Chiptunes: Realbit vs. Fakebit

WARNING: This video contains fast flashing images at 15:32. It may cause discomfort and trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.

YouTube Videos Referenced:

Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
2:48 - Part 1: What is a chiptune?
7:40 - Part 2: What is 8-bit?
9:20 - Part 3: Limitations
14:31 - Part 4: The Chipscene Generations
21:07 - Part 5: Conclusion?

[spastorok]

Hey everyone! I just wanted to address the inaccuracies in this video that people have made me aware of! This was a video presentation for a college course I took and I was only expecting my class of 10 people and my professor to see it instead of the 93K (at the time of writing this) that have viewed it. Yes, I could take the whole video down and re-upload an edited one but that will take up more time than I have right now.

Thank you to everyone who pointed out these inaccuracies!

Inaccuracies:
0:48 - 英語のアニメ (Eigo no anime) should be changed to アメリカのアニメ (Amerika no anime) meaning American Anime / American Animation
2:28 - Ninendo should be spelled Nintendo
4:56 - The oscilloscope that was used as an example used a 2A03 Mod and was not the original sound produced by the NES
5:46 - The Commodore 64 (C64) is not a dedicated video game console but rather an 8-bit home computer that had the ability to run video games
10:16 - I pronounced flanging wrong
12:08 - Church modes should really just say modes (even though modern modes derived from church modes)
14:03 - 6.0 GHz/second should just be 6.0 GHz
19:52 - Marylou should be spelled Marilou

Additional notes:
I put the subtitles in before knowing I could add the correct ones via. YouTube.
I'm still learning how to edit my voice, I used a DeEsser and it sounded fine through my speakers but never test-ran it with headphones.
I didn't come up with the term "chipsters", it's a term mentioned in Marilou Polymeropoulou's article titled "Chipmusic, Fakebit, and the Discourse of Authenticity in the Chipscene".
My apologies for not including a warning for the flashing lights in the video!
Flat out disregard the bit-depth part.

[AlbySilly]

From my experience, when I hear people talking about "8-bit music" they usually means squares, triangles, saws and noise while "16-bit" seem to be commonly associated with fm synth stuff and some basic effects like echo (not reverb) and panning

[uncroppedsoop]

I've always just reserved "8-bit" for abiding by limitations, and "chiptune" for the general sound of a song produced with simple chiplike waveforms. I recognize it's arbitrary to use those terms that way, but it's still how I use them

[SawyerFriend]

Hey there!
I was the director of a video game that utilized a chiptune soundtrack for six years and wanted to share my experiences with this subject because it's something that I've struggled with for a very long time.
My game had a small team, but it was a relatively large teamm of composers. There were four of us for the majority of development, including myself as one of them, and the composers took up roughly a third of the total number of people involved with the project.
From the veyr beginning, I envisioned the game to have a chiptune soundtrack (specifically emulating the limitations of the Game Boy), and throughout development I spent a lot of time cracking the whip and shooting the team down when they got a little too ambitious. I had two schools of thought when trying to justify this, one philosophical and one practical.

The practical explanation ironically made more sense in theory than practice: it's so easy to find "8-Bit remixes" online that basically just throw a song into midi and replace every channel with a square wave and call it a day. Playing 8 square wave notes at once can sound somewhat retro, but it has this same inauthentic vibe as a lousy TV commercial trying to appeal to gamers with cheap pixel art and 90s buzzwords like "Level up!" I felt that by more faithfully following the limitations of a specific hardware, this sort of vibe could be avoided. In practice however, I often couldn't immediately tell the difference between a song with 3 voices and one with 5: the truth is that a composer with a genuine appreciation for the style will know how to use every channel with intent, and those channels serve a purpose.

The philosophical reason is something I still subscribe closer to: if you're not interested in emulating a specific style, why bother with any limitations at all? Usually chiptune sounds have objectively fewer options than modern composition hardware can provide, so why hold yourself back to only Squares and Saws when you can utilize any instrument sample in conjunction with the sounds you enjoy from these waveforms? The answer I've come to there is that chiptune music does have a specific style. The line of thinking that it comes from limitation is like asking a pianist why they don't add percussion to their music, or asking an electronic band why they limit themselves only to synthesized instruments. The truth is that there is no "rule" to what you can use in any genre of music, but nonetheless certain choices in instrument and composition will affect what kind of song you create, and choosing to use the voices of a particular hardware isn't an agreement to adhere to limitations, but merely a desire to utilize the sounds of that hardware, regardless of what it's actually capable of producing.

I still consider myself a purist in my own compositions, and I don't regret being so strict with my team, because we ultimately did produce an award winning soundtrack with a very distinct sound and I'd have it no other way. However, I acknowledge now that there are very genuine and valid reasons for fakebit to exist, and I think that other purists like me would benefit greatly from opening up to what those reasons might be. On the other side of the spectrum, I also think that fakebit "radicals" (that is to say, people who feel there should be no rules in chiptune at all) might benefit from understanding the perspectives around realbit better as well.

This was probably a super long read, but as a longtime game developer who's often struggled conveying this argument to his team members, as well as a chronic video essay enjoyer, I found this video to be especially relevant to me, and I thought others who are in a similar spot might also enjoy hearing my thoughts on the matter. Thank you for reading all of that!

