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

either that or acoustic guitar, but I pretty much suck at acoustic guitar and I can't write music with one on the bus (without being an asshole, anyway)

If anything, as I get older and it gets harder to regularly get a bunch of other idiots into a practice space together at the same time, my musical output will probably shift more and more towards being exclusively chiptune, since I can do it all myself, whenever and as much/as little as I want

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.

genre is a chip tunes

How can it be said that chiptune is a genre?

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"

Maybe the question to be asked is, where are all the crap copies of e.s.c. and tree wave? When are tree wave coming back, anyway?

But chiptune has never been a genre - it's a type of instrumentation. Just because, like some people complain around here, the more common chiptune releases are EDM or similar, doesn't mean that's all there is or that that's all there can be. I mean, if we take LSDJ for example, we have people making serious rock (see: Danimal Cannon, The J. Arthur Keenes Band, et al), and Kulor's first song using that software was funk. So it's not like there's no way to break the mold - we've known for a while that there's no mold to break, even.

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.

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

I'd hit that if it was close enough to home. Of course, the internet cafe/gambling sting in Florida isn't helping.

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.

I'll stop making chipmusic when I can hit a club with 1-bit pc speaker unce and be universally embraced.

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

things come and go, but these days nothing ever really dies. there is an audience and there will always be some kind of chip scene.

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.

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.

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

http://spaceboyfriend.bandcamp.com/