How can I start making chiptunes?
Tuesday, July 8, 2025 - 14:02
I'm a game developer, mostly a programmer so never really touched music before (except a 30-day FL Studio trial, only messed around though).
I like chiptunes and I want to make those for my game, what are your recommendations? (I don't have a MIDI keyboard, only mouse and keyboard)
Deflemask is a good tracker. It used to be free but now it's like 15 bucks. The Legacy versions are free though.
https://www.deflemask.com/
Legacy version https://www.deflemask.com/get_legacy/
I use LMMS for most of my music, not the best for chiptunes unless you're just looking for chiptune "sounds" and not... you know... meant to sound like actual hardware. Though there are some vsts out there that do emulate hardware. https://lmms.io/ The beta builds are stable enough.
Edit: And I forgot, the SNES's soundchip can be made by just downsampling small samples in impulse tracker and only using 8 channels. 32khz is the max but 24hz or 16khz was quite common. Half second is about the longest to get the "SNES" sound for most samples. It won't have the weird FM thing that they use to make wind or the "reverb". But it will have that lofi spc700 sound.
tysm!
is there anything else I should learn about chiptunes in general?
If you're going authentic you don't have a lot of channels so you need to understand how to imply harmony in some of the older systems. Nes only has 2 square waves, a triangle wave, a noise machine and a really limited sampler. The PCE engine will give you the "chiptune sound" with 8 channels. And since their all wavetables (or noise) you can set them to whatever you want.
Few other trackers:
http://famitracker.com/index.php
https://sourceforge.net/projects/goattracker2/
https://www.julien-nevo.com/arkostracker/
https://www.zophar.net/pdroms/nintendods/nitro-tracker.html
https://www.nesdev.org/nt2/index.html
https://famistudio.org/ ( not tracker, but oriented to famicom )
https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200809214716/https://bitbucket.org/ivanpir... ( not last version )
Sites with some other trackers:
https://files.scene.org/browse/resources/music/trackers/
https://woolyss.com/chipmusic-chiptrackers.php
https://web.archive.org/web/20220126232313/https://battleofthebits.org/l...
Some tutorials:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190930005822/http://blog.ntrq.net/?page_id=9
thank y'all so much for help!
I'm still starting out, but I'm sure with practice I'll make better chiptunes
https://tildearrow.org/furnace/
Furnace Tracker supports almost every old soundchip from the 70's, 80's, and 90's in existence. You can layer them too, and have for example four C64's playing at once in the same song. Controls are just like other trackers.
Your "first" track is so cute! Real authentic vibes! It reminds me of the level theme from Door Door.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKSYbuybEhs
For that kind of style, you are basically there already! But I don't know exactly what you are going for.
glad you liked it! Furnace tracker seems pretty cool (and it's free!!!)
Edit: btw what system is this guy using?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzGmbwS_Drs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxNfc8YDIjI
It's a tracker file. Usually like a software version of sample based soundchips. You don't need the special keyboard for them either.
I'm looking at FastTracker 2 and OpenMPT (they all use .xm files), do these even emulate some kind of chip?
I want to make chiptunes, but not for any kind of specific hardware (like NES, SNES, NeoGeo, etc...)
Edit: although I think those hardware limitations are a good idea for beginners
No they don't simulate a chip. you can kinda rig em up to sound like a Amiga mods or SNES spc files but they're just samplers.
But, forgetting about furnace, you can do some great "general chiptune" stuff by just using each chip as synth in and of itself. One thing LMMS has it has a built in SID and NES chiptune thing. But you can put as many of them as your computer can process. And plenty of free vsts.
idk what to use now, I'm rlly interested in using trackers (furnace, openmpt, etc...) but also like the ease-of-use that comes with DAWs and VSTs (LMMS, Reaper, etc...)
Well since you're not looking for authentic, maybe go with ease of use? Trackers are really fun but they can be dense.
I guess I'll check out LMMS (since it's FOSS), either way DAWs are still easier then trackers.
I'm planning on making an NES game in the future so furnace will be useful!!!
Thank you so much for the help!!!!!!!
I cannot recommend BeepBox enough for this. I also wanted to try making chiptunes and BeepBox has been great because it can be pretty overwhelming looking at more complex DAWs.
BeepBox is a lot simpler to get started but still quite powerful.