Hello, longtime fan of all things chip-music here. I finally got tired of just listening and I'd like to try my hand at making some chip-music for once. I've got an Akai MPKmini MK.3 midi controller, a fresh install of fami-tracker and literally no knowledge of music, music theory, or other music things at all. If I want to start learning to make fun music, what resources do I reference to start teaching myself? Your help is greatly appreciated.
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Feryl wrote:
I don't have much of an education in music theory myself, but I've been writing chiptunes for 12 years.
Something I'd recommend, is downloading a version of ModPlug Tracker or OpenMPT (personally I use version 1.16 from 2004, which is maybe less complicated than the newer versions) and downloading some songs from modarchive.org to see how other people have tracked. That could help you, especially since you're just getting started, to look at the patterns and see what other people have done.
For chiptune artists on the Mod Archive site, I'd recommend Radix, Ghidorah, Stalker, 4mat, and Zabutom. You should be able to find a bunch of oldschool module chiptunes there.
Edit: also you could look for FamiTracker source files from artists like FearofDark, if you're looking to work with FamiTracker specifically.
Hey Feryl! Thanks for the advice, I'll install OpenMPT in the morning. Thanks for the modarchive.org link, I wasn't aware of the site. I'll also take some time to look into famitracker. Any advice from others is still welcome.
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I would say: Focus on learning the actual software, and then look at tunes made by others in that software.
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Glasgow, Scotland.
You don't need music theory to get started. It can help later, but is not necessary. What's important is that it sounds good to you. With trackers, learning to use the software will be far more helpful at the outset.
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Bratislava, Slovakia
I pasted this link here some time ago, but i can again 