General
- Channel interleaving (one channel, two jobs) techniqueWhen channels are scarce, interleave: bass note on every even 16th, melody notes on the odd ones. Played fast, the ear separates them into two lines — a bassline and a lead — from a single channel. The same idea works …
- Chord arpeggio (the 0 3 7 trick) techniqueChips rarely have enough channels for real chords, so one channel cycles through the chord tones extremely fast. At roughly 25–50 notes per second the ear fuses them into one shimmering chord — the signature chiptune …
- Detune techniqueIf you can spare a channel, play the lead on two channels a few cents apart (or use a fine-tune setting). The slow beating between them sounds huge — the chip version of a supersaw. Small detune (5–10 cents) = fat; …
- Fake echo / delay techniqueRepeat each melody note after a fixed time (say 3 or 6 pattern rows) at much lower volume, and again even quieter. On a spare channel it becomes a lush echo; on the same channel, placed in the gaps of the melody, it …
- Ghost channel (two notes in one wave) techniqueOne wave channel playing two notes at once. Instead of alternating between them in time, the two waveforms are added together inside the same single-cycle wave — a low fundamental with a faster wave riding on top of it …
- Instrument design beats note count techniqueA lot of "chiptune magic" is in the instrument, not the pattern: a fast pitch drop at note start makes a kick out of any voice; a couple of frames of noise before a tone makes a snare or a pluck; a tiny downward pitch …
- Lead articulation (velocity, legato, late vibrato, drop-off) techniqueMaking a sampled or synth lead sound played : per-note volume (velocity), legato slides between notes, vibrato that arrives late, staccato and grace notes, an echo, and the "drop-off" at the end of a big note. A tracked …
- Levels and headroom techniqueNot "how loud", but how much room is left above the loudest thing playing . Every layer of a chiptune has its own ceiling — a 4-bit register on the chip, a 00–40 or 00–80 scale in the tracker, 0 dBFS in the render — and …
- Octave bass techniqueThe oldest trick in dance music and chiptune alike: alternate the bass note with the same note one octave up ( 0 12 0 12… ) in straight 8ths or 16ths. Instant drive, zero extra channels. Variants: octave on the …
- Pitch slides and tone portamento techniqueGliding into a note (tone portamento) or bending a note's pitch up/down (pitch slide) — the cheapest way to add emotion. Classic uses: slide up into the highest note of a phrase, slide down at the end of a phrase, slow …
- Pulse width modulation (PWM) techniqueA pulse wave's character depends on its duty cycle: 50 % is hollow and round, 25 % brassy, 12.5 % thin and nasal. Sweeping the width while a note plays makes a single channel sound alive — the classic C64/ sid shimmer …
- Randomization and probability (MayBe, RandomiZe) techniqueLetting the tracker decide: notes that play only sometimes, table hops that happen with a probability, and command values with a random offset. Cheap variation for hi-hats, fills and long loops — every pass sounds …
- Recording samples (sources, cabling, sound cards, rates) techniqueGetting a sound from a synth, CD, tape or microphone into a sample cleanly: the part of sampling that happens before sample-looping and multisampling . Cowboy's 1996 article is the wiki's source on the hardware chain …
- Retrigger and resync techniqueRe-playing the current note at a fixed tick rate without new note rows: drum rolls, ratchets, stutters, and — with a falling volume — a one-channel echo. "Resync" restarts the sound generator itself at a very high rate, …
- Reverb and compression (offline, in the sample editor) techniqueA tracker mixes samples dry. Room, depth and punch therefore have to be baked into the samples beforehand in a sample editor (Airon's examples are Cool Edit and Sound Forge), or faked inside the tracker with extra …
- ROM retuning — patching a tracker's pitch table techniqueOverwriting the block of precomputed pitch values inside a tracker's ROM, so that every note in the sequencer plays at a frequency you chose. It is how alternative-tunings are done on the game-boy , and it is also the …
- Shuffle, swing and FunkTempo techniqueDelaying every second 16th slightly turns a stiff pattern human — shuffle/swing. Trackers do it with groove or speed settings rather than with note positions (source: s-037-lab ) .
- Sidechain pump techniqueDuck the volume of chords and bass at every beat, then let it swell back before the next one. It creates the breathing, pumping motion of modern dance music — even with no kick drum playing at all (source: s-037-lab ) .
