- "Empty" (YMF288 Cover), jaezu (original by 4-mat)
Yamaha FM was the sound of pop in the 80s, with the DX7 used in more hits than I can name, and then the sound of high-end computers in the 90s, with budget versions of the DX7's chip showing up in the Genesis, Neo Geo, Soundblaster etc.
This is a chiptune cover of another chiptune. Originally a 512-byte demo for the C64 SID chip, here remade for the Yamaha chip of the Sharp PC-98 as laid-back, vaporwavey electric-piano funk.
- "TD-3 // RD-6 + volca FM = f u n k", Ricardo Schnidrig
Here cheap Behringer reproductions of the Roland 303 and 606, both running at maybe half the tempo those machines are usually run at, combine with an entire garage workbench worth of guitar pedals to make some unbelievably laid back acid atop a foamy wall of phased FM. Cool and dreamy and a little bit hypnotic.
- "Scarlet Skies", CorvusScribe
This is a chiptune piece on the 4-channel POKEY chip that handled sound and random number generation on the Atari 400 and 800 computers, plus most of Atari's 80s arcade games (Missile Command, Centipede etc).
This one's all big crashing chords, epic and dramatic. Sometimes you just want to listen to some PWMed square waves. The visualization in the video looks pretty cool.
- "Oh Sheila", Ready for the World
This is from that period in the 80s I've talked about before, when hip hop, new tech and Prince were causing pop music to change quicker than musicians could keep up with. It's a beautifully rocking R&B track, with borderline-experimental staccato everything. Morse code synths.
The link above goes to the full 4-minute version of the song, but if you want to see an incredible moment in men's fashion, look up the music video, or just GIS for "Ready for the World band"
- "Beyond your mind", Reinos
This is a eurodance DOS tracker tune from 2004, with sampled (?) acid synth noises and some fun stuttery violin sounds. Take this into a club in mid-1996 and it would have been the hypest thing.
This was posted on YouTube by the artist, and as the artist does not link the .xm file, and the website advertised in the .xm file on screen appears to be dead, this is probably the only copy of this track on the Internet.
⬇️ Click below for the sound of an overclocked NES ⬇️
- "zxy", Kiyomi Tadagumi
A 60-second chiptune onslaught made by virtually overclocking the NES's 2A03 sound chip to unlock new powers. This is the second time I've featured overclocked NES music in this post, although last time "only" went up to 400hz, whereas this goes all the way up to 1000hz. (I think that these numbers refer to the external "master clock" that the speed of everything else on the system latches to— on a regular NES this is the 60hz NTSC signal of the television, on a PAL NES it's 50hz, here it's 1000.)
This piece is dense. Every six seconds appears to show off a new, different "impossible" synthesis technique. It's super cool, but frustrating!— it's simply incredible as flexing, but since no musical phrase repeats over the course of the track's 60 seconds none of the fragments are given a chance to do much as "music". I wish for a longer version with a "song structure"— ABABCDAB or something instead of ABCDEF.
