Chip tune and trackers
Chip tune is a style of music that emerged in the 1980s, originally performed on home computers, and heavily influenced by game music, although it rapidly broke out beyond that hardware to represent a musical style or philosophy that used those types of sound, either in hardware or software. Think of the game soundtracks heard on the original Nintendo Game Boy – that’s 8-bit music (YouTube is full of examples, if you’re not sure what we mean). And then think of the Commodore 64 computer, and the sounds created by the onboard MOS6581 chip. We’re talking low-res sounds, limited polyphony and effects, and tedious-but-productive sequencing workflows. In the 21st century, we’ve seen hardware chip tune machines, some featuring remaining stocks of those original chips, one example being Elektron’s legendary Sidstation.
Tracker software is a list-based type of music sequencer, based on a vertically-scrolling list of note, instrument, and effect, parameters – kind of like an interactive version of today’s Logic Pro Event Editor. This originated with the Ultimate Soundtrack software, released in 1987, and since then, trackers have never really gone away; there are trackers available for pretty much any platform. One example is LSDJ (Little Sound DJ), which can be run on vintage Game Boys courtesy of a customisable cartridge, or inside a Game Boy emulator running on a computer.
This is amazingly creative for such a ‘basic’ piece of software, and there’s nothing quite like working with those crunchy low-res samples that it uses for beats and synths. Most recently, things took an unexpected turn on the hardware front, with Polyend’s Tracker, a hardware version of the tracker workflow, featuring not only the sequencing tools but an onboard sampler as well. Further retro points are awarded, because the Tracker even includes a selection of retro games which can be played directly on the device – and this can be expanded by loading NES ROMs onto the Micro SD card. Playing Tetris on music hardware – yes you can. The popularity and public profile of trackers comes and goes, but these sounds are going to be around forever, and they can really help producers set the mood of their work in a specific period. Very usable!
Making them with software
Ableton Live users can create chip tune style sounds using the Operator synth. Load the default Operator preset, and choose Sine 4 for oscillator A. This will give you a low-res sound that takes you right into the 80s ballpark! To add some buzz, go to the filter tab, and from the central section, set Shaper to 4Bit. Beyond that it’s more about the composition than the sounds. Try putting an Arpeggiator in front, perhaps with Random and Scale devices in front of that, giving you one-finger sequences that start to sound more game-like. You could build on this by duplicating the track and transposing it down, either with Operator’s Transpose control, or by adding the Pitch MIDI effect device. Now when you play a note you should hear two patterns playing together.
By experimenting with the Arpeggiator settings in each track, you can get a result that sounds quite sophisticated while still being built around only one note. Limiting polyphony (the number of notes playing at once) also helps keep it real. LSDJ has a drum track, a noise track, and two ‘melodic’ tracks, and that’s all, for example, and each of those is monophonic. Working with this limited palette really boosts your melodic and harmony skills, and gets you using counterpoint, something which you might not be interested in, otherwise.