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Lawrenceville, GA
I heard the music in the NES games I had and always wanted to make my own. I found virt in 2000 or 2001 and tried using Paragon5 tracker, but didn't really get anywhere. Nullsleep made a basic guide to how to use MCK and that got me started making music. My first cover was of an Infected Mushroom song in 2003. Then I joined 2a03.org and vgmix and the rest is history.
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Oakland CA
RushJet1 wrote:
I heard the music in the NES games I had and always wanted to make my own. I found virt in 2000 or 2001 and tried using Paragon5 tracker, but didn't really get anywhere. Nullsleep made a basic guide to how to use MCK and that got me started making music. My first cover was of an Infected Mushroom song in 2003. Then I joined 2a03.org and vgmix and the rest is history.
Wow. You started in tracking in 2003? I stumbled across your Sounds of the 2a03 in 2005 and was really inspired by it. I would close my eyes and imagine being taken on a journey over the course of the album. You told a great story with music.
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Oakland CA
I stumbled across micromusic.net somewhere in 2001. I think I was looking for anything related to net art. Looking for things like hell.com and jodi.org. I was hooked, but thought, "Oh damn, the whole micromuisc scene is in europe, too bad I'll never make it to a show". Shortly thereafter I came across 8bitpeoples and a few years later went to the 2006 International Chiptune Resistance show in SF with bitshifter and nullsleep.
I think one of my initial attractions to chipmusic was that it's this umbrella term for a wide range of styles. This was in contrast to the San Fransisco bay area electronic music scene which had an overwhelming amount of sub generas and rabid fans who were on edge just waiting to correct you about their sub sub sub classifications of music. In this way the chipscene seemed familiar to the breakcore scene I was a part of.
I completely missed/avoided the 8BC scene because it seemed like a lot of drama. But I've been convinced by Matt Payne that Chipmusic.org is a lot friendlier and less crowded. So far I like it here.
Last edited by NickDrexler (Sep 7, 2016 8:24 am)
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Glasgow, Scotland.
Semi necro-bump...
Commodore 64 was my first computer, that my parents bought me when I was 5. Probably irresponsible by today's standards, but the tech world ended up being my passion/career, so there's something to be said about it.
I played in a band for years and then the hatred of each other boiled over to the point where we split up. I didn't play music for ages, and then when I did, I tried to embellish my solo acoustic stuff with various different instruments and sounds to avoid sounding like a singer songwriter cunt. My quest for different noises led me to electronic things, and I remember reading some shit article about 'Game Boy DJs' and ending up buying a modified DMG to try out LSDJ. While I waited for it to arrive I started modding my own, and slowly I progressed into full blown electronic music. That was 5ish years ago... and now I've fallen down the Eurorack hole... but composing on LSDJ is still one of my favourite things to do.
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I grew up with dialup and didn't have much patience to download MP3s. So I would download and listen to .nsf files from various videogames instead. After some more digging I found there was a small niche community of .nsf composers at 2a03.org. I joined the message board and slowly learnt MML to do my own .nsf. Soon after famitracker was invented and changed the nsf scene inside out. Fast forward 11 odd years and here we are.
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Czech Republic
OK.
It was 10 years ago, we ran a band. My pals said: We'd like to have you in band, you could play bass guitar. I was a guitarist, drummer and keyboardist, but I didn't have any bass guitar. Few weeks before this I took out my Commodore64 I had till my childhood and i tried to make some tunes with it in Music assembler +, only one tracker I had these days on my 5,25 floppy disk. I said to guys: I have no bass guitar, but I'm trying to make music on Commodore64 and they said: that could be interesting. So we ran the band. Today is The day, we have 10th anniversary from our first gig. And today we have a gig and we are publishing our Live album. I still use Commodore64 with that not so good tracker, but what the hell! And than I started to look for some guys doing similar music, got Gameboy DMG from my friend and bought 32M EMS cart with LSDJ. That's how i get to electronic music, vintage synthesizers and chipmusic and here.
Last edited by ryba (Sep 26, 2016 2:45 pm)
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Adelaide, Australia
Well, I took a left turn at Albuquerque...
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Stockholm, Sweden
Well.. I have always liked the music but never understood how it was made. I used to listen to chiptunes on youtube and one day I saw this screenrecording of a square that played notes (LSDJ emulator). I started researching and found out about LSDJ. Downloaded it and tried it out. Awesome! Bought my copy of the site and ordererd a cart from kitch, and bought a DMG from a friend since I only had a gameboy pocket (I had read that DMG had better sound -true). This was somewhere about 09-10-ish..
After searching for like-minded on the net I found 8bc, which became my new home on the internet. When it closed down I tried to find another place, but didn't like what I found. I stopped making chiptunes and started producing electronic music. In recent years I have started to build my never ending modular synth, that keeps eating my salary, and mixing that with my chipping.
This summer I started playing around with Linux. I wanted a DAW on this computer too, so I found MilkyTracker. Hooked again. And yesterday I found this site and here I am!
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Tennessee
8bc died so I migrated here with the others
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Playboy Man-Baby
~Got hit by a car on the first day of high school (2007) and got wicked jacked up.
~Couldn't play guitar for almost a year; learned about Famitracker and GoatTracker instead of going to gym class.
~Acquired lsdj eventually; busked a lot. Got some house shows after busking hard. Came up with a lot of ways of making it functional as a live instrument.
~Got more shows. Went to college for American modernist lit theory; focused too much on lsdj. Played more shows. Started an indie/new wave band that used lsdj. Played shows with them.
~Dropped out; started playing even more shows. Went on tour for a month, honing the craft and thinking a lot about the use of space and the weird "social dynamics" operating during performance.
~Started reading/re-reading a lot of stuff from college on theories of occidental culture, technology and industry, post-futurism, and neo-modernism. Wrote out and revised a lot of ideas that I wanted to explore in my act. Totally lost interest in any chip stuff that didn't make the gameboy sound ugly and gross. Developed a caffeine habit and got really pessimistic about stuff. Became determined to make absurd/bleak work. Started listening to a lot of breakcore and harsh noise/power electronics (Hanatarash, Datach'i, Whitehouse, etc.), went to a lot of performance art and noise shows. Pretty much left the chip "scene" (?) like 99.98% by this point (I'm still on here hehe). I don't bill myself as "chipmusic" and am careful to avoid advertising/pimping out the gameboy as this big 'part of' the project or anything like that, and I kind of don't even play with other chip acts anymore. Generally get booked for shows with noise/performance acts and hardcore/grindcore bands.
~Applied for a room in an artists' studio in the city; got accepted. Started a new band (not chip) with friends and a side project (slow, wacked out lsdj + no-input noise module) with a different friend. Still find time to do IRH shows sometimes, but I make it a point to never have my sets repeat themselves at all, which means it takes like a month to prepare a show.
Last edited by Invisible Robot Hands (Oct 29, 2016 12:10 am)