This is too much fun not to share – Thriller (Saitone 8bit tribute), directed by Raquel Meyers.

via TCTD

Cool Hunting interviews Bitshifter about making music with Gameboys.

via coolhunting:

In our third installment of the 8-Bit series, we interview Bitshifter (Joshua Davis) about creating music with a pair of Gameboys. The interview takes place at ‘Barcade’ in Brooklyn and also features Mike Rosenthal, Experimental Music Director at ‘The Tank.’

The festival showcases the use of the former heavyweights of computing such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Atari ST and 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy to create arresting music and visual art.

Artists announced so far include:

• Bit Shifter
• Chromix
• Disasterpeace
• failotron
• Fighter X
• I, Cactus
• Je Deviens DJ En Trois Jours
• Leeni
• little-scale
• Nullsleep
• Rainbowdragoneyes
• The Hunters
• The J. Arthur Keenes Band

via truechiptildeath

It’s starting to look like old 8-bit computers are the new Roland TB-303.

Petsynth is a free, open source application described as “the only program for rocking the Commodore PET that the cool kids use”:

Petsynth features a two-octave keyboard layout, selectable note length, many selectable octaves, selectable pulse-width, vibrato, distortion, and noise or “drum mode” depending on how you use it.

All this without adding or hacking the Commodore PET in any way. Plus, it’s compiling from C, so it’s FAST – with very low latency.

The drum sounds are also crazy weird. You can also set the vibrato so high it sounds more like a laser gun or alien telephone.

Here’s one, slighty distorted, demo of Petsynth in action:

via RetroThing

Plogue today released its new soft-synthesizer, chipsounds.

“Quite simply put, it beats the s*** out of any other single chip emulation VST currently available,” says 8-bit artist nitro2k01. “chipsounds is a must-have for anyone who’s seriously interested in chip sounds but don’t have access to the real hardware.”

chipsounds is designed to faithfully reproduce the sound and style of vintage video game music and sound effects in plugin format, usable inside any sequencer or DAW, or as a standalone virtual instrument.

Plogue chipsounds will be offered at an introductory price of 75$ until November 1.

chipsounds simulates the following sound chips:

• 2A03
• AY-3-8910
• DMG-CPU
• P8244
• POKEY
• SID
• SN76489
• TIA
• UVI
• VIC-I

chipsounds reproduces the idiosyncrasies of the most sought-after classic sound chips, including their most well-known variations, as sonically accurate as possible without adding any non-authentic aliasing or DSP artifacts. Research and analysis for this project has been made in house on Plogue’s large collection of cartridges, modified consoles and classic computers and also on the chips themselves using custom made circuit boards and low level 8 bit software code.

Saltone peforms the Michael Jackson Thriller 8bit tribute mix. 

via JapanPost24:

Michael Jackson Thriller 8bit Chiptune tribute Remix Live at Exp2.

(tokyo Japan)

http://www.myspace.com/saitone

Plogue has announced a new soft-synthesizer, Chipsounds, that turns your VST/AU/RTAS host into a classic video game console, vintage 8-bit home computer and even an 80’s arcade.

Plogue Chipsounds authentically emulates more than eight vintage 8-bit era sound chips (on top of their variants). But more interestingly, it also faithfully allows you to dynamically reproduce the accidentally discovered sounds effect tricks and abusive musical techniques that were made famous by innovative chiptune composers and classic video game sound designers, which for the good part of the last 2 decades, have pushed beyond the boundaries of the original chip designs.

No pricing or release date have been announced. Details and audio demos are available at the Plogue site.

This is the music video for minusbaby’s A Large Part of Your Mind Sliced.

Credits:

• From “Left” [8BP101] • 8bitpeoples.com
• Music by minusbaby • minusbaby.com
• Video by Asif Siddiky • 2playerproductions.com

via truechiptilldeath

A bunch of people travel to the moon and toss a rave, and then bend space time.

Music video for the track Dirty ROM Dance Mix by Nullsleep, Jeremiah Johnson. Containing glitch textures by “noteNdo” Jeff Donaldson.

Animation by “plasticflesh” Stieg Retlin. 2009.

Tracks include:

• Island In The Sun (Belmont’s Revisal) – videogame orchestra
• Holiday – Anamanaguchi
• El Scorcho – Tugboat
• The World Has Turned And Left Me Here – Bit Shifter
• You Won’t Get With Me Tonight – PDF Format
• Hash Pipe – seal of quality
• In The Garage – OxygenStar
• You Gave Your Love To Me Softly –
• We Are All On Drugs – Rabato
• Jamie – Unicorn Dream Attack
• Come To My Pod – Mahamajama
• Why Bother? – I Fight Dragons
• Buddy Holly – nordloef
• I Do – arcadecoma

via True Chip Til Death

The album is a project of Je deviens dj en 3 jourr.

More info and the album is available here.

Download link.

