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.”
Thanks a lot Johann ! I am honoured ! 
well, that site is just great, you should be
Draw tool.
I’d go as far saying if the tune sounds like chiptune and is small in filesize, it can be called chiptune without losing nightsleep.
That said, both have quite hazy definition but thats how its been for a couple decades. If my memory suits me right(instant failure possibility) it was 4-mat who first came with the term “chiptune” when he used only a few bytes long samples in his Amiga-mods.
QuadraSID is apparently alright. There’s also Peach if you’re using a PC.
I use a Macintosh and I’ve been involved in the chiptune scene for a couple of years (I use Nanoloop and LSDJ to create music on my Gameboy).
When working on the computer I use:
Automat
Really excellent plug, it’s got sine, saw, triangle and square (which all sound really nice).
http://blog.alphakanal.de/category/automat
Chip32
Unfortunately Chip32 doesn’t emulate the chip sound very well, in fact it generally sounds pretty poor to me, and you’d be better of just using the draw tool in Renoise or whatever.
http://mac.wareseeker.com/Multimedia-Design/chip32-1.0.zip/317397
Other than that a lot of simple, free synths can be used to create sounds that are kinda like what old-school hardware sounds like. Tal Elek7ro is a good example.
Remember that the chiptune sound is really just music that’s made out of waveforms that are basic, so any VSTi that has an oscillator that can produce sines, saws etc. should be alright.