After 8bitpeoples, Kittenrock is certainly one of the most loveable outlets for free chippy weirdness in the world of gameboy music. Thanks to Jellica, this will remain a place to be for the next couple of centuries.
Nonetheless Retinascan also wants its piece of cake and has therefor set up this next chipstyle series with ten artists from 9 countries, where Jellica represents the home of fish and chips and the motherland of football, the Empire called United Kingdom.
Besides, England is also the birthplace of warehouse parties, combat drinking and pop in general. Jellica embraces this all in a wonderful hysteric yet funny stylemix of everything that swapped over from the island in the last few years, including especially electro, drum’n’bass and breaks.
The site has full length streaming of all the tracks, but at reduced quality from what you’d get on the cd-r. Standout tracks include the spacey driving beats on “Man QQQ”, the hard tech jamming on “Soft Pink” and that awesome basslines in Man One.
All around chip god and sex idol Chibi-Tech is profile on the Denpa No Sekai Blog. The interview is massively in-depth and well worth the read.
Excerpt:
“Chiptune is slowly but surely getting recognized as a musical genre, though it remains solidly anchored in the gaming world that created it. I think the problem at this point is that it features no lyrical content or message. A Tokyo group called “DENPA PARTY” are throwing events and composing music under the “NO WAR” banner, clearly a political message (simple though it may be). If you started adding lyrics to your songs, what would they be like?
The man, The Pixels
Haha with all aside from synthesized vocal techniques, I honestly never thought of it this way. However, maybe that kind of deliverance can get certain problems with chiptune’s public perception off my chest!
My problem is that the general public either thinks of chiptunes in two ways. One: Their first impressions are that chiptunes are not legitimate music in their own right simply due to their age — and often get dismissed as “crappy General MIDI sounds” not worthy of serious evaluation. Two: People exploit 8bit as some sort of retro-waxing of “a simpler time” without much real thought put into it. Emo-wanker groups are probably most well known for this. It honestly gets tiring to see a young kid yell out “Whoa that totally sounds like MEGAMAN MUSIC” without putting much thought to why I make this kind of music. It’s all a combination of misinformation and groups of people trying to stake their claim on its nostalgic factor.”
the consumer market. It was also originally designed with the ability to output three very out-of-tune tones on a single channel through its internal speaker. Sound obviously wasn’t a major priority; versus cost and playability. Saying this, people still generally had a good opinion of the games for the Fairchild Channel F.
Unfortunately, with the invention and introduction of the Atari 2600 (VCS), the Channel F was utterly destroyed and kicked out of the market due to the superiority of the Atari VCS’s sound, colors, and games. I’m not going to compare the VES to the VCS because truly the VES is at a total loss compared to the VCS. In 1979, Fairchild sold the rights to the Channel F to Zircon. Thinking they’d get a piece of the market, they took the same console, fixed some of the sound architecture, and replaced the internal speaker with a jack-out to a television.
This was deemed the Channel F System II; which also failed in the US of A. However, Europe seemed to
take off pretty well with its many licensed versions of the System II VES consoles.
The System II is the focus of the discussion.
With a little bit of internet-aided archaeology, I was able to discover this console and also a pretty well-documented wiki focused on VES development. By disassembling and reverse-engineering the proprietary F8 assembly code for the game Pro Football, hackers were able to steal and optimize an effectively brilliant way to output all sorts of tones from the original three by essentially modulating one at different duty cycles. This is where my sequencer comes in.
Currently, I am able to output a few octaves of notes with the little-modified Pro Football PlaySong routine. (I have other duty cycles and other effects in the making, but essentially am learning as I go.) Baron Knoxburry, Battle of the Bits father and brother, was able to create a very awesome tune using the first release of the sequencer.
As you can see, the notes are in tune and even crude percussion is able to be
produced by different tone modulation and placement.
Where is it now?
The state of the sequencer:
I’m incorporating some standard “noise” routines and other duty cycles to produce lower octaves.
I’m probably going to change the name of the sequencer.
From being MML-ish at the moment, the goal is to use a scripting engine like Python or Perl to make it pure MML.
Also instead of just fruitlessly working the CPU to waste cycles and create lag, I plan on using those cycles to draw pixels on the screen using the frequency values.
So, what’s so cool about this single-channel sequencer for a 1976/1979 failed console? Well, you’re making it do something that it wasn’t originally designed to do for one. Also, this really helps in the aid of sound design. Every millisecond counts since you only have one channel to work with. It’s an intense challenge to
produce quality music from a single channel, limited piece of hardware. This could practically aid in the design for new-age audio to any other chip you decide to “tune.”
Pushing the boundaries of the chip definition, Bondage Fairires are a 2 piece Pixies style c64 weirdo flameout. They are following up their “What you didn’t know when you hired me” with the 7″ inch release “Garbage Indiebands”.
Not Pictured: Pool of Urine.
You can order the record worldwide, or you can preview the title track on their Myspace.
