wills316 wrote:Oh yeah, and what does fakebit mean? I'm new to all this.
Traditionally chipmusic (when talking about the tracks from videogames and demos) is made using soundchips within computers or consoles. For example the 2A03 in the NES, the SID out of the c64 and so on. But there are many other ways of generating simple waveforms, as an example the Amiga has a 4-channel digital sampling chip called Paula. While it doesn't have dedicated oscillators for generating waves you can still use tiny sample waveforms and modulate those to create the chip aesthetic, same with the chip in the PC Engine and many others. The Gameboy soundchip itself shares some similarities in it's waveform channel, something that is entirely missed by a good portion of the people yelling "fakebit".
So then, "what is fakebit"? It's commonly described as using either a software or sampling method to create the chip aesthetic , rather than a dedicated soundchip. That's the technical term. However it's used mostly in the chipscene by people who think using sampling trackers, VSTs or other tools is somehow "cheating". That because you're not slaving over LSDJ or SDI the process of writing music is easier. That because you have more than 4 channels you're "not doing it right". Stupidly it's even been used to describe 8-bit tools in emulators, where writing a song on Nanoloop in an emulator makes it fakebit, rather than using a real DMG to write it.
Apart from anything else terms like Fakebit stop people experimenting and we have to have progress in this scene always. Look at the scene in 2011, for the most part people are releasing albums as streamable files now and they're adding post-production and other instrumentation. Does this stop it being authentic? Of course not.