You can preview a few bonus tracks from the project below:

The world of music lost one of its most iconic stars today, Michael Jackson.

It’s a cliche, but Jackson lives on in his music, not just in its original form but in thousands of permutations.

The world of 8-bit Michael Jackson covers, is a little strange, or maybe a lot strange, depending on your perspective. But, even in video game style arrangements, Jackson’s best songs are still insanely catchy.

Here are just a few examples…….

Billie Jean C64 Edition 8-bit

Click here to view the embedded video.

8-bit Beat It

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thriller – 8bit Cover by Superpowerless

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: This post has been updated to focus on Jackson’s music. People universally hated the original post.

This is a two guys, one synth demo of what could be the ultimate Commodore 64 synthesizer, a C64 customized to work with Cynthcart.

via kilobyte242:

fully customized Commodore 64, enhanced for Cynthcart. Features SID2SID installation, Linear/Slider pot for Cynthcart filter, active guitar effects (overdrive and frequency filter) for each SID’s output, an mounted musical overlay, feedback knobs…..for more information check out www.kilobytemodshop.com

This is a promo video for John Tracker’s Amiga 1200 album, Cyber Techno. All 18 tracks on the album were created on the Octomed tracker app on an Amiga 1200.

via bazartist:

Jon Tracker’s track made on the Amiga 1200 titled Cyber Techno and promotional video to assist. This track and the Amiga Album will be available on iTunes soon.

The Pixelh8 Music Tech Master Stroke DS is a real time synthesizer for the Nintendo DS system.

Description:

The new system allows for keyboard style play by pressing “X” to bring up the 2 Octave Xylophone or classic Music Tech mode by using the directional pad to control the sounds in the same way as the Music Tech Game Boy and Pro Performer Game Boy Advance.

Loads of new combinations are possible as you can now combine interval settings with time based effects as well as using the noise channel instead of tone and the easy change between menus allow for quick change during performance.

All sounds are produced via the on board sound chip and no samples or sample manipulation is used, this is a real time chip tune synth for the DS.

Pixelh8 plans to release Music Tech Master Stroked DS for free and a iPhone and Android versions are planned.

OT: Ferrets frolic to the 8-bt sound of Rick Astley’s Never Going To Give You Up.

via BrianWilliamGreen:

This video is of nicoles ferrets jumping around.

While you are here you should go check out, http://www.seeyouinsleep.com/

The audio used for this video was a cover made by, http://www.myspace.com/ccivoryatl

Boing Boing has come into possession of some wicked footage of an anonymous Atari Computer Camp excursion that has everything you could ever want from grainy stock video: namely, yellowed and over-saturated money shots of retro-tech, and a bevy of over-eager and still-innocent pre-teens banging out BASIC to make crossword crosses out of the words Van Halen (no joke!) and gawping at the awesome limitless power and future of computers.

Here’s the catch: neither of the videos — the first clocking in at about seven minutes, and the second coming in at seven and a half — have any sound at all.

And so: given Offworld/Boing Boing’s sizable audience of chiptune/junk-tech musicians, we thought we’d throw the score open to you. If you’re interested in submitting some of your music for the videos, which will be broadcast on BBtv at a later date, send an email to brandon@offworld.com with the subject line “Atari Computer Camp” and we’ll dig through and select our favorites from there. Bonus points awarded for (but certainly not limited to) composing on actual 8-bit Atari tech.

8Bitone is synthesizer and sequencer application for the iPhone, designed to simulate sounds from the 8-bit personal computers and console games of the 80`s.

They expect this to be available in the iTunes App Store in June.

via yudoinc

Andy Baio has announced a project to create an 8-bit CD version of Miles Davis’ jazz classic Kind Of Blue:

What would the pioneers of jazz sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga? For years, I’ve wondered what “chiptune jazz” would sound like, but there are only a tiny handful of jazz covers ever made.

To satisfy my curiosity — and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” — I’ve asked five brilliant chiptune musicians to collaborate and reinvent the entire album in the 8-bit sound.

The lineup, in alphabetical order:
Ast0r (Chris J. Hampton)
Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland)
Sergeeo (Sergio de Prado)
Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss)
Virt (Jake Kaufman)

I hope to have the entire album download ready for Kind of Blue’s 50th birthday on August 17. (Printing and shipping CDs will take longer.)

The 8-bit take on this jazz classic, Kind Of Bloop, could be epic or awful, but we’ll have to wait until August to know.

Will Kind Of Bloop join its predecessor as one of the ultimate collegiate make-out albums of all-time, or will it be a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an old friend?

Leave a comment with your thoughts!

kilobyte24 is responsible for this Commodore 64 vs Commodore 64 dualing bassline synth smackdown. It features twin Commodore 64 computers running Mssiah and Cynthcart.

The video’s pretty static – but you gotta love twin C64 bassline synths!

Any readers using Mssiah? If so, leave a comment with your thoughts on it!