So my voice, completely filtered through a sawtooth wave, sounds like this: If you don’t know how vocoders work, you’re basically filtering one sound with another sound’s frequency spectrum. Smoothed sawtooth wave from MilkyTracker as the carrier sound. I decided the best way would be to use a vocoder effect in Ableton live and feed in a slightly smoothed sawtooth wave from MilkyTracker as the carrier sound. Since I made this song intending it to be a jingle for my Composer Quest patron Rob Waite, I somehow had to add my lyrics without it sounding too tacked-on to this otherwise authentic chiptune production. I just hit random notes in the key of G, then edited a few of them.įor the climax of the song, I wanted to fill out the texture with a gentle high-pitch pad…īy then, I was pretty happy with my instrumental chiptune track: To give the ends of my phrases some life, I added a solo part with a crunchy synth. I listened back to what I had so far, and I started hearing a counter-melody, which I added with a triangle wave. The drums are just pink noise samples, played at different frequencies to get a slightly different sound for the kick, snare, and hihats. I figured that sound would work for the melody part, too. ![]() First, I created a quick bass sound, which is basically a sine wave, but I hand drew it so it would have a little more grit. I recorded a simple demo of me singing the melody and playing the bassline on piano (note: my goal was to create a chiptune jingle for my Composer Quest patron Rob Waite – that’s what these lyrics are all about).įrom there, I started entering the notes one by one in MilkyTracker. So for my second attempt at creating a chiptune track, I waited until a melody popped into my head. But again, thinking about the importance of constraints in art, I realized I should just see what I can do with the basic sounds – sine wave, triangle wave, square wave, sawtooth wave, and noise. I also thought I needed to start with a huge musical color palette by creating some intricate sample sounds. I was trying to make the musical equivalent of the Mona Lisa right away, when I should have approached my first chiptune song like drawing a tiny picture. That’s another thing that initially discouraged me. ![]() If you were drawing pixel by pixel without an idea of the final drawing, it might eventually turn into something cool and unexpected, but it would be much quicker and probably more satisfying if you can imagine the whole picture before you start.Īlso, your first attempt at pixel art would probably be a tiny avatar or sprite, not a huge pixel art version of the Mona Lisa. I realized my tracker experience would be much better if I had the melodies and chords fleshed out in my head before I start typing in note after note. I decided I would probably give up.īut after a little break, my perspective started to shift. It felt really clunky when I tried my normal method of composing and recording on the fly, as I do in Ableton Live. I got really excited about it after watching tutorials and seeing that it wasn’t as daunting as I thought.īut then I tried making a song, and it seemed painfully tedious. I thought I’d give it a shot though, so I downloaded a free tracker that works on Mac called MilkyTracker. Instead of seeing waveforms, you have a scrolling list of all the notes, like “A4” and “C#3,” along with numbers representing their volume, effects, etc. If you’ve never seen a tracker before, it looks more like computer code than a modern music sequencer. Since I’m getting more into writing video game music, and since a lot of game developers are looking for an old school chiptune synth sound, I thought I should learn the authentic way to make them: by using a music tracker. What I roughly know about MED's commands is that most of them are pretty much the same as Protrackers commands.If you’d rather listen to this article than read it, check Episode 9 of the Charlie’s Music Production Lessons podcast. And they work fine on PT2.3 (just tested them). mod tunes I made last year on OctaMED 5.04 - nothing fancy, no sample loops and only simple commands (I was beginning to learn Amiga trackers). Whatever it is, I'm personally convinced of there being a difference in how octamed/protracker handle. Octamed was certainly a little more lenient and opened files as. I'm sure there's an easy answer but Amiga tracking and beer usually go hand-in-hand.Īnyway, I wish I had documented some of the process, but I do remember having to go into protracker and adjusting various settings which seemed to adhere to the incredibly strict rules of the. I asked if it worked in protracker, and when it didn't we knew something was up. I remember him writing it on octamed soundstudio and throwing a rage when neither winamp or renoise would play the sound file. ![]() mod wasn't working for use in the tracker hero game. ![]() We spent about 3 weeks trying to figure out why dispyz's datarunner.
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