[DustyMusician]

11:04 I'm no expert but Tim Follin is kind of legendary with how he used early console sound chips, it's kind of an extreme departure from his peers to use him as an example.

[yamden]

At the end of the day, "Did I write good music?" is more important than "Did I write authentic music." Squares are square, and I like the way they sound. Creative limitation is great and important, but if I want to write a piece with tons of channels and lots of sound generation techniques, I will. But I'll still call it chiptune, because I've got to call it something.

[DiThi]

Small nitpick: Hertz means "cycles per second", so "hertz per second" are "cycles per second per second".

[FoDSteve]

There are some wild takes in these comments jeez xD

I thought this video was a reasonable attempt and I get that this was for a school project with limited time to do any research. I echo those who say that this video would have been better if the framing wasn't around the 'real chip vs 'fake' chip'' debate.

As someone who both makes chiptunes in Famitracker that can be exported to a format that can be played on a real Famicom, and chiptunes in OpenMPT that utilise like 50 channels and incorporate completely non-chiptune instruments, I've always felt weird about this debate and I don't care for it very much. I think nowadays (at least primarily amongst people who make chiptunes) there's an implicit consensus that both the purist definition (chiptune as a medium/instrument) and the more modern/"chipster??" definition (chiptune as a genre/style) are valid.

Also I think neo-chiptune is a neat term.

[harabisj]

It's great how you managed to provide viewers with precise definitions of technical terms while not leaving out important details and still keeping the definitions easy to understand. It also made the video dense with information, yet not boring at all. Hats off to you.

[DIOCORE]

i clicked on this from recommended, watched the entire thing and didn’t realise how little views it had (800) until someone mentioned it in the comments omg. this is FIRE

[kox]

I make chiptunes (or fakebit) since the early 2000s. I was never really a purist but thought that at least some of what I did is considered chiptune.

Where do you stand on "classic Dos Modules" (xm, it, s3m and mod)? That's pretty much universally agreed "chiptune". It's somewhat sample-based and can be played on an old computer. Sounds like according to your definition that wouldn't be chiptune either.

But I'm really happy to see that a video about 'chiptune vs. fakebit' get so many views. Chiptune is so niche, so seeing this is really amazing.

[muffinconsumer]

I had my finger resting on the skip forward button the entire video, but never once felt compelled to press it. You kept holding my attention evenly througout the video. Bravo

[Sh-hgkf]

6:10 There were these absolute madlads I recall, demoscene programmers who managed to stufff an Amiga MOD into the c64 and got it play the mod back! Crazy stuff, very similar to the Genesis Toy Story title

On that note, the SID chip has amazing filters that allow musicians to create super unique sounds. Take a look at Eliminator on the C64. Jeroen Tel managed to use filters to get a super fat bass out

[DākuOngaku]

The limitations of NES hardware have brought out the more creative side of me and many other composers I've met. A lot of music nowadays relies very heavily on good sound design or tembre but with the NES everyone has to use the same sounds so the question now is how do you make your song stand out from the rest? I've discovered so much about music that i don't think I would have using a traditional DAW (not to discredit DAW composers). I'm so glad you covered this in this amazing video!

[TakuikaNinja]

Chiptune composer here. I think a lot of the inaccuracies people have already pointed out would have been caught had you reached out to chiptune communities. In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of research projects like these is communication and collaboration with experienced people.

[TheRealHedgehogSonic]

Another chiptunist here. I really hate when people say they made a "Genesis cover" of something only for it to be a MIDI slap with Sonic 3's soundfont. No channel limitations whatsoever.

[MidoriMushrooms]

"spongebob is not an anime" is the best conclusion here, I think

[Kroopahatsune]

I’m glad you included the Pictionary title theme as an example. It goes so hard

[kawashin]

I am a chiptune composer, and I also use a variety of DAW arrangers. I think the most important thing is how you view music. After all, producing good-sounding music is the most important, but if you are exposed to a little bit of chiptune, you also have a little music. Knowledge, you will find some of the mysteries and fun brought by chiptune is good. Of course, many retro sounds are now being widely integrated and used, but I think why everyone is arguing about this issue is mainly because of the so-called "fakebit" Among them, there are many bad works. They probably don’t understand things like “square” and “SAW”. They will use DAW to the extreme to perform large-scale EQ compression processing and stereo expansion. It is best to get a distorted but similar is about retro video game music, so I think the most fundamental question is how to produce good music that all people can appreciate

[pumodi]

It's always a tough question but at the end of the day I don't think the answer really matters all that much. Anamanaguchi is chiptune in my mind but considering they add so many other instruments it wouldn't fit under many other folks description. I make chiptune all the time, sometimes on hardware, sometimes with Plogue synths, sometimes with Raw waves in a wavetable synth. I think what Chiptune actually is has expanded greatly since the 'chiptune' era and terms like Fakebit only really serve to gatekeep and discourage others.

We also can't discount the fact that not everyone can get a hold of a DMG, GBC, C64. Older consoles are getting harder and harder to find and parts are disappearing. It can be pretty costly and not everyone can afford that.

Really appreciate everything you touched on in the video.