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To be honest.. I still don't call this chipmusic. To me, that's just music, made for games, that happens to run on a console with limited sound hardware. I know I'm part of a tiny minority and somewhat of a self-jerking purist about it, but "chiptunes" were invented in the Amiga demoscene by people who were nostalgic about their C64. I know things evolve organically and now a new generation of people are nostalgic for whatever machine they grew up with and that's why we're pretty much seeing a 90/10 ratio of nes and gameboy versus everything else. BUT IM OLD AND I NEED TO SHAKE MY CANE AT PEOPLE AND BLAME YOU DAMN YOUNGSTERS FOR SOMETHING.

That said though. This soundtrack fucking nails the NES sound perfectly.

...that was my whole point though

hahaha Nah, I'm not saying theory is essential. But there's a difference between saying theory is not essential, and calling it bullshit. Seeing as theory is nothing more than the analysis of existing music, calling it bullshit is pretty close to calling music itself bullshit.

Think of it as science. Whether you understand why tides roll or not won't stop them from doing it for a very specific and explainable reason. We were sailing across the globe centuries before we understood how the tides work. And that's quite fine. All you really need is a pair of eyes to see if there's enough water in front of you to sail your boat in. If you sail often enough, you'll notice patterns. You'll know the tide is high at certain moments, and low at others. You'll know this with enough confidence to predict when sailing a particular place is safe or not. That's where the large majority of musicians are. They don't know the exact science behind it, but they're confident enough in the patterns they've observed to predict some things. If what you want to do is sail your boat around, content to know that the tide is high at a certain moment, or low at another then hey...sail away! But it doesn't mean that people who studied this academically and figured out that it was the gravitational pull of other celestial bodies just wasted their time. Yknow.. whatever floats your boat (see what I did there?) But scientific knowledge of the tides made fishing more efficient. Made sailing easier and safer. Made it possible to create the Panama canal, etc.

Not caring about theory, I can live with, seeing as it's pretty much how I function myself. But disregarding it as pointless is simple ignorance.

YEAH!

Also if you wanna be good at hockey, fuck the rules. They say the puck goes in the net, I say bull sh*t. Its time to stop playing like the Habs already. Learning the rules might just be a waste of time if your intent is to never play in an arena, but play hockey outside.

This level of stupidity can't be natural, you've clearly trained for years to achieve this. Theory is not relevant unless you want to copy other people. Words fucking fail me.

Please mister jacker, do show us your music. Try as I might no amount of Google magic returns any result.

Reporting for duty sir. SIR YES SIR. *does some military-looking things*

A few tips for short ingame loops:

1) Poetry. More specifically, limericks and haikus. Weird tip? Yep. Go listen to a few limericks on the tubeternets, and notice the musical quality of it. How ending on a high note suggest there's more coming, and ending on a lower note suggests the limerick is done. Kind of the same for melodies. If your melody is going to repeat a whole damn lot, it helps the listener know "where" he is in the loop if there are definite start, middle and end point.

2) A-B structure. Find something that resolves in four bars, then add four more bars of something else. The relative minor works very well in such cases.

3) Tempo. The faster the song, the more music you can fit in the same time....obviously. Some ideas are good, but hard to resolve in just a few bars. A faster tempo might be what you need to make your idea loop properly.

4) Keep it simple and sparse. With loops, you usually don't have time/space for an intro. Generally you jump right into the meat of the song. As such, you don't want your song to have 83 layers of epic harmonies because that's way too much for the listener to grasp right away. Songs with tons of layers tend to build up into complexity, but you don't have that luxury. So, keep it to the minimum the song needs....drums, bass, chord, lead. Only add to that formula if there really is something missing.

5) Similarily, don't try to be too innovative in your chord progressions. People have to "get" what your music is about in a very short time. Classic been-there-done-that progressions work best for this. Don't give me none of that artistic fucking bullshit about expressing your fucking feelings. You're on a fucking gameboy making fucking loops for a fucking game. If you want feeling, go paint a vase or something.

6) Learn about tension. You want a strong tension to build by the end of your loop. One that screams the need to resolve back to your home chord. Dom7th chords work wonders for this. Learn to use the leading tone in your melodies too (google it). If you build up enough tension in your chords and melody, then it doesn't feel like a loop because every bit of you wants the damn song to resolve back to the root chord. Powerful weapon in your arsenal.

edit: Oh yes and... you're shooting for at least three complete loops per day. Anything under that, you're overthinking it. A lot of these songs will be of dubious quality and that is NOT a problem. Build yourself a library of looping songs so that when you're ready to include music in your stuff, you can pick the best ones out. For Ironfist, I composed 55 loops and 11 were selected for the final product. Other contracts I had in the past had a similar ratio of composed-to-selected. It's normal. You didn't waste 44 loops, you made sure the 11 selected one were the best you could do.

haha yeah I know it's a sweet ass piece of gear. It's just a shame that 90% of all distressors out there are handled by EDM jerkoffs on a mission to make music as undynamic as possible.

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