Following up with the previous post about chiptune music, remember what I said about those purists only considering to be TRVE CHIPTUNE that in the format of Amiga MOD files created with an old school tracker software? Well, guess what, you can do just that to create chiptune music the hardcore way.
This route is certainly not for the faints of heart, but the results will be really convincing and proper chiptune music, not cheap imitations. As a matter of fact, when you go out in the wild looking for chiptune tutorials they are mostly going to point to this approach.
So in the dawn of times, apparently Amiga computers had really good sound chips and equally good tracking software, and this spawned a community of enthusiasts creating chiptune music with them. Over the years, software trackers came to be for PC, imitating those of Amiga computers, and these are the ones you can use to create chiptune music, as was done in the 80s. And with that, I mean cryptic and hardcore text-based interfaces. Like this one:
That was MilkyTracker, which is actually the friendliest of trackers that I found (it’s also free and available for Linux). There are plenty of other options out there though.
If you feel brave enough to step into this path, your experience wouldn’t be complete without some ancient tutorials in glorious static html websites from a decade ago, so here’s some to get you started:
- The Tracker’s Handbook
- Amiga Music Preservation FAQ
- Tutorial at The ChipWIN blog
- Woolys is an extensive reference site with tons of tutorials and documentation about all things chiptune and tracking.
Don’t forget though that there’s a saner way to do it, we’ve shown you how in the previous post!