Lots of people diss circle jerks, but remember jerks done right benefit EVERYONE.
Last edited by herr_prof (Feb 5, 2013 7:56 pm)
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UK, Leicester
trash80 wrote:
Alpine wrote:I'm just really damn fussy. It's quite easy to tell if someone is using samples or some app on their iPad. I don't know, it's just something about it never sounds quite right.
Maybe you are just picking out the things that do not sound right and missing the stuff that sounds fine. To me a lot of sample based plugins sound terrible (some synth edit stuff / toad / magical 8bit / etc) as well as DSP synthesis that utilize filtering algorithms for interpolation. There are ways around it, and some emulations or DSP based synths do a great job at it- But the terrible ones are also some of the more popular and give off a general distaste for the thing as a whole. Personally I just concentrate on what sounds good to me, and don't care where it's coming from. I use all the wares, both hard and soft. (ew.)
I guess that's all it really comes down to, I like the sound it makes. I mean if I could listen to stuff that was made on ipad etc that sounded as good as the stuff on the hardware, or used good samples I'd listen to it.
herr_prof wrote:
Lots of people diss circle jerks, but remember jerks done right benefit EVERYONE.
Deep
Last edited by Alpine (Feb 5, 2013 8:02 pm)
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Sweden
BR1GHT PR1MATE wrote:
oh, i have nothing against any of it. only pointing out the irony :]
i mean, maybe i just missed the whole point of the post. are we supposed to be 'discussing the discussion' or something, and it just slipped back into the old circlejerk? i guess im just surprised everybody is so keen to do this routine again. but anyways dont mind me, ill leave y'all to it.
I'm not sure what you mean by circle jerk, but I wouldn't use the word to describe an open discussion in which the participants respectfully argue based on a wide variety of opinions and perspectives.
Last edited by boomlinde (Feb 5, 2013 11:27 pm)
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vancouver, canada
goto80 wrote:
The discussion about software vs hardware doesn't seem to lead anywhere - yet it still goes on.
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Abandoned on Fire
Just to clarify for those that are TL;DRing or feeling put off/cynical by the whole discussion:
This isn't "hardware or software, which is better?". It is "let's start having a different discussion that is not based on hardware vs software".
So if you're tired of HW vs SW discussion then this topic is for you!
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babylon
walter b. gentle wrote:if the op's question is should we move on, like not worry about the definition anymore, then no. thats just caving in to people that want their music to be accepted as chip when it is actually chip influenced
Why is this "caving in" something to worry about? Are you afraid that the music won't stand on its own? Consider the person A and B example egr posted.
you make some good points sir. i guess my mindset is just that chip music really doesnt have anything to do with how the music is created. just how its is delivered. when i think about the soundchips associated withh chipmusic theres a list in my head of the ones that "count", but i suppose i dont even really have enough technical know-how to discern this on my own. dont get me wrong, i could care less about the debate in a sense of what music im going to listen to, but if people are giving chip any kind of definition, no matter how grey or broad it is, theres gonna be stuff thats left out even if we enjoy it the same way. if the discussion is about moving past caring what its made with then hell yeah, i thought that happened already, but i think there should still be a distinction of some sort. maybe i didnt understand what was being asked.
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Earth
Whoa this is a biggish thread. Also I'm not saying that software is bad or something 
I just think about these things.
boomlinde wrote:
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.
On a modern pc the sound chip would not be constrained to the point of being clicky. You would just feed the wavetable to the drivers, and if it clicks that means you need to debug it. On modern computers I think there is a tendancy to ATEMPT to make the hardware transparent. To pretend that the computer is something else. Clicky is buggy. Yeah that specific type of sound comes from LSDJ specifically, but it wasn't intended to click I'm sure. Anyway yeah the software does effect the technique here. I wouldn't argue that it doesn't. All I'm saying is that hardware is a factor that effects software and software effects composition, which you are kind of saying too.
boomlinde wrote:
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.
I wasn't very clear about that. What I meant is that something like wavetables (in the non-waveform sense) or the tracker interface itself are a result of limited hardware resources. I agree there are always constraints.
Anyway I guess chipmusic is a just a particular sound. You know it when you hear it.
I'm tired.
