[Fedora-music-list] 8 bit bleeper/tracker

[Callum Lerwick]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:36 AM, William Blackburn <bill_- at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Do you guys happen to know of an audio app that  does 8 bit tracking?  I
> have tried milkytracker but I had trouble understanding the cryptic
> interface.  I really like these noises to make music so I was wondering if
> CCRMA packages anything similar to this?

I don't have any Fedora specific tips, but such sounds are pretty much
by definition easy to replicate. Any basic analog-style softsynth will
do. Set up a square wave oscillator, turn off the filter if possible
otherwise set it to lowpass, turn the cutoff all the way up and the
resonance down. Add a little vibrato if you want a more refined
demo-scene style lead sound. On most synths this means applying a LFO
to the oscillator frequency, use a triangle wave for authenticity.

For some nice C-64 SID bass type sounds, apply a single-pole lowpass
filter with resonance all the way down.

The Reaktor SoundSchool Analog softsynth works good for this.
Apparently there's a free standalone version you can download, if you
use the evil windows/mac.

There's a nifty ymVST available:

http://www.preromanbritain.com/ymvst/

Which is capable of a lot of authentic Atari ST style sounds. Its
based on an actual Atari chiptune tracker patch editor, but not a true
YM2149 chip simulator. Once of these days I'll get around to doing an
open-source clone of this...