Recently I caught up with Chip Musician cTrix at the Wah Wah Lounge in Melbourne to discuss what exactly Chiptunes is, how making music with old hardware can actually help with the creative process and his latest creation the gAtari.

How would you describe what Chip Music is?

Chip Music usually refers to taking an old gaming system from the 80’s or early 90’s and writing music for that platform.  Back in “the day” making music for a games console was a luxury that only game companies could partake in.  This was mainly due to the dev kits being exclusive and costing a fortune.  Now we’ve got whole online communities centred around reverse engineering the old hardware and opening them up for musicians to compose with.   We also have 20-30 more years of user interface experience so the programs being created now are much easier to use than back in the 80’s!  We are also able to push far beyond what the old software companies could do with their “background” music.  We’re making music that stands in the foreground and uses all the CPU and memory.  This is a huge shift forward for music on these platforms because “games music” generally meant being very careful with memory and always putting the game play and graphics as the primary focus.  So now we are focussing on just the music and taking things to a whole new level.   The chipmusic and demoscene community are constantly creating sounds you won’t have heard in a first generation game.  And that’s why we love it.  Chipmusic (in a nut shell) is geeks + old computers + online communities = good times!

What drew you to working in this medium? Were you interested in making music previous to this?

When I was 3 we got a first gen Commodore 64.  You had to type in commands to load programs so I started wondering what else I could do.  When I was maybe 5 or 6 I started making very simple music and sound routines by using BASIC.   You would “poke” parts of memory and it would make crazy sounds – then you could make loops and side number combinations around and have different oscillators doing different things.  Most of it was pretty simple and out of control, but I used to love it.  Later on I discovered the Amiga and it’s MOD format, also started visiting the local computer swap meet and discovered a family friend’s son ran a BBS.  Win!  I instantly began making music for the Amiga because at the time it was the best sounding computer and had a fully featured digital sampler at a time when the studio equivalent cost $4,000 - $5,000!!  The Amiga was THE machine that changed the sampling game because anyone at home could create remixes and original tunes.  Freeware was everywhere and you could reverse engineer peoples tunes to “leach” samples.  Then people started converting entire sample libraries from “studio” samplers so the quality of samples went though the roof.  It all sounded a little scratchy but no one cared. 

From here I got obsessed with the live music workstations of the late 90’s and started playing techno.  But the age of unstable software and plug-ins arrived in the early 2000’s and I got very jaded with the way music production was headed.  I was clinging onto to my aging techno gear but was being left behind.  So I guess Chip Music was a wonderful return to simplicity where nothing needed updating.  Ever.  I could access every part of the sound hardware and really perfect a tune.  Plus it hardly ever crashed and after a few years I discovered a wonderful bunch of people living locally who were doing the same thing.

Yeah; often having restricted tools for working on art with often helps give you direction.

Totally.  It becomes more of a craft rather than a bottomless pit of settings that you never quite get right.   3 or 4 channels of sounds and bugger all memory is the best way to keep it productive for me!

It seems with Chip Music it’s not so much a Genre as it is an instrument.  There are so many different types of music that people can play, for instance Anamanaguchi is more like Rock band, what would you consider the music you make to be if you had to class it as a genre?

I’ve always written heaps of styles of music.  What I didn’t mention before is that I also played in a Jazz band, the school orchestra, several metal bands so I’m all over the shop!  I play House, Drum ‘n’ Bass, Breaks, Prog Rock, Synth Rock and psytrance usually in the same show - so it’s more about the challenge of using the simplistic tools to write in those styles.   Luckily people let me get away with it!  But I think that’s a credit to the people who come to a chip show – they are generally very open minded.

So you’ve been around the world doing this during the past couple years.  What is the scene like in Australia compared to other countries that Chip Music is popular in like America and Japan? 

