NICE! I want to hear the TI-83 tune. I'll admit, until I started listening to the tunes you were posting I hadn't heard of chip-tunes, thanks for that. This talk brought my appreciation for the genre (I mean instrument) to another level. I hadn't realized the DIY aspect; people building their instruments. It was great that he waited until the 4:30 mark until playing any music, nice to get the description tease and then he doesn't disappoint with the music. Pretty bad ass. To a lot of people watching though it may just seem like a dude playing the guitar over a sequenced part that was pre-recorded. For sake of the presentation, it may make more sense to not have the guitar. But, then we get to see him creating a sound and that was really cool. An entirely new world to me. It's definitely a lot to do with programming as well as musicianship. "It would be very difficult to create that sound on any other platform" -This is an important point. These sounds do sound extremely unique and evoke an emotion that is all their own. Thanks for sharing. Tell your friend I said, "great talk."
I'll pass along the word to him. He's a great guy and an extremely talented musician. That's the thing about chiptune, it's not just VGM like a lot of people think, it's been described as having a punk rock aesthetic due to the DIY nature and because of the fact that presets and other user-friendly things are typically rejected by the community. Case in point: Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) comes with some preset drum kits that don't sound bad, and some of which we all use from time to time, but for the most part we all create our own drums. I would say that 95% + of the instruments that you hear across chiptune is musician-created instruments. Similarly, everything that you hear is programmed from the instruments to the tables that Dan briefly showed (which are the most useful) to the song structure. It's not really intuitive and definitely has a bit of a learning curve. Also the best part of the scene is something he touched upon, which is the workshops and generally friendly nature of it. If you make chiptune everybody else in the scene supports you and vice versa. Everybody is willing to share their knowledge with everybody else for the sake of making good music.