5: Milkytracker, chiptunes, and that intro music

FOSS and Crafts

Chris's journey of making the intro music is used as a backdrop to explore how to make music in Milkytracker, a FOSS program for making tracker music, as well as to explore a bit of sound theory, what chiptunes and tracker music are, and even a bit of exploring what it's like to learn something new even when you aren't necessarily very good yet.

Links:

• Milkytracker

• sfxr

• drpetter's sound theory and synthesis page

• musagi and the musagi tutorial

• The Impulse Project

• The Commodore 64 computer and its famous SID chip

• c64.com, an archive of Commodore 64 games/programs (pretty much all proprietary though). Many of these have interesting cracked demos that are as interesting as the programs themselves.

• Monty on the Run with its music by the famous Commodore 64 composer, Rob Hubbard

  • Listen to the Monty on the Run main theme

  • Rob Hubbard's Music: Disassembled, Commented and Explained

  • Not shown in the podcast but you really also ought to listen to the Commando theme for the Commodore 64

• Moments by Mr. Lou (mp3) and the original XM file (zipped) Really worth listening to the XM in Milkytracker so you can see how things work.

• More cool music on the bottom of Milkytracker's downloads page and especially on The Mod Archive.

• The demoscene

• Chiptunes

• Music trackers

• Famitracker (Free software so why the heck is it Windows-only still? Someone finish porting it!)

• Milkytracker's documentation page has of course its own manual but also a number of interesting historical music tracking guides

• Brandon Walsh's milkytracker / chiptune tutorials (Content warning in that he does say an ablist slur somewhere in those videos.)

• Music theory stuff

  • Open Music Theory

  • 8-bit Music Theory

  • Learn music theory in half an hour (well, some of it)

• freesound, amazing commons of useful samples for your music composition needs

• I guess maybe you want to look at Chris's sound file sources (but probably not) (All CC BY-SA 3.0, like the show)

  • Conversations with a Computer

  • Dollhouse

  • Ecto House

  • the arpeggio example shown in the show

  • And yes, the FOSS and Crafts intro theme

Made it all the way to the end of the podcast and this blogpost? I guess you really did stay awhile...