Few names carry as much weight among fans of Commodore 64 and Amiga music as Chris Hülsbeck. Across four decades he composed the scores for some of the most beloved games of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras...
By the late 1990s, the golden age of the tracker seemed to be winding down. FastTracker 2 and Impulse Tracker had defined PC composing through the DOS years, but as Windows took over and glossy sequencer-style DAWs...
In Eastern Helsinki, one of the most quietly influential figures in both the demoscene and the international IDM/ambient scene has spent over three decades making music...
Long before Lassi Nikko was releasing records on Warp under the name Brothomstates...
Artificial intelligence is quietly becoming a useful companion in this scene...
The very first piece of music ever composed in the format Obarski invented...
Aleksi Eeben grew up in Finland with an early fascination for both music and computers...
For the first decade of home computer music, "composing" meant programming a chip...
In the early 1990s, if you wanted to make serious computer music with real instruments, you owned a Commodore Amiga...
Long before samplers and streaming audio, home computers and arcade machines made music and noise with tiny dedicated pieces of silicon called sound chips...
How tracker musicians started their own labels, gave the music away for free, and beat SoundCloud...
Open almost any music file today — an MP3, a WAV, a FLAC — and what you get is a recording: a long list of amplitude values...
Every 8-bit computer of the late 1970s and early 1980s had its own personality baked into silicon...
How demoscene coders fit an entire music engine inside an executable smaller than a single photo...
How a chip built for math, not music, became the sound of an entire era of PC gaming...
Two of the most influential names in that world were Psi, the Finnish coder behind Scream Tracker, and Pulsar, the Australian coder behind Impulse Tracker...
How a subculture built around cracking games and coding demos invented its own version of the record...
Most demoscene music stays inside the scene. Every so often, though, a track escapes into the wider world in a way nobody expected...
Finland is arguably the spiritual home of the demoscene. Assembly, one of the world's largest and longest-running demoparties...
Mods Anthology is the most comprehensive archive of this era ever assembled...
When Karsten Obarski released Ultimate Soundtracker for the Amiga in 1987, he created more than just a piece of software...
Long before streaming platforms and DAWs were everywhere, a subculture of programmers, artists...
When discussing the greatest musicians of the Amiga demoscene, one name consistently appears among the elite: Moby, better known today as Frédéric "Elmobo" Motte...
While Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway were pushing the Commodore 64's SID chip to its limits...
Long before orchestral scores and streaming soundtracks, a teenager in Manchester was coaxing three-voice harmonies...
There is a kind of music that most people have never heard, composed by artists most people have never heard of...
Most legendary pieces of music software are remembered for their interface or their feature list...
Most music technology has an origin story with a famous inventor attached...
In the 1980s, two rival home computers ended up defining two entirely different schools of chip music...
Chiptune is one of the rare music genres whose name describes its own technical limitation...
"Best of all time" is inherently subjective. This list was built by cross-referencing community charts...
In the mid-1990s, the IBM PC audio landscape was thoroughly dominated by Creative Labs and their ubiquitous Sound Blaster series...
Most sound chips from the early 1980s were built to make beeps and simple effects for games...
When discussing the legends of video game music, few names command as much respect as Rob Hubbard...
If you listen to modern electronic music, indie video game soundtracks, or chiptunes...