TW #77–81 — A Chip Off the Block / Chiptune Seminar, parts 1–4 (The Modsquad)

A four-part, mostly satirical "seminar" on making chiptunes by the-modsquad; the editor noted he was "not that enthused". Parts 3 and 4 are almost entirely nonsense (paper boats, Elvis, nail collections, "encryption"); the usable content is below, everything else is skipped.

Key claims (the real ones)#

• Five kinds of "chip song" in the 1996 PC scene: Amiga-style 3-channel, "new-school XX-channel", non-chip samples "sampled down" (e.g. a piano), AdLib music (and "shit music"). The series covers the Amiga 3-channel type.
• Chip picking: if a sample is over 5 k, shrink it; big percussion can be clipped short; pick instruments before you start tracking. A rating chart by module size gives ten stars to 11–20 k songs and one to anything over a megabyte.
• Arrangement rules of thumb: arpeggiated chords in one channel, never two; no percussion inside the chord channel; use vibrato (HFF) on percussion rather than arpeggio; "volume sliding is the one effect that makes or breaks the song, use it a lot"; don't repeat patterns much, and when you do, repeat in threes or odd numbers; "form the song's base and build up: lead, percussion, simple bassline, then the arpeggiated chords"; "I didn't know you could do that with 4k samples!" as the chiptune feeling.
• Pattern examples (S3M/IT commands): a drum pattern with the kick on every fourth row; a lead using A05 speed, Gxx tone portamento, H81/HA4 vibrato, K05 (vibrato + volume slide); chord channel J47 major / J37 minor arpeggios at volume 64 with J00 to stop. (Their "quick reference" chart lists J-36 for major and J-25 for minor and a mock S3M effect table — the pattern example is the reliable part.)
• Samples: collect samples from many mods, keep the ones whose waveform "touches the top and bottom" (properly normalised); make drum "chips" by cutting both ends off real drum samples; render waveforms in QBasic — sine CHR$(SIN(A/20)*60+128), square (first half 0, second half 255), white noise INT(RND*255+1), an "acid" sweep SIN(A*A/20) — 1000 bytes each, written as raw 8-bit files.
• Chords (part 4): Major C E G · Minor C D# G · Sus2 C D G · Sus4 C F G · Seven C E G A# · Maj7 C E G B · Min7 C D# G A# · Maj9 C E B D · Min9 C D# A# D · Min11 C D# A# F · Maj add9 C E G D ("given to me by a friend, as weird as they look"); use the same instrument for all notes of a chord, and try the "cooler" extended chords.
• Lyrics can't fit in a chiptune, so put them in the sample text for the listener to sing, or sample them at 4 kHz.

Relevance#

Period colour for chiptune and a few genuine practices: single-channel arps, tiny normalised samples, generated waveforms (chip-samples), volume slides, odd-numbered repeats (arrangement).

Pages touched#

the-modsquad, chiptune, chip-samples, chord-arpeggio, diatonic-chords, arrangement, scream-tracker-3.