TW #33 — 4Channel Lives On (Trixter)
trixter's reply, printed in the "Amiga Debate" section, to a correspondent who said Amiga MODs are as obsolete as the Wright brothers' plane.
Key claims#
- The Amiga masters' music "does not suck compared to modern PC music"; Nuke/Anarchy is named as making better four-channel music than many PC musicians of 1995. The point is technical, not old-versus-new: "More channels does not necessarily mean better music. Less channels, however, does mean that you need more technical skill."
- Nobody makes four-channel MODs any more "without sampling snatches of sound from some album, like Orb" because they no longer need to.
- The 20-minute compo — "how fast you can build a tune with chip samples" — is the current fashion in "bare-metal" tracking; the four-channel compo, still held at Assembly and The Party, is another and "requires more skill".
- "Some of 'today's best PC music' is still 4-channel MODs"; saying old MODs are good does not make new ones bad.
Practical takeaways#
Channel economy is a skill worth practising on purpose: four channels, or a chip-sample time limit, are the scene's two self-imposed constraints (channel-interleaving, chip-samples).
Notable quotes#
- "Less channels, however, does mean that you need more technical skill to make something sound better."
Relevance#
Documents the 1995 view of the 20-minute-chip-compo as a constraint exercise and the continuing status of four-channel compos; a Hornet voice on the MOD format's worth.
Pages touched#
channel-interleaving, trixter, hornet, 20-minute-chip-compo, chiptune, mod-format.