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"Don't just tweak some knobs or use a generic waveform or patch"

This part kind of bugged me. Seems like one of the main points of chip music is that you're limited to certain wave forms, which means you have to be original through composition, not sound design.

I dunno whatever. I'm gonna kill myself eventually anyways. who cares.

I think an easy solution to this problem could be said in two words: community involvement.

The chiptune community is kind of a bizarre entity because we constantly see people come and go. The reason being is most people will upload something similar to what is already being done and then no one says anything and they leave. What in fact we are doing to weeding out any kind of potential innovation. It takes awhile for people to come into their own for any type of genre or style of music. Look at anyone's first album then compare it to what they write now, it's almost always different or better (this isn't always the case, I listen to plenty of bands who have transitioned into a sound I don't care for.) If we had more people coming into the scene and sticking around we have a lot more input rather than having the same discussions with the same 15 people who are active here.

To get over this hump more discussion with new artists and even older artists needs to happen for innovation to take place. chipmusic.org is a great avenue for all of us to feed off of each other but it seems as though if you're not an already accomplished chip musician within the scene most people don't care. Take me for example. For a long time I was discouraged with writing chipmusic entirely because I would upload tracks and BEG for constructive criticism only to receive maybe a total of 5 comments (spanning 5-6 songs) for the past 2 years like "sounds good" or "a little repetitive, but not bad." Argh! Where is it repetitive?, What did you like particularly?, What can I do to make it better? I'm a perfectionist and I thrive on criticism, compliments are also a big boost to motivation, I prefer the harshest of criticism because that just gives me the drive to make it even better. Don't be afraid to criticize even the most accomplished among us. No one is above being criticized, people will always critique everything to themselves why not make it known? Voice an opinion and make it better. Bouncing ideas off of each other is crucial to innovation. Very few people ever innovate alone.

Take it a step further. If you listen to someone and think "this person has something going here" do a split album or write a song with them and feature them in it. This is not only great exposure for new artists but collaboration is a great way to write a track (probably easier as well, since there's two or more people working on it) and expand on an existing idea. Other artists are constantly featuring new people in their tracks, hip hop especially. Shit, Korn did a bunch of songs with Skrillex and in turn it expanded what they were already doing. Punk and hardcore bands have been doing splits with bands for decades, so why not us?

I'm aware that music or any art form is very egocentric. Almost all of us are much to wrapped up in what we have going on to do these things but if you have enough energy to complain, you have enough energy to fix it. You don't have to hold people's hands and constructively criticize every track you listen to but doing a little bit more than coming on here and circle jerking with the same people day in and day out is a start.

/mytwocents