Different ways of getting that chiptune arpeggio sound?

In Famitracker, you can use effect 0xyto get that characteristic simulated chord sound.

I’ve noticed that you can do a similar thing in Renoise when working with samples.

Both of these approaches are okay, but I’d like to get that effect without having to punch in the number of semitones each time.

I can approximate this effect with one VSTi, Synth1, which includes an arpeggiator that loops over the currently active notes.

Other chippy VSTs include arpeggiators that operate at programmed intervals which relate to only one active note.

Is there a word or phrase that describes the difference between an arpeggiator that uses the currently active notes vs one that uses offsets? I’d like to be able to find more chippy VSTs that can produce a quick arpeggio when more than one key is pressed.

I’m also trying another approach, but having trouble.

Not sure about your specific question about the names but isn’t the phrase editor pretty much exactly what you’re looking for?

^I don’t think so. He’s looking for an arpeggiator where he can just play whatever chord on his keyboard and it automatically plays the arpeggio with those notes. You can get something similar with the phrase editor if you just make a phrase with only one or 2 lines, and only a C4, then whatever sequence you play and hold will loop, but it’s not going to be perfect and you may not be able to play fast and perfect enough to get the effect he’s looking for. Although you could certainly track with it well enough.

Chipsounds by Plogue is probably right up your alley. It has classic sounds sampled from a ton of different old chips, and has the kind of arpeggiator you want, with different settings for random sequence, octave alternating, going up, going down, etc.

Right now I’m just trying out a bunch to see which have arpeggiators that operate in the way I’m describing. Basic 64 has an arpeggiator that operates this way. I haven’t been able to reproduce the effect 0xy sound yet, but maybe with some tweaking.

I was able to get the sound I was after with Basic 65 using one pulse waveform, adjusting the ARP note length up to 100%, the speed to 1/16, and the octave to 1.

At the moment, triangles don’t sound good arp’ed with the same settings.

The Oatmeal from Fuzzpilz also has an arpeggiator that works this way, and the triangles sound better.

Recently I learned about another tracker called Klystrack that has something similar to a pattern editor in its instrument editor called the program editor. This tutorial talks about how it can be used to create arps.

The program editor in Klystrack can do other interesting things as well, it makes me wish that its instruments were available as VSTi.