What foolish wretch has roused the Trouserful of Melody from its slumber!?

Oh, it’s you guys. Hello!

If you have a fondness for the bleepy, chip-based videogame music of your childhood, and this fondness inspires you to create, there are two things you can do about it.

The first is to take those old, bleepy tunes, and cover them, using modern technology – unhampered by the limits of the machines they were originally written for. (The NES/Famicom’s music chip, for example, could play no more than four sounds at the same time.) You can record a piano arrangement of the Super Mario Bros. theme tune, or create a pumping dance version full of sonic acrobatics, or whatever you like. This hobby is commonly called ‘remixing’ (a misnomer, but whatever) and is the musical equivalent of fanart. So, kind of dorky, but good fun, and it attracts a lot of serious talent.

The first three Trouserfuls I’ve served you have been about these ‘remixes’. So you’ve gotten the idea by now.

The second way to combine your love of bleepy videogame music with your own musical talents is...

Chiptunes

I keep assuming that everyone knows about the chiptune scene by now, and then, I keep talking to people who don’t – including people who are really into videogames. So here’s a quick introduction to chiptunes.

Whereas ‘remixes’ are old tunes played with new sounds, chiptunes are new, original tunes played with old sounds. If you listen to the piano arrangement or the pumping dance version of the Super Mario Bros. theme, and you think, “This is cute and all, but the proper, bleepy version is so much better,” then (a) God bless you, and (b) chiptunes are made for you, by people like you; people who create new music in the style of classic, beep-bloop-bleep videogame melodies, because dammit, those beeps and bloops and bleeps – they sound fucking fantastic.

If you’re looking for hipster irony, by the way, you can fuck off – chiptune music exists because people truly and sincerely love chip-based sounds.

There are many variations on the basic idea of chiptunes, and fortunately the scene hasn’t yet been ruined by spoilsport ‘definers’ insisting that a chiptune must be such-and-such, and not be such-and-such-else. So, some chiptune musicians strictly use original hardware to create their music – hacked NESes and Gameboys, or their old Commodore 64 or what have you. Others are happy to use synthesisers that simply emulate those old music chips; still others don’t attempt to imitate a particular machine at all – they just aim for that bleepy, videogame-y sound. Some artists or groups create chiptune songs with vocals (eg. YMCK); some mix real instruments in with the, er, ‘traditional’ chip-based sounds (eg. Kplecraft). What you must remember is that ‘chiptunes’ is an umbrella term that we use in conversation, for the sake of convenience, to associate a bunch of musicians who happen to share a common inspiration and broad aesthetic. It’s not a strictly defined art movement with a manifesto, or anything retarded like that.

As you might expect, most chiptune musicians are between 20-ish and 30-ish – actually, a 20-year-old chiptune musician would strike me as exceptionally young. Basically I am talking about the ‘Nintendo generation’ – the first people who have been playing videogames since childhood. The sounds and images of Atari and Nintendo are a part of our creative vocabulary, and now – now that we’ve reached the age where we may contribute significantly to the culture we inhabit – that brightly coloured, blocky-lookin’, bleepy-soundin’ videogame imagery has been appearing all over said culture, more and more all the time. Super Mario Bros. was the rain, and now, clumps of 1-up mushrooms are popping up everywhere. And chiptunes are a part of this zeitgeist.

That’s right – zeitgeist. Fuck you.

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