egr
Offline
Abandoned on Fire
Alpine wrote:
egr wrote:

The point goto80 is making is that lsdj is more important to why you would make that table than the gameboy is.  Theres nothing about the gameboy thst dictates the use of tables at all, that is an interface choice.

The point is the gameboys limitations. I kinda think it's cheating to use lsdj on a gba as it's more advanced (see what I did there?) although it may use the same software, it doesn't have the same limitations. Back when I first got into chip, I always thought it was to do with pushing the limits of what you can make with the limited hardware. I know this isn't it's true or even original meaning, but I always thought it was about getting the most out of it, pushing the hardware as far as you can to achieve the best sound/s possible. I think that hardware is very important, it's the restrictions and boundaries that I like. I don't like emulating lsdj on psp or ds or anything because the hardware is more advanced. Call me dumb or whatever, but this is just how I see it, I'm not saying that things that don't run on hardware aren't chip, I'm just saying that this is the way I look at it.

We're still not on the same page but that's fine and I doubt most people are even talking about the same thing even if they think they are when it comes to this topic.  smile

To stay on the gameboy analogy:

LSDJ is one way to interface with the hardware.
MML is another.  Z80 assembly is yet another.
So is Nanoloop.

All of these interfaces have differences that influence the way you use the hardware but NONE OF THEM ARE EQUAL TO THE HARDWARE.  The gameboy simply executes instructions like any other machine (all machines) and much of what we refer to as "character" comes from quirks of the interface just as much as quirks of the platform.

ForaBrokenEarth
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Nottingham, UK

I always remember that one insane c64 demo that pushed it so far it didn't even sound like a SID any more, it sounded more like a sampler (can't remember what it was called). It pushed it so far that people who liked SID music basically passed it over because, despite being legit on the hardware, it didn't meet their expectations.

bryface
Offline
vancouver, canada

i think you're referring to this: 

Last edited by bryface (Feb 4, 2013 10:22 pm)

e.s.c.
Offline
IL, US
ForaBrokenEarth wrote:

I always remember that one insane c64 demo that pushed it so far it didn't even sound like a SID any more, it sounded more like a sampler (can't remember what it was called). It pushed it so far that people who liked SID music basically passed it over because, despite being legit on the hardware, it didn't meet their expectations.

i'd say this problem exists on a broader scale in most scenes/mediums of art...

breakphase
Offline
Earth
goto80 wrote:

A clicky waveform can be emulated easily. It could also be made more clicky, which would then make it even more fun, if that's what you like. If you'd identify the "unique" characteristics of e.g the SID and then intensify them in an emulator, would that make it more unique? More chip? Is it more authentic than using external effects? More purist than bending the machine?

That seems more interesting, compared to building all these additional hardware to be able to transgress the original hardware platform. If you want to make a hawt C64 coder pr0n demo today, I'm not even sure it's possible to use the original platform anymore. You have to use emulators and special tools. And then play it on a C64. Yeai/wow/etc.

Hm. I think I'll stop there.

But you wouldn't have thought to create clicky wavetables if you hadn't started with the hardware. It's totally undesirable when you first hear it. But eventually you learn to manipulate it to make something totally different than what you'd have made with clean waveforms.

Yeah, we could just start emulating all of it. Maybe there aren't anymore limits to push with the hardware. Then again, emulation doesn't really sound the same. It's hard to get a "natural" sound out of an emulator. The old hardware wasn't perfect -- it was noisy and error prone. It might sound silly but I do perfer the sound of a dmg, as opposed to any emulation I've heard. Goattracker is a pretty good emulation for c64 though.

Also, yes it's nice to experiment with new software. But then, after you have removed the constraints which shaped the software, you really have to think about what "chipmusic" means. When does it stop being chipmusic? I don't know if we even agree on what that term means.

Last edited by breakphase (Feb 5, 2013 3:12 am)

Saskrotch
Offline
Chicago IL

i don't understand what any of you are defending

breakphase
Offline
Earth
Saskrotch wrote:

i don't understand what any of you are defending

Not sure we're defending anything. Just mulling over the question in the OP.

chunter
Offline
Brunswick, GA USA
ForaBrokenEarth wrote:

It pushed it so far that people who liked SID music basically passed it over because, despite being legit on the hardware, it didn't meet their expectations.

