I'd like to tell you about our live chiptune project consisting of me (kvee) and nooly (of demoscene and Big Chipcompo fame). We call ourselves (the) Squarewave Orchestra and we play a mix of game music, chiptunes, d'n'b, ambient, or just generally electronic music live.
While we use prerendered backing tracks, we perform the bass and melody parts live using various vintage computers and consoles, using the actual machines' keyboards (where possible).
Nooly uses his Commodore 64C with retroskoi, whereas I use the ZX Spectrum 128 with its AY-3-8912 chip that I wrote my own controller program for, then some 386/486 PCs with OPL3 and also my own DOS program to control the chip. Lastly, I use one of my NTSC NES consoles with midines and once again some custom software that actually runs on the oldschool PC and then uses the gameport-MIDI cable :]
(I intend to release my software sometime in the future)
We think this is an interesting alternative to the usual DJ-style performances done on gameboys. Check it out if you're interested and let us know what you think :]
We played this live show as part of the Extra demoparty inside a neat arcade game museum. So instead of the usual backstage stuff, we were trying to beat each other's high score on Ms.PacMan (nooly won by 2k). We played for an audience of about 30.
(Bear in mind this was our first live show and we _do_ make mistakes here and there. We know about them, we're working on playing better :]]] )
Here's the whole YouTube playlist of our live show
(also, our page and also our facebook page)
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