- Song initialisation and looping techniqueMaking a module start and loop correctly in any player — the "finishing touch" most often forgotten, according to catspaw : default speed, tempo and pan positions in the song header apply only once, so a song whose last …
- Sound effects and game audio techniqueThe other half of a game soundtrack: short, non-musical events — a shot, a jump, an explosion, the "Game Over" — fired by the game code, on the same three voices the music is using. It was most of the paid work. …
- Stereo panning techniquePlacing channels left, right or centre to separate parts and make a mix wider. On the game-boy it is a hard switch per channel (left / right / both / none), audible only through the headphone output; on PC trackers it …
- Vibrato and delayed vibrato techniqueA periodic pitch wobble on a held note. The important variant is delayed vibrato: the note lands straight, then the vibrato fades in — real singers and lead synths don't wobble immediately. Straight attack + late …
- ADSR envelope conceptAttack · Decay · Sustain · Release: the volume contour of a note. On the sid it is hardware — two registers per voice (attack/decay, sustain/release, one nybble each), started by the gate bit and released when the gate …
- Alternative tunings — chip music outside 12-TET conceptTwelve equal semitones per octave is a choice, not a law, and on most chips it is a choice made by a lookup table in the ROM rather than by the hardware. Change the table and every note in the tracker moves — the …
- Arrangement — think in 4s and 8s conceptAlmost all chiptune and EDM breathes in 4- and 8-bar phrases. Introduce or remove one element every 4 or 8 bars: drop the bass out, bring the drums in, transpose the whole thing up, add a counter-melody. Repetition is …
- Chiptune — what the word means conceptTwo related things share the name:
- Chord inversions and voice leading conceptAny chord tone can be the lowest note. Take minor 0 3 7 , move the bottom note up an octave and re-measure from the new lowest note:
- Chord progressions conceptChords have jobs: degree 1 ( tonic ) is home, degree 5 ( dominant ) pulls back home, degree 4 ( subdominant ) is the scenic route between them. Most songs are clever trips away from home and back. Written as scale …
- Commercial tracking — selling and producing tracked music conceptCan a module be a product? traxweekly argued it out in October 1997 – January 1998 after Behemoth's "The Scene and the Commercial Market". The useful residue is a list of real cases, a production workflow for …
- Compos — music competitions in the tracker scene conceptA compo is a competition with a deadline, a rule set and a vote; in the 1990s PC scene they ran on IRC, by e-mail and at parties, and they were the main way a tracker got quick, public feedback. The one this wiki has …
- Diatonic chords — why it is not always 0 3 7 conceptA triad = root + a third + a fifth, but "a third" comes in two sizes (minor +3, major +4) and the fifth is usually +7, sometimes +6 or +8:
- Live tracking — performing with a tracker concept"You cannot perform tracking live" (Behemoth, 1997) drew four answers that together describe how sceners actually did it: pattern switching on cue, live instruments over the module, channel muting, and playing a …
- Orderlist (sequence) conceptThe list that tells a tracker which pattern plays next; in C64 trackers each track has its own orderlist, so tracks can loop patterns of different lengths independently. Besides pattern numbers it can carry song-level …
- Rhythm and groove in 16 rows conceptIn 4/4 with 16 rows per bar, rows 0 and 8 are the strong beats, 4 and 12 medium, everything else weak: 0 > 8 > 4, 12 > the rest . Notes on weak positions — especially just before a strong beat — create syncopation , the …
- Scales and modes — your palette of notes conceptA scale is a subset of the 12 semitones written as offsets from a root. Stay inside the set and almost everything you play fits together. Changing the root of the same scale type is transposing; the pattern of numbers …
- Semitones — the only unit you need conceptOne semitone = one step in a tracker 's note column = one piano key (black and white counted equally). Every interval, chord and scale is a pattern of semitone distances, which is why tracker arps are written as numbers …
- Serial composition — rows, retrograde, inversion conceptSerial (twelve-tone) technique orders the 12 semitones into a row and forbids repeating any note "until he has passed through all the other notes of his 'row'"; it evolved in the 20th century "as the final stage of …
- Synchronisation with other gear conceptRunning a chip tracker in lockstep with another Game Boy, a drum machine, a DAW or a modular. Both focus trackers support it natively.
- The PC tracker scene 1995–98, as it saw itself conceptWhat traxweekly 's writers said about where tracking came from, how music moved around, who judged it and where it was going. This is the scene's own narrative, mostly written by teenagers in an afternoon; for checked …
- Tracker conceptA tracker is a music editor where the song is a vertical grid: time runs downward in rows , each pattern is a block of rows for all channels, and an orderlist says which patterns play in which order. A row cell holds a …
- Tracking workflow — advice from the scene conceptHow experienced trackers of the 1990s said to work — most of it still true for sid-wizard and lsdj .
- Writing melodies that work conceptTwo questions decide a melody note: is it in the current chord? and is it on a strong beat? Chord tones on strong beats (rows 0, 4, 8, 12 of a 16-row bar) make the melody sound anchored; non-chord scale notes are …
- 0 3 7 lab toolA single-file browser app ( 037-lab.html , lives in ../037-lab next to this wiki) that teaches music theory in semitones for tracker musicians, built by m64. Named after the question "is the chip-arp formula 0 3 7 the …
- ChipMusic.org publicationThe chip-music community forum (chipmusic.org) whose Nintendo Handhelds and General Discussion boards hold much of the lsdj folk knowledge of the 2010s: command semantics, drum recipes, table methods, save-file swapping …
- little-scale personSebastian Tomczak, chipmusician and prolific tutorial writer, whose 2008 blog post How to: Prepare Samples and Create LSDJ Kits is still the reference the chipmusic-org kit threads point at five years later — …