This jam was my first attempt at making chiptune/8-bit music, and I'm very happy with how it turned out! I spent a good amount of time before the jam doing research and getting things setup to prepare for it, so I thought I'd make this guide if anyone else is curious about the process. This guide is meant for people who already have experience playing piano and/or working with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) - if you don't, there are easier options for making chiptune like BeepBox or Bosca Ceoil.

You can checkout the soundtrack I wrote here, or you can play our game Super Plantoid.

Setup

The main tool I used was Nintendo VST, which is best free tool for replicating chiptune sounds that I've found, and I was able to use it to create all the sounds I needed. Of course, if you're willing to spend money, there are much better VSTs available that I haven't tried myself. I prefer using this to dedicated software for creating chiptune because you can record all the parts using a digital piano, rather than having to enter each note in individually using a mouse.

The biggest downside with this tool (along with most of the other free chiptune VSTs I've found) is that it only comes in a 32-bit version. Depending on the DAW you are using, this might not be an issue. Reaper is one example of a DAW that supports 32-bit VSTs. However, I use Studio One, which does not support them, and requires a bit of an annoying process to get it working. I used a tool called NetVST to run 32-bit plugins and then stream them into my DAW. Here's a useful tutorial for learning how to use this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNKG9ho4dBE&ab_channel=ShaneDunne Once you have this set up, just open multiple instances of NetVSTHost for each track you need and increment the port numbers in both your NetVSTHost and NetVST track in your DAW so that you have a separate port number for each host/track.

Presets

One other downside of using a free tool is that there aren't really any presets available for it. I'm not an expert with making presets for chiptunes sounds, but here are some basic settings I used to create some interesting sounds.

You can use a slight modulation in pitch to create a vibrato effect.

You can use a wave of volume to create a pulsing, dynamic sound.

You can use variation in the duty cycle to create sci-fi-like sound.

You can save preset files in the Nintendo VST, but your DAW won't save the settings for the track if you're running it through NetVST. Therefore, I'd recommend naming your tracks in your DAW to match the preset you are using for it so that you remember what it was when you come back to it.

Musical Techniques

The NES only had 3 had melodic channels (two square waves and one triangle wave, along with white noise and DPCM channels for percussion), meaning only 3 notes could be played at once, which is a huge harmonic limitation. One technique that composers would use that allow them to work within these constraints is called polyphony - a musical texture consisting of multiple melodies being played at once that harmonize with eachother, rather than having a single melody play over chords (homophony) like the majority of western music. Of course, nowadays there aren't any hardware limitations on making chiptune music, and you can even disregard authenticity completely and combine chiptune sounds with modern instruments. However, polyphony is a really interesting musical technique, and using it will not only make it sound more like authentic 8-bit music, but it will also lead to writing more interesting music that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I used a polyphonic structure in the Surface Theme of the soundtrack I wrote because I thought it worked really well, but I also didn't limit myself and decided to use unauthentic homophonic textures for the rest of the soundtrack.

Another technique that is very specific to chiptune is including sounds that resemble video game sound effects within the music. Playing things like a fast, isolated arpeggio can sound like a coin pick-up or something similar, adding a unique quality to the music. Just be careful not to make these sounds too similar to the actual sound effects in your game so as not to cause any confusion. You can hear an example of how I used glissandos (slides) to create interesting video game sounds starting around 1:15 of the Fossil Theme in my soundtrack. One other unique sound effect I made in this soundtrack is using a single note square wave to make a series of beeps that resemble Morse code. I think it fits the "stranded on an alien planet" vibe that the game has, and I may have used it to encode a hidden message into the music :wink: I'm curious if anyone will actually be able to figure out what it means - no one has yet.

Final Thoughts

I could keep going on with this topic, but this post has gotten kind of long. If anyone has any questions about writing chiptune or music in general, let me know. Also, if anyone else here is a chiptune composer, let me know what your process is! I'm curious if anyone has better approaches to using a free chiptune VST in a DAW without doing some of the annoying steps I had to do.