buy a second hand amiga, something about the dac / paula sound chip 
.
you must be kidding me??
Why would I be kidding? Music software has gotten so complicated! Don’t you think it’s gotten much more complicated? All I used to have to do was squeeze what I could out of a limited pile of 8 bit samples. Those were the days! (P.S, in those days all I wished for was more high quality samples!).
Yea, I’m defintely not kidding. I like Renoise a lot, but with more power comes so much more confusion. I don’t spend as much time as I used to sitting on the computer tweaking away.
A tip that helps: write your tune, and once it’s finished, think about tweaking sounds and mixing. If you do the two things at the same time, things get more complicated.
While playing with the sounds at http://sdcompo.com (round 72) I’ve found resampling to lower rates helps brighten things at a tradeoff of lower sound quality. It’s worthy of experimentation, depending on the sound you’re looking for.
Wow ! Sorry to revive this old thread but hey im looking back and im still wondering how some freakin good tracker music artist was making such beautiful blip sound !
Just Listen to this sound :
I know that this artist was makin music for the commodore 64 but i am just unable to sound like in any close way for my opinion !
I guess that talent matters 
Speaking of SID music, if you want to make SID music but don’t want to use Goattracker, Deflemask is pretty damned good. Bonus points if you write a script or something to sync 2 instances of Deflemask so you can do the “stereo goattracker” thing with Deflemask.
The basics of these sounds should be easily recreatable in Renoise, if you understand how the SID works and know its filterranges…
This is the actual instrument schematics of how the oscillators were routed:
You only need one oscillator/generator set.
The metallic sounds that you hear in the song are ring modulation tricks and voices were upwards chain-linking (these are these Sync/RM lines that you see connecting the sets) to other voices to produce that effect (if value 33 was a sine wave oscillator shape, then 32 was its ringmodulator)
Next to the ringmodulation, and filtereffects you also could design pulse width effects which gives each waveform its more narrow or wide shape.
Pulse width is not easy to emulate since the ringmod device does not have such an option (and it lacks a noise generator). But the pulse width and filter modulations are in generic that give these sid sounds their vivid personality.
Recreating multi-oscilator sequence variations is not easy either. (On the C64, a kick drum was usually combined out of a noise generator wave and a sine wave quickly in sequence)
You might want to try the Dream 64 pro plugin to get pretty similar sounds
i suggest that you take two or three trackers that are chip-based like GoatTracker, FamiTracker, DefleMask. they usually are programmed to emulate the original chip as good as possible. you could also use MilkyTracker which has an 8-bit wave generator and can be easily switched to no interpolation. write a few songs in them, learn their limitations and what tricks the artists use to make the songs sound good and then you can always write patterns, export them to WAV and use them in Renoise. some artists like to add reverb at this point or add proper drum samples.
i mean there’s no magic behind it, you just have to put in the effort and do some research. writing good songs on the other hand is a totally different topic.
Goattracker is pretty good. DefleMask has a very long way to go regarding being able to build good Sid instruments though, i would not recommend it at this stage (unless you want to play with the FM sound systems).
u dl goattracker
Siduzzit is difficult to learn, but i believe that it’s the most powerful tracker on C64, at least it was considered so by my C64 geek friends. I never got to learn it properly though and did most my stuff in JohnPlayer, which on the other hand is very simple, but also a bit buggy sounding (which i thought was a cool feature).
So grab VICE 64 or another emulator of choice and it’ll be almost as good as the real thing.
You could also build yourself one of the projects at Midibox.org.
Looks like the forums are down at the moment but I built myself a SammichSID after I was able to source the SID-chips.
About €300 in materials and then it’s the build time.
Wasn’t too long ago that I built it so I haven’t used it much.
The SammichSID comes with prefab boards, the whole component kit except the SID-chips.
The guides are pretty good so it’s more or less a straight forward process.
Have the whole HVSC library, so if anyone want to hear an example through the SammichSID from that library let me know.
There are also demo vidoes on youtube with the various midiboxsid-projects.
I have a broken C-128D (and a working one) and i have for a long time considered to use the chip to some synth project. I haven’t really done any digital electronics, so i’ll probably make a simple analog monosynth. I have an old pedal keyboard i salvaged from an old organ that would be perfect for it. How cool wouldn’t it be playing the electric guitar while also making awesome SID sounds with your feet. 
i think all replies are somewhat helpful, but it’s surprising nobody mentioned the all-mighty arpeggio command (which i think you’re after in the 1st place)
- start renoise
- enter note triggering very SHORT sample (no matter what) with forward loop
→ if any doubt, create a new, self-drawn sample with a length of 128 - apply effect 0Axy, whereas x and y represent the half-tone steps to arpeggiate between.
try for example:
C-4 01 … -A47
— 00 … -A47
— 00 … -A47
— 00 … -A47
C-4 01 … -A37
— 00 … -A37
— 00 … -A37
— 00 … -A37
…
…
…
… and you’ll get the idea.
Yes, but it will be no more than just an idea. I personally (as a sid composer) considered the old arpeggio command the most poorest arpeggio feature that got implemented into trackers. Loads of music composing applications on the C64 have always been much richer in that concept.
And every other tracker developer simply kept forking this same limited idea into his own design, even when there no longer was a reason to be such limited. Finally we now have phrases in Renoise where you can have a very big influence on arpeggio design. Using the arpeggio for chord effects is just plain silly to refer to and always has been. No doubt the arpeggio command is still useful to create various nifty effects, but for creating arpeggio chords i would really advise to use the phrase editor instead.
@vV
i can’t even comment such a quality contribution to the actual topic.
Phrases is like ornaments…i agree with vV
Take a look at Vortex http://bulba.untergrund.net/vortex_e.htm
I have a smoke of renoise chiptune here XRNS Song