This is what I mean about people having a proverbial "line," a limit that, once crossed, the thing that makes it "chip" is gone. I started to find my version of that line when SuperNSF made Amiga-ish work on NES possible. Hearing MODs on C64 is a similar.

I think some of what is so vague about this topic is that technical innovation and artistic skill blur quite a bit.

Chainsaw Police
Offline
Sydney, NSW

I don't get it.

Is this a subtle way to bash fakebit? Is it defending fakebit? Is fakebit v purist chipmusic even a thing anymore? (fun fact: it's about as much of a thing as brostep vs. chillstep)

danimal cannon
Offline
buffalo, NY

Software or hardware, the real appeal is the alternative composition techniques
(let's call it character) imposed by the quirkiness of the odd hardware or software. 

NES for example, the arp.  32nd note triplet arps are a really unintuitive and inefficient way to play a chord.  And now they become an iconic sound.  Going further, your channel is monophonic, it has a really limited tonal palate.  WHAT DOES IT DO WELL?.  Pitch slides!  You can do pitch slides with amazing precision in most tracker software.  The "vocals" of Moe Moe Kyunstep, it's a really stupid and inefficient way to do vocals right?  It's incredibly complex, but it's got a special character to it, that you don't hear a lot of places.  Because why would they?  You almost have to approach music from a mad scientist point of view to replicate a lot of these sounds.

Let's take for example the wrap around factor of the pitch bend in LSDJ.  We've all made our crazy noises taking the P command to it's HF limits, and part of that is because when it hits the lowest possible note, it wraps around back to the top possible note and actually descends at a logarithmic rate.  Try doing that with a pitch bend on a keyboard.  Try doing it on a piano roll.  Try doing it on a guitar.  The sounds you make doing that are ones that you'll never hear making traditional instruments. 

Looped noise, HF vibrato, arps, pitch bends--- both bass drums, toms and auxilliary percussion.

These are the things that bring the magic to chip music, the character of the alternative musical techniques.  It's not the clicky wave form, or the specific sounds.  Whether it's stock NES, VRC7, c64, Atari... it's the fact that YOU COMPOSE MUSIC DIFFERENTLY WHEN GIVEN THESE THINGS that makes it great.  Personally, most fakebit sounds boring to me because they're missing all the details, all the subtlety that makes it great, although there's loads of fakebit songs I love.

Alpine
Offline
UK, Leicester
Chainsaw Police wrote:

I don't get it.

Is this a subtle way to bash fakebit? Is it defending fakebit? Is fakebit v purist chipmusic even a thing anymore? (fun fact: it's about as much of a thing as brostep vs. chillstep)

You can't really compare fakebit vs purist chipmusic to brostep vs dubstep as bro and dub are to entirely different musical sub genres. Dubstep has been around since the early 2000s, a lot earlier than bro, it also focuses more on bass growls than bass wobbles. It's not like brostep is a fake version of dubstep.

Trash80
Offline
Los Angeles

Fakebit should not be a thing- because even the term chipmusic (more to the point in chiptune) has morphed into whatever is suitable at the given time- And to which bits are we referring to? The audio? (Gameboy: 4bit, Computer: any resolution really) or the processor (Gameboy: 8bit, classic Amiga:32bit)

Software, hardware, chip waveforms arp'd on tracker, sweet PWM sweeps from a C64, or nasty LFSR noise sweeps on a NES- it's about the sound and not the process, the music composition and not the tool.

The whole thing about hw vs sw reminds me of the old analog vs digital debates from a decade ago, or the vinyl vs cd arguments from 15 years ago, or in the 60's I heard some musicians preferred the sound of a physically destroyed speaker over a tube or transistor based circuit for adding distortion to their guitars. WHO KNEW

goto80
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CHIPTUNE

It's pretty obvious that we still distinguish between hardware and software. Just see how many times we mention it in just this thread. Nothing wrong with it, of course - it's kind of intuitive - and yet it is so tricky to use it when you broaden the discussions to include different platforms (emulators, soundchip keyboards, VST/DAW) and interfaces (qwerty, mouse, piano roll, MIDI, circuitboards). Maybe this is just boring scientific crap, that is better discussed somewhere else though...

