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Hey all!
I'm back again with another installment of "fuck off stop asking us questions."
Today; exactly what the topic says.
As a bonus, why do you continue to make chiptune if said least favorite thing is really hindering?
I'll start with the fact that I hate the hardware and no gameboy models are perfect for me, but here I am still making music because I love the sound and LSDj as a form of composing music.
Last edited by nanode (Aug 29, 2016 4:16 am)
hardware tradeoffs (gameboy micro has background noise/whine, DS lite has no link cable port, etc etc)
making subversive chip music doesn't really work as well in the scene as I thought
the sound of the dmg; I'm a bit over it tbh, and only really keeping my nl1 cart so I can do wavetable-ish stuff. bring on nl mono! 
Last edited by pselodux (Aug 29, 2016 6:29 am)
Old hardware will eventually die. As everyone else.
This let's me appreciate the ephemeral nature of music in a strange way. Soothing.
Anyway:
My least favorite thing about producing chiptune is not being able to do it consistently/easily. That's definitely not tied entirely to chiptune itself, but I find it harder and harder to be creative with it specifically. I can't make stuff sound *fresh* easily. I still try, obviously. To varying effect.
Yeah and I guess hardware is a bit of a pain. It can be a very therapeutic process of untangling all the wires, cleaning/checking contacts, loading up cartridges/projects and making sure the signal chain is as clear as possible but there are days where that sounds like the LAST thing you want to do.
making subversive chip music doesn't really work as well in the scene as I thought
this.. the scene's taste seems to be narrowing in on dance music (mostly stuff that sounds like 90s house or current edm) over the last 8 years or so... surprisingly, the scene was more diverse when it was smaller, there was a point in time when most artists sounded diffferent enough from each other that you could learn to recognize most of them by the little tricks they'd use in their tracks if not just by their style... i think that worked that way because a lot of us didn't see anyone playing chipmusic live before we started making it... there were hardly any shows (and no regular recurring ones like Pulsewave) and very little video online of other artists so you could easily have been using chip stuff for years before ever seeing another artist perform their chipmusic.. i'm guessing that the shift towards one or two styles is the downside of the community growing, as you could basically say the exact same thing about the punk scene from 1974-1980 (that it went from being amazingly diverse to being either in one of two or three styles)
Old hardware will eventually die. As everyone else.
0 to 100 real quick with this shit
the scene's taste seems to be narrowing in on dance music
I'd have to disagree with that to some extent. The Famitracker community is a prime example of classical or more complex pieces that don't usually have a lot of dance-y tunes.
Though I definitely see what you're saying. The GB scene is VERY big with dance/dub/glitch/thrash/etc...
i don't remember you being around in the pre-8bc days, so you didn't really see what it was like back then
edit: also, by pointing to a small subsection of the scene, you're missing my point.. there are and always will be outliers.. the fami scene tends to be mostly demoscene style, and is in its own way somewhat limited in range of styles, just not the exact ones i mentioned..
edit 2: i also think we have VERY different definitions of dub, glitch and thrash, because unless i'm missing something, there's very little dub (cow'p and quarta330 come to mind, maybe you mean dubstep? it's a completely different genre), glitch (besides abandoned on fire and some of frankangotti's stuff or some of mine.. is chalices of the past still around?) or thrash (unless you mean "chipthrash" which is a major misnomer as almost none of it has anything remotely in common with thrash metal... not sure i ever heard a good explanation of what people even think chipthrash is, most of the demos we got the last year of datathrash didn't fit what we were looking for at that point at all)
Last edited by e.s.c. (Aug 29, 2016 4:15 pm)
weird doublepost but isnt my avatar hypnotic all in a line?
Last edited by Jellica (Aug 29, 2016 6:13 pm)
but on a less trolly note i get esc's point. i seem to hear fewer artists trying to carve there own musical identities or whatever these days but im just old and shit and if people are enjoying themselves then it doesnt really matter and i still find lots of good things to listen to and go to some nice gigs sometimes.
Last edited by Jellica (Aug 29, 2016 6:15 pm)
but on a less trolly note i get esc's point. i seem to hear fewer artists trying to carve there own musical identities or whatever these days but im just old and shit and if people are enjoying themselves then it doesnt really matter and i still find lots of good things to listen to and go to some nice gigs sometimes.
There are periods of consistency, and novelty. The late 90s were a paradigm shift, now things are settled down. Technology has driven all of these phases of chipmusic, if you think about it.
Not that it bothers me. There's a handful of innovative chipsters, and other than that, I get inspiration elsewhere. If you want to carve or your own musical identity, you shouldn't be listening to chip music anyway, you know? Like what Photek said about Jungle.
Last edited by breakphase (Aug 29, 2016 7:49 pm)
Jellica wrote:but on a less trolly note i get esc's point. i seem to hear fewer artists trying to carve there own musical identities or whatever these days but im just old and shit and if people are enjoying themselves then it doesnt really matter and i still find lots of good things to listen to and go to some nice gigs sometimes.
There are periods of consistency, and novelty. The late 90s were a paradigm shift, now things are settled down. Technology has driven all of these phases of chipmusic, if you think about it.
Not that it bothers me. There's a handful of innovative chipsters, and other than that, I get inspiration elsewhere. If you want to carve or your own musical identity, you shouldn't be listening to chip music anyway, you know. Like what Photek said about Jungle.
most of my favorite artists in the scene listen to little or no chipmusic.. personally, i listen mostly to industrial metal & hip-hop
e.s.c. has a point. I don't even publish my non dance chip because it isn't what people are into...but maybe that's a mistake?