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Sweden
breakphase wrote:
On a modern pc the sound chip would not be constrained to the point of being clicky. You would just feed the wavetable to the drivers, and if it clicks that means you need to debug it. On modern computers I think there is a tendancy to ATEMPT to make the hardware transparent. To pretend that the computer is something else. Clicky is buggy. Yeah that specific type of sound comes from LSDJ specifically, but it wasn't intended to click I'm sure. Anyway yeah the software does effect the technique here. I wouldn't argue that it doesn't. All I'm saying is that hardware is a factor that effects software and software effects composition, which you are kind of saying too.
Yeah, I definitely agree with your last point, and I agree that there's a tendency to aim for transparency in a lot of music software, but that's a tendency of software development more than anything else, and being clicky in many cases is something you have to opt out of rather than something that you simply don't have to deal with when developing. I also agree that there are limitations of simple hardware that prevents this freedom of choice, so I have a hunch that we aren't really disagreeing about anything
breakphase wrote:
I wasn't very clear about that. What I meant is that something like wavetables (in the non-waveform sense) or the tracker interface itself are a result of limited hardware resources. I agree there are always constraints.
Well, yeah, any music is shaped by the constraints of its platform. In the "clicky" case, for example, I'd say that the perceived limitation is really one of modern computer music software, not of the Game Boy or LSDJ, and it's more a case of limited software resources than limited hardware resources.
breakphase wrote:
Anyway I guess chipmusic is a just a particular sound. You know it when you hear it.
I'm tired.
Agreed!
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Westfield, NJ
Downstate wrote:
pop tarts or fruit loops ?
don't open that can of worms around here dude
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montreal, qc
I got into tracking during the DOS years, so the rigid re-defining of the word "chiptune" has seemed really strange to me.
For me, it's more of a musical form with tropes/conventions and a limited sonic palette than anything hardware-defined.
Whether the limited sonic palette in a chiptune comes from hardware choices, software limitations, or user-made choices doesn't seem all that important to me.
I understand the logic in approaching chiptune from a modern interpretation of the term (hardware = real, software = fake), but very few artists are interacting with their hardware without a software interface; one likely installed on a modern personal computer and written by somebody else.
A lot of the innovative programming stuff that people tout as the "legitimizing factor" of hardware in this debate has been very much present in all forms of tracker music: it stems from clever people using a software interface.
To some people, the hardware/software/means of production seem to be of paramount importance - almost to the point where this "legitimacy" concern presides over any consideration of the musical content. I would strongly caution against this attitude, simply because there is so much good stuff out there made with sample-based trackers. The "pushing the envelope" factor was even more prevalent, I would argue, from a user input/pattern data standpoint. Since music was always released as source files, there was a constant incentive to show off your tricks to the rest of the community: be it for scene cred or motivated by good natured one-up-manship.
Is all mod/s3m/xm/it stuff "chiptune"? Not by a long shot.
Back then, it seemed to me that people were more interested in producing music that _didn't_ sound like it was made in a tracker. People would stem out tracks just to add DSP and hide the typical sonic traits associated the format. (ie: add reverb)
Was there a massive amount of legitimate chipmusic made using these formats? Absolutely.
Broadband and the sudden viability of 5mb music files (mp3s) changed a lot of this, mostly by eliminating file size concerns for PC-based tracker music outside of a demo/compo setting, as well as effectively killing the tracker scene as musicians switched to releasing in .mp3 format.
Nobody cared about tracker music at all in 2004: It had faded into contemporary electronic music seamlessly. (Huge generalization)
What put it back on the map was stuff like nanoloop and LSDJ - new software platforms developed for previously underexploited hardware.
People often forget that the "chip" in "chiptune" never used to refer to an actual hardware component.
It _definitely_ does nowadays.
This gradual shift in meaning over the last 10 years or so seems to be the at the root of all of these debates.
I fucked up my SMMM cart and recorded this in less time than it took me to write this post. 100% legit, 0% talent. (At least on my end.)
http://chipmusic.org/ilkae/music/2a03-autechre-clone
Hey, at least it's not fakebit, amirite? (Thanks, Baldwin, now I can make fake "realbit")
Check out that dirty line noise
There doesn't need to be a debate at all, in my opinion.
People using trackers to make music: awesome.
People developing new tracker software: awesome.
People expanding the range of legacy hardware that music can be written for: awesome.
It's all good.
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CHIPTUNE
Good stuff, Ilkae. There is room for debate though, because I think that the chipscene is entering a new phase. Hardware purism was sort of the center of the scene for the past decade or so. And now it's wearing off now. There's much less drama. So I'm curious about what will happen next. Personally, I don't think that the hardware/software dichotomy will be around as much.