my girlfriend wants to make sum chiptune stuff,i dont know much about it since im not its biggest fan,but i was wondering if anyone out there in renoise land cud advise me on some nice plugins/techniques/sounds nething to do with making chiptune stuff really.i was also wondering if just sticking a lo fi mat at 12k on 8bits at the begining of each tracks chain is cheating?
I don’t know if lo-fi mat is cheating but it’s an easy way and won’t help her with the “How to track a chiptune ?” part.
A good thing to do could be : check chiptune.com and download some files (.xm or .mod from authors like rez, loonie, radix or others). Load them into renoise and see how these guys did it. Then use some of their samples and try to come up with your own chiptune…
As regards plugins, she might be interested by QuadraSID if she’s into chiptune stuff.
the instruments that come with renoise are good for chiptune,
i like to bit crush my drums, or use amiga samples, google em
Easiest way is to just create simple waveform samples for example square, pulse, saw, tri. The lo-fi mat doesn’t do much magic since chiptunes isn’t synonymous with dirty (shitty) sound “quality”, altough it can save some time on the drums, since drawing chip drums from ground up can be a pain in the ass and can require a lot of patience to sculpture to perfection.
A good starting point is to make a four chord, simple and moving, octave bassline with a saw-waveform sample (Classic example (base notes): C3 G2 D3 A2). Then add a kick ass drum beat and the rest pretty much comes on it’s own.
Chiptunes is pretty much about keeping it simple since the samples often are, by nature, very “compressed” so to speak. They can give a very tight sound with very little mixing effort. With no eq (which shouldn’t be used if making it old school 
) the sounds can take up a lot of frequencies.
Another trick is to work with the volume column and use the effect column wisely with effects such as vibrato, arpeggio, portamento and porta up and down, to name a few.
I have a bunch of cheesy chips for direct listening at my website
Basic waveworms are the order of the day (saw, square and Triangle). Don’t use any more than 1 osc per voice - keep it simple and melodic. Lot’s of PWM and simple noise waves for snare and hi hats (pref S&H). Arp chords are a must!
I can highly recommend Quadrasid VST and Dreamstation DXi (used with dxishell in Renoise) for easy construction of chip sounds.
P.S. - can I have your girlfriends phone number? ;oD
Basic waveforms and http://seankeisman.com/musicgen/musicgen.html
Then some playing with signal follower and filter cuttoff, delays, reverb, maybe some extra lofi etc.
Drums to one send, or work with a break (or both), and throw a lofimat on it with real low bit crunch level, then thicken it all with some cabinet and distortion. 
i cannot open that with pro tools, even with the VST / RTAS tracer…
making sounds in the goattracker is not that complicated! c64 music has nothing to do with chiptunes because chiptunes came first on amiga. using single cycle waves is the way chiptune are build.
8bit, mono, 22 khz and only patterneffects is everything you need to get the typical chip sound, imho.
no. just… no.
“A chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis.”
Yeah I know, most of the time when we say “chip tunes” we mean “something that sounds like chip tunes”, but still… as much as I loved the Amiga…
also:
thanks for all the replies it helps a lot,i suspected the use of single cycle waveforms alright and also i was wondering about being really true chiptune,synthesizeing all the sounds instead of using samples.she loves that dude sabrepulse so ideally shed like to sound similar to him but i think he uses lsdj.i want to stick to renoise though because i can teach her really quickly how to use it and also its just the tits!can anyone recomend a list of good chiptune artists that i could listen to in order to teach her some similar techniques and arrangements?
I know, and that’s mentioned in the wikipedia article as well (I guess chip music is the real thing and chip tunes are the tracker modules that sound like chip music).
I don’t care about how something is done, and my favourite chip tunes are protracker modules haha… I just had to protest the statement that chip music started on the Amiga. It got emulated with samples on the Amiga because they had no other way, unlike the Atari ST for example… and the Amiga was very popular and had a lot of kickass musicians. So chip tunes were born… but that doesn’t make them the “original chip music” or anything like that.
You can say this about any pouet thread in existance 
@kaneel
hehe thats excacly what i thought when reading the article. ive never heard the word chiptune/music in the c64 scene and im still active there. i´ve started making sid music in 1990 and the first time i get in contact with chiptunes was on the amiga. on the c64 it is and was allways sidmusic, so i realy dont know whats right or wrong. but that article seems to be not 100% correct.
and as you already said, if “chip” is defined by using an machine with a soundchip inside, then kraftwerk was chipmusic too 
Netlabel, so go ahead and down em all. Label is now ran by Bit Shifter…
Completely offtopic; I heard Sabrepulse is kinda of a dick though. Like he always cancels concerts, etc…
thanks the 8bitpeoples site is great
i think i`ve heard that name before
i`ve just read the german wikipedia entrie right now and they also say that chiptune is by default using a computer with a soundchip.
but they also say that it became first popular with the amiga because they tryed to copy the sound from the SID for example.
but who cares we all know what a chiptune is, or how it sounds, right ?
this is a neverending discussion i think.
well yeah, but that’s kinda like the fact that we didn’t come up with a word for water until we left the ocean, if you catch my drift? fish don’t talk about water in the way we do, they’re in it. so yeah, chip music on a C64 was just music - so? ^^
(sorry for being so stubborn haha… but hey, I posted a link with sooo many plugins that I kinda did my due - now I can bicker 
)
excacly, we called it music 
we are all stubborn 
“Eskimos, as the unimaginative would now interject, have all sorts of names for snow. This information is presumably intended to demonstrate the city dweller’s blunted feel for nature. I have no sympathy for those who parrot this pedestrian theory. Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, which means that even seldom-used expressions like ‘snow that falls on a red T-shirt’ are combined into one word. It’s so tiresome to have to keep pointing this out.”
