Only if Facebook purchased Nintendo.

lol thats why i dont want the oculus rift anymore...

To consider chiptune a "genre" isn't just labeling it harshly, it's closing a lot of doors to experimentation and diversity.

How? As far as I'm concerned, musical genres are a system that has very little to do with creating music. If you set out to compose a genre piece, you have yourself to blame for the doors that that approach is going to close.

Welcome to a decade ago! If this is what you mean by closing doors to experimentation and diversity, I disagree that it is.

If you mean conventions, I think there are a lot of them in chipmusic. Just like in [whatever relatively modern genre you can think of], these are not necessarily common to all the works, but different conventions overlap in such a way that we can see a connection. In general, perhaps we can trace the origins of a set of works down to just a certain group of people, to a certain era or a traditional practice and still find out that that's still more well defined than, say, jazz or rock music.

Agreed. The common uses of these instruments are also closely guided by conventions.

Those same people must say that guitar is a genre.
People use "chiptune" in music that does not feature exclusively "chiptune" instrumentation just like people use "guitar" for music that would not make sense being categorized as "guitar"

To consider chiptune a "genre" isn't just labeling it harshly, it's closing a lot of doors to experimentation and diversity. Soon people will wonder "how to write chiptune" and start asking for rules and guidelines ("what tempo", "what loops does it use", "is it bad if I don't want to use 4/4", "am I wrong for not using the BRK sample"...), just like people wanting to compose doom metal, or dirty south, or baroque counterpoint, or any other genre. But there are no rules in chiptune - only limits of your chosen hardware (the octave ranges, the amount of audio channels and their type of sound, the processing limits, etcetera). Which is a similar thing that musicians experience when writing for piano, or accordion, or hang drum, or any other instrument.

danimal cannon wrote:

Maybe you're not downloading enough albums from Ubiktune dude.

I'll be making chip for a good while. I've always made other kinds of music so I'm sure some non-chip albums will happen at some point. I still see a lot of room to grow as a chip artist, and I haven't made all the music I want to make yet.

im not saying that arent some, just that as a percentage of the scene, i think the unique acts are actually a smaller part of the scene than they were in 2007-2008.. seems for every new artist doing something really different there are15-20-30 artists all copying other peoples sounds (intentionally or not)

Doesn't this actually mean that chiptune is turning into a real genre? For every metallica there are 12459292 crappy copies of metallica. For every influential band there are crap copies. I started playing crappy versions of slayer songs and copying the style of my favorite metal bands when I was 14. Is that not a natural thing to do? The great bands surface, the crappy ones don't

[...]
also in my idealized world, the club venue/feel would not be the only expression of a live performance.  when i think about how i would want to cultivate a local chip scene, i'd love to find a way to make it more of a loungey concert where people are encouraged to sit and "chew on the incoming music" with attentive ears.
[...]

Hint: That actually happens in Berlin's "8bit Bar" if they don't have a big act or themed party where they use the big stage.
Last time i played there, i just played my set while people were sitting on couches, relaxing, listening to the music, having conversations and some were also playing C-64. Sometimes after a song there would applaud for a moment and then just go back to relaxing.
I also find this way of live experience most of the time better than the big dance partys. Just enjoy the music and if u liked it, there's still time afterwards and then u can also have a chat with the artist.

Oh, i guess I should start keeping up with artists individually instead of on this forum. Whooops. Cool!

I do think that we will look back at stuff like Blip Fest and shiz like it was the "golden age" or something. chiptune woodstock.

e.s.c. wrote:

im not saying that arent some, just that as a percentage of the scene, i think the unique acts are actually a smaller part of the scene than they were in 2007-2008.. seems for every new artist doing something really different there are15-20-30 artists all copying other peoples sounds (intentionally or not)

I think that's probably some sort of rose-colored-glasses hipster talk, but I really have no idea where you're finding new music.  I haven't really noticed this trend at all.  I dunno, I find rad shit all the time, 90% of it not chip unce.  I go to a lot if shows and check out cool stuff that my friends post.

In fact, there's a lot of stuff out there today that makes some of the earlier chip records sound weak

Yeah there's not really an oversaturation of unce and hairtune like in the 8bc days. Don't get me wrong, I know there still is a plentiful amount of mediocre and coma-inducing snoretune to sift through, but I'm forever finding cool upandcomers in chip (thanks 8BitNortheast) who treat it as a way to expedite their own cool musical ideas, and my own explorations in what I can accomplish in mixing and matching pieces of genres and stuff through chiptune is just starting to get interesting.

I've been poking around with teaching some classes on chiptune and it's been an incredibly mixed bag of people interested in it, which was a pleasant surprise.

PS: I miss Space Boyfriend.

Why? Jami is super active and plays shows all the time, just put out an album!

http://spaceboyfriend.bandcamp.com/