chiptune

So Chiptune music. Have you heard of it? I'm sure most people have heard the Nintendo remixes of Beck's new album. Chiptune is music created using 8-bit computers and game consoles like the NES, and Commodore 64. There are lots of chiptune artists on myspace.com as well as chiptune.com or the record lable 8bitpeoples.com. This music reminds me of my love for old Nintendo games. Some of the music is quite sophistocated in its... 8-bit sort of way.

When writing music I often feel the limitations are what inspire composers to write interesting music. These days with any musician with computers and unlimited tracks and effects can make music that sounds very stale, too crowded and over-processed. Chiptune music is usually limited by itself: 4 tracks of sound, one square wave, a triangle wave, a sawtooth wave and a white noise track. While some may argue that chiptune is a lame repetitive music style, I say that it is an important part of electronic music culture. Electronic music contains such a wide variety of sounds and influences- its hard to classify a single type. Chiptune however has taken the limited tracks and produced a unique catchy sytle of retro music. That is awesome.

Some chiptune artists worth listening to:

Bit shifter
Nullsleep
Randomizer
Aonami
Maru

Koji Kondo - the man behind the music of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, as well as many other games over the past 20 years. A classically trained musician, many of his game themes have been played by symphony orchestras.