Chip tunes in the public (Page 2 of 5)

This thread is the same old news really... if you listen to Black Eyed Peas, Calvin Harris, David Guetta, etc. it's all chip all the time. These are top 10 hits, sometimes even #1s. It's not hard to imagine that the same waveforms we all love so much would have mainstream appeal. These days if you are running any kind of synthesis software in the studio, you can make these sounds.

I think the real separation between mainstream electronic music and chip music is the drums. Sometimes the bass too, but mostly the drums. That's why the most successful acts combine gameboys with a real drum set, or do some kinda fakebit setup with drum machines or drum samples. It's the one thing your average chip synth can't do well on its own.

That and I'm not sure how using a drum machine along with real chip hardware would make something "fakebit" either

If fakebit has any usable definition, I'm pretty sure it would be something like "music utilizing waveforms common to chipmusic without regard for the limitations inherent to the original hardware that generated those waveforms".

My experience with drums + chip has been that one does best by taking advantage of both interplay and doubling between the two percussion styles. This seems obvious, but I hear a lot of straight doubling or completely absent chip drums, as well as a lot of "I use my gameboy for my drums except for the kick drum".

Maybe that doesn't change much though - I do know that for The Glowing Stars, the human energy of the two of us on our instruments, jumping around, yelling, making mistakes, is definitely a source of appeal for our fans.

The loudness war thing is one of the best explanations I've heard - obviously there's also a touch of gaming for nostalgia there too. I'm always amazed at how easily lay people - who have never heard or thought of chipmusic - can recognize the waveforms and techniques we use from their childhood and place them. The fact that anyone can even think to say "Mario at a rave" when they hear a recording is almost impressive in a way.

1. There is no such thing as fakebit. It was a word constructed in 2009 and it should go away.
2. Primitive waveforms have been around since the beginning of audio synthesis, just because something has a primitive waveform does not means it's chip music / chiptune etc.
3. There is no such thing as fakebit.
4. Your gameboy sounds like shit.

chip music is an aesthetic and an intent, if it's not made as chip music, it is not chip music. if you make something and call it chip music, it probably is.

Don't get me wrong, I think fakebit is a shitty word too, but a lot of the stuff I hear with VSTs fails to utilize those waveforms in an interesting way, and a big part of that is that they fail to utilize techniques inherent to the original medium, usually because they lack the necessary background to understand them.

There's been a million and a half "what is chiptune" discussions of course, but I still think it's a combination of primitive digital waveforms, techniques specific to synths with limited numbers of monophonic voices (fast arpeggios, voices changing roles quickly, etc etc) and noisy audio. Is there anything else that anyone would argue is absolutely essential to chipmusic?

Also I don't think most major artists using basic wave forms are trying to be like chiptune or steal from it. They are just like... ooooh square wave sounds nice : ]