little-scale — Microtonal Chipmusic Compilation, call for tracks (2009)

Short, and included because it is where little-scale states the point of the whole 2009 tuning project and lists the routes into it — a contemporary bibliography of chip microtuning as of December 2009.

Key claims#

• The motivation: "Microtonality is a field that seems to me to be a little overlooked when it comes to chipmusic. That's why I thought it would be fun to do a microtonal compilation."
• Rules: "Software or hardware, real or fake, it's all good. Tracks must be microtonal as far as the chosen tuning is concerned. Effects are fine." Submissions in FLAC, "as I would like to release this in both lossy and lossless formats"; due 2010-02-20; more than ten tracks and he would pick the best ten.
• The three routes he names, which is the cluster in one list: abrasive's LSDJ tuning script (s-little-scale-abrasive-lsdj-tune); "LSDJ can also be retuned using a simple spreadsheet and a hex editor" (linking his own s-little-scale-underclocking-and-retuning); "Nanoloop can be retuned in a similar fashion" (s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet).
• And a fourth claim, unworked: "the SEGA Mega Drive, C64 SID chip and many other chipmusic-related consoles and computers support a frequency resolution that is fine enough for the composition of microtonal music." He asks in the post for anyone with methods for machines other than the Game Boy to say so in the comments.
• A commenter (Johan, 2009-12-05) adds a fifth: Little Piggy Tracker had "just gotten a new command pfin", in "the ghetto version of LittlePiggyTracker" — a fine-pitch command, i.e. microtonality by effect column rather than by ROM patch.

Practical takeaways#

• On a chip whose pitch register is a fine-grained divider — the sid especially, at 16 bits — microtonality needs no ROM patch at all, only a tracker that will write arbitrary frequency values or a fine-pitch command. The Game Boy needs the patch because lsdj holds its pitches in a lookup table.
• A fine-pitch effect command is the cheap version of the same idea: per-note, per-track, no flashing.

Notable quotes#

"Microtonality is a field that seems to me to be a little overlooked when it comes to chipmusic."

Relevance to the wiki#

Dates and frames the cluster, and points alternative-tunings beyond the Game Boy to the chips this wiki covers best.

To verify#

• Whether the compilation was ever released, and with which tracks, is not in this source.
• The SID and Mega Drive claim is little-scale's assertion, not demonstrated here. The pfin command in Little Piggy Tracker comes from a commenter and is not verified against that tracker's documentation.

Pages touched#

alternative-tunings · little-scale · sid · lsdj · nanoloop