When asked what kind of music I enjoy, I'll often say something like classic rock, classic country, and "80's". The standard stuff considering my age and American Midwest upbringing. One style of music I often leave out of my answer is also one of my favorites, mainly because I don't want to have to explain it to people, and that's "Chiptunes".
The definition of Chiptunes can be a little different depending on who you talk to, but for me, it encompasses most of my childhood video game favorites, and more specifically, music made using a technology known as “trackers”. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to copy the opening lines of Wikipedia's article on trackers because it describes them much better than I can.
“Trackers are a type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several channels at chronological positions on a vertical timeline. A music tracker's user interface is traditionally number based. Notes, parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits. Separate patterns have independent timelines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated patterns. Later trackers departed from solely using module files, adding other options both to the sound synthesis (hosting generic synthesizers and effects or MIDI output) and to the sequencing (MIDI input and recording), effectively becoming general purpose sequencers with a different user interface."
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
Trackers got their start with the Commodore Amiga back in 1987, where I got hooked, but quickly expanded to other platforms as time progressed.
All of this is my long-winded way of saying that Chiptunes are basically, at least to me, music written to be played using a sound-chip of some type. Early video game music is a perfect example of this as most all the sounds and music were generated using the hardware platforms internal sound chips, hence why the same game would sound different depending on the platform you played it on. They were not just simple sound recordings being played back like we see used today, the sounds were being generated in real time by the sound processor in the machine, and I always thought it sounded amazing!
Early on, I fell in love with music from video games, starting with the Commodore 64 and Nintendo Entertainment System. One of my early favorites was the Castlevania series on NES, and that one is still a favorite of mine to this day. Games like Blaster Master, Megaman, Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and many others have music in them that I truly enjoy listening to and hearing being covered by other media, such as a full orchestra playing “Bloody Tears” from Castlevania.
Chiptunes, trackers, and things of that nature don't seem to really be a thing much these days, but there is a community of people still keeping this retro music art style alive, and I have a collection of my favorite modules that I listen too from time to time when I'm working on something or playing a game. These days, I use basically two pieces of software to listen to my tunes of choice, “OpenMPT” and “FastTracker II Clone”, but there are other options out there as well. OpenMPT is by far the easiest and runs just fine on most modern operating systems. It's a modern convenient tool for those looking to create, or just listen to, it's many supported module formats.
https://openmpt.org/
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| OpenMPT Running on Windows 10 |
FastTracker II Clone, is as the name suggests, a clone of a piece of software called FastTracker II. The original FastTracker was released for MS-DOS way back in 1993, with number two coming the following year in 1994. The final stable release came in August 1997, but an unofficial release was made public back in 1999. FastTracker II was the tracker of choice for many in the community back in the 1990's and into the early 2000's. It's what I still use today on my real DOS hardware machines, as seen below.
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| Fasttracker II Running in DOS 6.22 on Real Hardware (AWE64) |
FastTracker II Clone is a modern, well, clone, of the original. It's much more nostalgic, looking and feeling like the original MS-DOS software, but it runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It also lacks support for all the different file formats out there, being limited mainly to MOD and XM formats. It will load, and attempt to play other formats (like S3M), but it warns you you are likely to experience issues. For me though, a vast majority of the tunes I enjoy the most fall into the MOD and XM format categories. I like using FastTracker II simply based on the nostalgia of it all. I still run the original software on my DOS machine, so I just had to have it on my modern Windows 10 machine as well.
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| Fasttracker II Clone Running on Windows 10 |
FastTracker II MS-DOS - Updated Version
FastTracker II Clone
I've started to compile a list of all my favorite chiptunes over on the de-facto source for all your tracker needs, The Mod Archive. Going through someones favorites list like this gives you a gateway into exploring this wicked cool format and discovering your own favorites. The great thing about Mod Archive is you don't need to download a tracker just to listen to the songs, you can play them right from your browser to decide if you want to add a song to your collection or not! So kick back, put on your headphones, and explore one of the coolest music formats of the past three decades!
I suggest starting with "Telescope", Rainbow Runner", Space Debris", or "Alien Earth" to get a feel for what this style of music is all about. "Amiga Power" is a good tune to see how it got started!
My Mod Archive Favorites Collection
Thanks for reading!
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