBand, but it didn't fit in with the other music). In fact, the cover art for the EP is a screencap of that scene with the GameBoy "color" profile.

http://portopak.bandcamp.com/

One thing I've decided is that I definitely want to make shorter tracks for any future recordings. 3+ minutes can be a bit grating for an instrumental with my limited musical ability.

I'm particularly proud of the first two tracks, "Take it Easy, Dracula" and "No More Nights," especially the latter, since I was curious what something very slow would sound like, as most chiptunes I've heard and the other tracks I made were pretty fast-paced. After cutting in some samples from CARNIVAL OF SOULS, it became way more haunting than I had imagined.