#sound-design
- Chip samples — tiny looped waveforms techniqueIn a sample tracker, a "chip" is a very small looped sample — a single waveform cycle or a few hundred bytes of a real instrument — that stands in for a sound-chip voice. A chiptune module is built from nothing else, …
- 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; …
- Filter programming on the SID techniqueThe sid has one filter shared by its three voices: an 11-bit cutoff, a resonance nybble, per-voice on/off switches ( $D417 ) and a band selection — low-pass, band-pass or high-pass ( $D418 ). Sweeping cutoff and …
- 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 …
- Instrument envelopes (volume, panning, pitch) techniqueIn impulse-tracker (and FT2) an instrument wraps a sample with envelopes — volume, panning and, in IT, pitch — drawn as nodes over ticks, optionally with a sustain loop that holds while the note is on and a normal loop. …
- Multispeed (framespeed) techniqueCalling the player routine more than once per frame. sid-wizard supports up to 8× framespeed, i.e. 400 Hz SID control instead of 50 Hz, which gives finer resolution for pulse-width-modulation , filter-programming and …
- OPL / AdLib FM instruments in trackers techniqueA second sound chip inside the PC tracker: scream-tracker-3 plays up to 9 FM voices on a Sound Blaster's Yamaha OPL2 next to its digital channels, and the s3m-format stores such instruments alongside samples; openmpt …
- 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 …
- Ring modulation and oscillator sync techniqueTwo of the sid 's control-register bits couple a voice to its neighbour: sync ( $02 ) hard-syncs one oscillator to another, ring ( $04 ) replaces a voice's triangle output with a ring-modulated combination of the two. …
- Wavetable programming (waveform / arp tables) techniqueChanging a voice's waveform (and pitch) every frame from a table — the way C64 instruments get their attack transients, percussion and arpeggios. A couple of frames of noise before a tone makes a snare or a pluck; a …
- 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 …
- Charles Deenen interviews: Domination #11 (1998) and Designing Sound (2010) summarycharles-deenen in his own words — the programmer half of maniacs-of-noise on the driver, the tool and the money, and later the sound designer looking back at how it started.
- chipmusic.org — What are the typical C64/SID sounds/instruments? (2015) summaryA keyboard player joining a video-game cover band (in the vein of Press Play on Tape or Machinae Supremacy) asks which sounds make a SID tune sound like a SID tune, and how to fake them on a rompler (Yamaha MOXF6, Korg …
- Composing in SID Factory II, Part 4 — Instruments (Chordian) summaryA tutorial blog post by chordian on making instruments in sid-factory-ii : what the ADSR bytes do, why hard restart exists, the four waveforms and their combinations on old and new chips, the noise lock-up and the test …
- Creating Chiptunes with SID-Wizard, Second Edition (summary) summaryA 75-page e-book (document version 1.0, 11 February 2014, written for sid-wizard 1.6) by witchmaster with chapters by hermit taken from the 1.2/1.4 manuals. Its stated purpose: explain "some stuff left out that SID …
- DUET docs: DUST and DUSK, the two synths (summary) summaryduet 's two own synths (m64's tracker, not yet published): DUST , a sid synth — one whole reSID per slot, three voices, table programs and a mod matrix on the patch's own clock — and DUSK , wavetable synthesis over the …
- Intense Tech #09 — Let's Table This Discussion! (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism 's lesson on lsdj tables in the intense-tech series: the four columns explained with the details the manual skips, nesting tables with A , a quirk that turns one table into a stereo effect, and attack …
- Intense Tech #17 — The Joys of Noise (Defense Mechanism) summaryA deep dive into lsdj 's noise channel by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): how the shape byte maps onto the LFSR's octave and divisor, short-loop versus long-loop mode, how S , P , C and transposes act on shapes, the …
- Lemon64: How does one learn SID sound design these days? (2020) summaryA returning C64 user with an Ultimate64 has found sid-wizard ("reminds me of ScreamTreacker/ImpulseTracker in terms of composition") but cannot turn what he knows about subtractive synthesis into instrument values — the …
- Newman — Driving the SID chip: Assembly Language, Composition, and Sound Design for the C64 (2017) summaryAn academic article arguing that the C64's sound is as much the product of the composers' bespoke player routines ("drivers") as of the sid itself: rob-hubbard and martin-galway wrote their own 6502 drivers, and the …
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP3: \"Isometric\" save-file walkthrough (video, 2016) summaryOne song taken apart screen by screen — his lsdj cover of Madeon's Isometric , used as a live opener. The framing is worth keeping: "when you have covers you don't have to focus on actual composition, you have to focus …
- roboctopus — LSDJ & You: Collapse of the Waveform (2014) summaryThe introduction to drawing waves rather than generating them, aimed at players who can already write a song: "My goal is to help intermediate users learn techniques to really fill out their songs and take their sound …
- TW #86 — Wrecking Samples with Impulse Tracker (Graham the Happy Scum) summaryThree tricks in IT's sample window (F3): smoothing — Alt-E (resize with interpolation) to length +1, then −1, damps high frequencies; a crude noise gate — Alt-A to unsign, Alt-M amplify to ~103–104 %, Alt-A again, which …