So for my second attempt at creating a chiptune track, I waited until a melody popped into my head. But again, thinking about the importance of constraints in art, I realized I should just see what I can do with the basic sounds – sine wave, triangle wave, square wave, sawtooth wave, and noise. I also thought I needed to start with a huge musical color palette by creating some intricate sample sounds. I was trying to make the musical equivalent of the Mona Lisa right away, when I should have approached my first chiptune song like drawing a tiny picture. That’s another thing that initially discouraged me. If you were drawing pixel by pixel without an idea of the final drawing, it might eventually turn into something cool and unexpected, but it would be much quicker and probably more satisfying if you can imagine the whole picture before you start.Īlso, your first attempt at pixel art would probably be a tiny avatar or sprite, not a huge pixel art version of the Mona Lisa. I realized my tracker experience would be much better if I had the melodies and chords fleshed out in my head before I start typing in note after note. I decided I would probably give up.īut after a little break, my perspective started to shift. It felt really clunky when I tried my normal method of composing and recording on the fly, as I do in Ableton Live. I got really excited about it after watching tutorials and seeing that it wasn’t as daunting as I thought.īut then I tried making a song, and it seemed painfully tedious. I thought I’d give it a shot though, so I downloaded a free tracker that works on Mac called MilkyTracker. Instead of seeing waveforms, you have a scrolling list of all the notes, like “A4” and “C#3,” along with numbers representing their volume, effects, etc. If you’ve never seen a tracker before, it looks more like computer code than a modern music sequencer. Since I’m getting more into writing video game music, and since a lot of game developers are looking for an old school chiptune synth sound, I thought I should learn the authentic way to make them: by using a music tracker. If you’d rather listen to this article than read it, check Episode 9 of the Charlie’s Music Production Lessons podcast.
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