It’s a surprisingly similar vibe of smiling faces and excited crowds everywhere you go.  But here in Australia we are still evolving at a rapid pace and at every gig people are saying it’s their “first chiptune gig” . We are maybe where the Euro or American scene was 3-4 years ago.  So it’s very exciting times.  Australia is a little different in that we have a lot more coders, sound engineers and trained musicians involved.  Australia has a very diverse range of talent and we don’t have a single artist that sounds the same or is doing it just for the street cred.  It is actually quite easy to program up a tune on the Gameboy which has an underdeveloped theme and minimal substance.  But people here generally want to get to a solid level of skill down before jumping on stage.  This means showing each other drafts of songs and sitting down to help each other pull sets together.   So there is a lot of love behind the tracks you’ll hear here.  Plus everyone helps each other out with hardware mods and programmable carts, etc, as the equipment tends to be a little pricey and hard to get in Australia.

Well if the instruments have to be hand modified for somebody to get into it, that would limit Hipsters as they would need to learn the skills that nerds and programmers already have.

Actually, that’s part of the fun!  It’s not just nerds and coders.  It’s a whole community of people hanging out with differing interests.  Everyone in our community will help anyone write music with oldskool hardware and point people in the direction of good hardware and mods.  That’s the benefit coming to shows; it’s the best way to get into it and you get to meet artists over a few beers and inevitably end up hanging out.

It seems to me that in Australia there is a very tight community, everyone seems to know and support each other.

Yeah it’s funny that we all live in different states yet see each other quite a few times a year!  Most of us hang out in an IRC Channel together which helps everyone keep in touch.  Plus we have quite a few characters who are renound for their sense of humour on international forums.  Many of the Australian peeps have travelled the world together to events like Blip in New York and Japan and really care about chipmusic.  You can hear the heart and soul in their tracks.  This comes across in recordings and live shows plus inspires everyone involved to push their tracks as far as they can.

It’s very rare that a group of people are all banding together over an instrument and not a genre of music to the point where they will play gigs with each other despite the genre of music.

I guess?!  When someone decides they want to make chipmusic using the real hardware they have to find out how it works.  It’s not like you can call a helpline for something like LSDJ or Ninja Tracker – although there are some good intro videos online. (One of which I have made)  For some lesser used hardware you have to actively hunt down the people involved in that scene and there are only 1 or 2 places you can get info from.  So the community has grown naturally online through a shared passion and need to learn from each other.  People will often send their “RAM” dumps and source code to each other which is effectively sharing a complete break-down of a track.  There is so much to learn from seeing how other people work.  Even tonight I looked at Doy.AY’s Gameboy and didn’t know what was going on!  So I guess on the quest to learn how to make different sounds and push limits you end up digging each others tunes on a technical level and a composition level.

The fact that locally here people in Australia are making entirely different developments and sounds as compared to say other in Japan or America is really interesting.  To watch that sort of phenomenon happen up close is like a microcosm of world music. It’s similar as to how the way playing styles of the guitars developed in Ireland were entirely different to that of say South America. It’s fascinating to watch it happen live and in such recent history.

On top of that Australia has a very DIY approach.  Traditionally you would get on your Commodore 64 or your Gameboy and create your track with existing software but here you have people like little-scale who are pushing limits constantly.  In fact little-scale did a PHD that focused on building interfaces for chip music!  He’s developed cartridges for consoles like the Mega Drive, has built an interface for controlling the Commodore 64 from an iPhone App, built a push-rom sample cart for the Atari 2600 (to make it play digital audio), he built an entire Arduino based sampler and sequencer in a weekend just for fun then did a complete breakdown for people to see how it works!  Meanwhile Maddest Kings Alive is using custom made software when performing his tunes, and guys like 10k are doing hardcore thrash metal and pressing 5” records.  Then you have the demoscene guys coding complete voice synths on the C64 and new software for Atari Lynx.  We’re a country that has a tradition of doing lots with little 

On an international level it has all just happened at the right time I guess.  The availability of new hardware “workarounds” to get new code running on old consoles has meant anyone can get the building blocks to work on.  If you are interested in making Chip Music there are a plethora of cool hardware to get you started.   And now we have the internet to easily order and obtain parts.  Before this you’d get ASCii based schematics on a Diskmag (floppy in the mail!) or half baked instructions from a BBS that assumed you could solder and program chips.  I remember blowing up an LPT port back in the 90’s trying to make a C64 floppy transfer cable.  Now you just plug in an SD card adapter and turn the power on!  For additional modifications you now have Video streaming to take you though step by step and easily provide you with feedback if something isn’t working.   Chipmusic modding and dev has been going on since the 80’s but it’s only now that it’s broken free from a bunch of dedicated hardcore nerds who really need to be credited for the original ground work!

