The other day I stumbled across Metin Seven, one of the people involved in making SIDmon (the first synthetical tracker for the Amiga). I e-mailed him and received extensive answers. He published (much of) these e-mails as an interview: the origin of the chiptune phenomenon.
I was mainly mailing him to hear his take on the etymology of the word chipmusic/chiptune. Usually, it’s said that the term first arose with sample-based Soundtracker chipmusic around 1990. But according to Seven, chiptune was used (just) earlier to refer to synthetical Amiga music. It will take some more research to find out if this was a wide-spread practice.
Listening to songs made in SIDmon 1+2, it sounds quite different from both sample-based and synthetical chipmusic. Soundwise, it actually uses “long” samples (often ST-01/02) a lot more than I expected. The synthesized sounds are used more like instruments among others and there doesn’t seem to be much nostalgia in there. Music-wise, most of the songs are based on minor scales; they are melancholic — not like the happy chip-MOD style. Also, the amount of videogame music covers is very low.
Seven argues that this was the early days of chipmusic, but it might be possible to explain it with software aswell. Synthetic Amiga software produces a sound rather similar to soundchips. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the music created with it takes the shape of melancholic space data music instead, quite different from “mainstream” chipmusic. But this is a very subjective statement. When I hear songs like Paranoimia or M.A.D (youtube-clips) I have a feeling that my brain goes back 20 years and ruins my chance to judge these songs “properly”.
By the way, Paranoimia was composed by TSM in a custom-format. From what I understand, songs that are available in custom format are not necessarily made in a custom program, but stored in a custom format for optimization purposes.
By the way #2, SIDmon 2 was not made by the makers of SIDmon 1. Seven told me that the publishers of SIDmon 1 (Turtle Byte) did not even pay them for it, and then hired Unknown/DOC to program SIDmon 2 (who previously made his own version of Soundtracker). Their own sequel was called Digital Mugician, later followed by the Windows-tracker Syntrax.
August 23, 2009 at 2:17 pm |
paranoimia was coded in assembler without use of editor at all afaik :)
August 23, 2009 at 4:01 pm |
I wonder if SidMON really was the first synthetic editor for Amiga? Fred Editor was released already 1989.
August 24, 2009 at 3:47 pm |
[…] origin of the chiptune phenomenon By Peter Swimm, on August 24th, 2009 Anders from Chipflip has linked to an interesting interview he conducted with Metin Seven, one of the developers of SIDMon. In it, […]
August 24, 2009 at 10:52 pm |
Hi Johan,
Sidmon had been around since 1987. We first wanted to enter the game music business with it. Only eventually Sidmon was released to the public, when we were already creating complete games ourselves, in stead of only game music.
Cheers,
Metin
August 25, 2009 at 10:21 am |
you can find examples of those songs recorded from original hardware from my podcast if you like :)
December 11, 2009 at 8:02 am |
Ha ha ha ha! It’s the super special podcast guy, TMB, Why don’t you write some chip music and share it ? Podcasts hahahahahaha!!
December 16, 2009 at 4:48 am |
[…] you’d like to read more about “synthetic” Amiga music then check out the ChipFlip blog or the Blibb Blobb […]
December 17, 2009 at 11:37 am |
[…] you’d like to read more about “synthetic” Amiga music then check out the ChipFlip blog or the Blibb Blobb […]
March 30, 2011 at 12:44 pm |
[…] Hoi (video) – sound/visuals from RAM-trash + SIDmon! […]
March 14, 2017 at 10:44 am |
[…] a sound chip in the traditional sense. What people did was to synthesize sound in software, with SIDmon and other programs. As you can see in the screenshot, “playroutine by 4-mat” […]