Chip sounds are back in fashion, so how do you actually make some music with them?

Thanks to Justin Timberlake and 50 Cent, Chip Sounds are now back in fashion. So that means that loads of tunes are going to feature them. The problem is that subtle chip sounds are really cool, but in your face/ harsh chip stlye noises can be a bit too much...That reduces playablility.

Who have we got to thank for all this chippy noise? It depends where you are coming from really.

Most people would say that the actual time that chip music became popular (when people liked it properly) was when the Commorode 64 was out and about.

This was at the hight of "chip style music". The point being is that this was the actual noise of the computer creating the music in realtime using onboard chips, so it was the scope to which it could make music. However it launch many careers within the game music industry and released many classic game tunes to the world:

• Martin Galway with the fantastic Ocean Loader 1 & 2 music.
• Rob Hubbard- Monty and Commando
• Ben Daglish- trap and Gauntlet

However, it wasn't until the Amiga that one 4Mat (Matthew Simmonds) wanted to make Chip style tunes. So what he did was quite revolutionary at the time. He used simple waveforems (saw, sine, square) and then put them through a tracker. He realised that the 001 function emulated the sound of the classic chip tune. The "chip sounds" that alot of people hear today are remixed tunes or emulated tunes as the Commodore only had the file extension .sid

Here is a few example of some cool chip tunes.

First one is a classic and truthful representation of that classic "Ocean Loader music". Created by Dreamfish, it is spot on:

Next proves that chip tunes don't have to be harsh, they can be quite mellow and relaxing as Drax shows us with "Building Up And Down":

The final tune shows how versatile the chip sound can be. SuperNao is famous (in computer music worlds) for creating some great trancy techno tunes that are also melodic with some great sounds and sqeaks. So here is Mysterious C64:

Nowadays not everyone are using full chip tunes or creating tunes from scratch using basic waveforms (the purests do). Instead what most artists do is one of two things:

1Adapt a sample so that it sounds chippy. The best way to have a different sound is to run a drumloop through a chip sounding effect. Or have have a snare hit a chip sounding effect.

2 Download a loop, a kick, snare or percussion that has been built from scratch (Vince Clarke from depeche Mode and erasure does this- he makes his own samples. They sound new and unusual).

The Tutorial- Making A Chip Sounds Beat.

For this tutorial I am going to use:

1 Madtracker (only because I am used to it and its free, if you use another tracker then thats ok, everything is roughly the same).

2 Some chippy samples that I found on my harddrive. They are tiny in size, and they can be downloaded from here (in WAV format):

Chip Sounds Kick

Chippy Sounds Snare

Chip Sounding Percussion

Now if you haven't got Madtracker then you can download it for free from this page. Go for the larger file size one if you can, it has alot of tuff packed into it. Once done, come straight back here. We will be waiting...honest :)

What you will notice from the front screen is a little bit of paper, ringed here:

This is where you load up a sample. So we load up one of our samples:

• Left click on the little bit of paper (as shown above)
• You will then notice "new instrument" wording appear. Right click on that and then "load samples.."
• Find your first sample (if you click on it once a preview of it will play).

Do this with all three chip sounds. Please Note: If you try to play the sound (clicking on your computer keyboard) it won't play. You need to left click on the green lines below to get it out of "load up mode".

It should look something like this:

If you left click on one of the samples and then press your computer keyboard you will be able to hear your sounds. The keyboard is now a piano keyboard. The bottom row keys (from z to .) are from C to B- an octave. From Q to P is another octave but one higher. If you click on the F keys you will hear your sound get higher or lower, because the F keys adjust the octave of the keyboard. Have a mess around, you can't go wrong!

Anyway, if you press space bar you will input sounds- record, if you do input accidently just delete them, by using the arrow keys to go over the note and press delete (when in record mode). Press space bar to come out of record mode.

Inputting

What I am going to do now is to input some sounds into the Tracker so that I can make a drum beat. I am going to do the kick first.

So I find the kick sample, click on it, and then find a note which is nice and high and not too low. I think C-6 is right. I found this by pressing F6 and then Q. So I am on key C in octave 6. So it should look like this:

It doesn't seem much, but that is the basis to which our beat is going to flourish from. The number 1 is where the kick is within the sample bank. If you placed it in the sample bank in position 2, then it will show up C-6 02. The D is just the letter D inserted so that the track will loop at that point. If you press play which is located at the top of the screen (a green arrow pointing right) it will loop there, but admittedly it sounds quite strange.

So we shall insert the snare, in exactly the same way as the kick but in different places:

Sounds a little bit better doesn't it? More beat like.

So lets add the mini percussion.

You will notice that I have used C6 and C5 for the percussion. C5 is Z on the computer keyboad.

Have you noticed something else? The samples themselves are very short and it just doesn't sound good, not really professional. So what we need to do is add some effects so that it makes our little beat a bit more dynamic. So what we do is press the FX button:

This loads up a little box with alot of basic but powerful effects that we can add to our track. What we do is click on the down button by the side of "effects" and go to 2 stereo delay. Click on it and you will hear the track bounce on itslef and delay itself. We need to tone this down, so I have used these settings:

So what does it sound like once done?

That sounds much better :) Now if you want to add some real sounds or drum loops to this you can, quite easily. Find a loop, or find a kick/ snare and then add it to another channel. Loading it up as a sample.

You have to be careful though. The chip sounds are quite harsh, so you need to make sure that your other sounds are louder or more prominant within the mix...or even turn down the volume of the chip sounds :)

If you want some great free chip sounding sounds then the very best place to find them is at Chiptunes. Naturally ;) The problem is it is quite hard to find stuff there, so here we go:

• Double click on "chip bench 1.3"
• Double click on "format"
• Scroll down in the new little box and find XM
• Go through the alphabet downloading (in zip format) all the files.
• Then you can load them into the Tracker (in Madtracker it is file > open...then find the files)

If you want to make a synth line and add that to your chip sounding beat, then go over to here: create a synth bass line for this beat.