Kieran Nolan » Chiptunes

Bleeps on Wax

kieran — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:45:53 +0000

I've had a short loop I made in LSDJ on the Nintendo Gameboy included as a locked groove (infinitely repeating loop) on the Minimalizm v4 compilation. I always wanted to have some sound I made pressed onto wax, then I found this project and thought I'd give it a go. The venture is funded by the loop creators each agreeing to buy a small number of records. You email on a .wav file of your track as a 4 bar, 133 bpm loop, compilation organisers Noise Vinyl take care of the rest and it becomes part of a 7", 33 rpm vinyl record.

CDs and MP3s are fine and all, but Vinyl has a charm all of its own, both soundwise and from it's tangible form and it doesn't look like it's going to die out any day soon. This article from Wired suggests that vinyl will outlive cds commercially... and if there's a power cut you could always listen to your records on this, though perhaps not at audiophile levels :)

Octocky 8bit Improvo

kieran — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:39:51 +0000

A musical creation game from 1986 by Toshio Iwai, who created Electroplankton and most recently the Tenori-On for Yamaha. Octocky was released on the Famicom Disk System, the Japanese version of the 8-Bit NES console. The syncing of music, visuals and gameplay were groundbreaking at the time and it still stands out today. More information and a rom image to run in a suitable emulator are available here. Bonus review here.

8bit Chiptune Workshop @ LABoral

kieran — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:06:27 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I attended an 8bit chiptune workshop at LABoral in Gijón in the Asturias region Spain. The workshop was part of series of such running alongside LABoral's Gameworld exhibition (a Second Life workshop had taken place earlier that week).

The teachers were Glomag and BubblyFish from New York and 'Yes, Robot' and Rabato from Barcelona. These guys are big names in the chiptune scene and over the course of two days provided great hands on training making tracks on the oldschool Nintendo Gameboy using Little Sound DJ and Nanoloop.

LSDJ uses a text based tracker interface, you adjust the sound parameters by changing binary values. Nanoloop is more visual and you create sounds and sequences through by selecting icons and applying them to a 4 x 4 grid of squares. Both have their pros and cons but ultimately do the same job, directly controlling the Gameboy's unique 4 channel sound sound chip.

The 8bit maestros also performed live on stage at LABoral backed up by Barcelona VJ duo Entter, who complemented all the music by syncing up pixel graphic visuals through their own custom built flash applications. A news reporter from Madrid described the show as "Beautiful" and I've got to agree. I've been into 8bit video game sounds and graphics since I was a child, but hearing this style of music blasting through a concert PA while watching huge pixel graphic projections was on another level of greatness altogether.

Both the workshop and live show were filmed for an upcoming documentary by Lionel Brouet, who made 8 Bit Generation, so that's going to be very interesting to see. Anyway's I'm back home now and starting to mess with the special cartridges, the Gameboy is plugged into my Micro Cube amp and I'm beginning to make some simple loops, will post whatever happens on my myspace page. Bleep!