If you emphasize process (like egr does) then you can claim that anything made with a certain technology is chipmusic. But if you emphasize results (like trash80 does) then process and technology becomes quite irrelevant. I like how Danimal sort of goes inbetween, and mentions specific quirks and techniques that actually make a difference to both process and results. And how people perceive it, too. I'd argue that most of those characteristics are on the level of interface, rather than platform. Atleast that's the conclusion I made from the interviews I did for my thesis.

LFT put this very elegantly in a presentation he made. He said that it's about frequency. When you push a soundchip fast enough, at some point it doesn't really sound like chipmusic anymore. Like the C64-demo above. That tool was the most thought-provoking and maximalistik C64-music tool ever. But there was almost no interest for it. That kind of thing can happen to any platform, or even genre like e.s.c says.

Jellica
Offline
England
goto80 wrote:

If you want to make a hawt C64 coder pr0n demo today, I'm not even sure it's possible to use the original platform anymore. You have to use emulators and special tools. And then play it on a C64. Yeai/wow/etc.

I remember reading interviews in 80s/90s Zzap magazines with devs and I remember one (maybe Turbo Outrun? maybe Creatures?) and c64 stuff was written on ST then ported across, was this as common back then as it is today?

I dont know. i never really got on with using soft synths in a DAW, give me a real synth.

Last edited by Jellica (Feb 5, 2013 12:17 pm)

boomlinde
Offline
Sweden

But you wouldn't have thought to create clicky wavetables if you hadn't started with the hardware. It's totally undesirable when you first hear it. But eventually you learn to manipulate it to make something totally different than what you'd have made with clean waveforms.

What makes you think so? Stepping noises and clicks is something you have to take care to eliminate when you are developing software synthesizers. In this case it's not some inherent difference between the platforms that make the gameboy more clicky than a PC, but rather the level of abstraction from the natural properties of the sound hardware by the software. This further goes to prove the original point, because the real thing here is that you wouldn't have thought to create clicky wavetables because the software you are using basically won't allow you to do so.

A more interesting example of your line of thought would be non-aliasing waveforms. No to minimal aliasing is something you basically get for free with most simple PSGs of the 80s, but on a modern sound card that operates with a sample throughput of a few tens of thousands of samples per second, it's something you have to take care to eliminate by clever algorithms, and only then by losing overtone content.

This just reinforces the original idea that the hardware and software aren't really separable in any meaningful sense because neither is a transparent hose to your musical ideas.

Yeah, we could just start emulating all of it. Maybe there aren't anymore limits to push with the hardware.

Maybe there are, but the grasp of general users is limited to what the software provides them with. I don't disagree that you can "push the hardware" in some sense, but in reality most people are only pushing limits within the confines of the software paradigm.

Then again, emulation doesn't really sound the same. It's hard to get a "natural" sound out of an emulator. The old hardware wasn't perfect -- it was noisy and error prone. It might sound silly but I do perfer the sound of a dmg, as opposed to any emulation I've heard. Goattracker is a pretty good emulation for c64 though.

While I mostly agree, I can't think of any particular hardware besides the C64 (the SID envelopes are a bit buggy) that is prone to errors in any positive or musically relevant sense. I'm sure someone here can point to a few good examples, because I believe they exist.

Also, yes it's nice to experiment with new software. But then, after you have removed the constraints which shaped the software, you really have to think about what "chipmusic" means. When does it stop being chipmusic? I don't know if we even agree on what that term means.

You can't simply remove the constraints which shape the software, whatever those are. The hardware is at most one of many constraining factors, but definitely in no case the entirety of it. Wherever you'll find a defining point of chipmusic, I don't think it will be some hardware aspect of the production of it.

egr
Offline
Abandoned on Fire
goto80 wrote:

If you emphasize process (like egr does) then you can claim that anything made with a certain technology is chipmusic.

I want to add to that just a little:  While I do believe that any composition made on any of the "traditionally recognized chip hardware" is by default chipmusic whether it's on physical hardware or as an emulator, that's not the end of the story by any means.

In a lot of the descriptions I've had to write about releases and the group of artists that I work with I've used the phrase "we are linked by a love for a common methodology" which is vague enough to cover all the bases, I think.  tongue