So tell us about the gAtari.  I’m assuming this classes as a mod?  What exactly is it?!

Ah.  The gAtari is one half my sense of humour, and another half a quest to make music on a classic piece of hardware.  The Atari 2600 was THE FIRST hugely successful play-ay-home games console.  More people had these than any other console in the early 80’s.  In fact it retailed in stores for 15 years which is unbelievable considering the advancements that happened around it.  Can you imagine if we were all still buying Play Station 1’s?! 

I was expecting to find a whole load of software for making music and to my great surprise I found virtually nothing.  There was this cart made a few years ago called the “Synthcart” which allowed you to play some preset beats and add a few notes in by button mashing - but that was it.  So I tracked down the coder of the Synthcart, Paul Slocum, and obtained some of the assembly code it was based around.  Luckily he’d a fantastic guy and shares his code for people to learn from.  Unfortunately the code involved making tracks with 0’s and 1’s - you had to write the music in binary!  But that was a great way to learn how the console ticked.

So to combat the binary I built a preview engine that used a PC to make Atari 2600 music.  This allowed me to experiment (usually at high tempos) pushing the sound limits of the unit and using all the memory I had… in this case 4kb.   The Atari by nature has very simple sound.  The official documentation written in the 70’s specifies very clearly that the Atari 2600 was not designed for making music! 

For the geeks out there it has 5 bits to define the pitch and 4 bits to define the sound “waveform”.  The sound starts at a square(ish) waveform and runs all the way to a chaotic loop of semi-noise which is still questionably tonal.  Meanwhile the pitch is 30khz divided by 2, 3, 4, 5 all the way up to 32 using the 5 bit register which means the tuning is atonal (aka. completely out of tune!) and also presents different tunings depending on what waveform you have selected.  So you do not have a scale like a piano or guitar – you have random frequencies where the spacing get dramatically wider the higher you go.

But it turns out you can make tunes with the notes available and I soon had a few tracks pulled together in software.  But then I needed an output from the Atari which meant building a translator to generate the assembly code required to run it on real hardware and spit out an EPROM image to “burn” onto a 4kb chip.   This then replaces the chip on a gaming cart but luckily someone had prefabbed a board so I didn’t have to deconstruct any Atari games!

Then I hit the problem that the Atari was from an era when televisions had no AV sockets!  It only had RF for old analogue televisions.  So I had to build an audio output by soldering onto to the main custom chip (called the Stella) and of course everything was at the wrong voltage and also lacked in bass hence I added an EQ pedal designed for slap bass players to boost that up.  Then added a delay pedal to hold and warp snippets of sound, then finally a joystick to access the parts of tunes.  This added up to a lot of gear to set up so instead of mounting it to a board the idea popped into my head that I should wear it.   And the gAtari was born!

The whole project took a year to get working but totally worth it.  At the end of the day it is fun for everyone involved – for me, and for the crowd.  And no one notices that the music is out of tune or there are only 2 notes played at once.  And it always breaks down, but usually I get it up and working again within a few minutes.

And I think that sums up the chipscene.  Yes, there is a lot of nerdy stuff happening behind the scenes at the forefront is a bunch of smiling musicians from all backgrounds of life who are there together having a good time and rocking out in their own way.  And everyone is invited to the party.

Anything to add? Plugs?

Yes!  If you haven’t been to a show then come on down to one.  Soundbytes in Melbourne, Pocket Music in Brissy, DeathRave in Sydney and of course Blip Festival which is happening in Melbourne in February (in Melbourne).

Website: ctrix.syntaxparty.org

Facebook: cTrix