For me, It’s sort of a long, slow story, but I’ll just highlight the basic timeline. When I was like 6-9 years old, my favorite songs were the pop songs that had big electronic riffs in them, like “Crazy Frog,” “Gangnam Style,” and my favorite, “Party Rock Anthem.” When I was about 10-13 I was really into EDM, like NCS music and TheFatRat. Admittedly, this genre was sort of cringe, so I moved on after a few years. To what? The music from video games, notably, Mario and other Nintendo games. It was then when I realized I wanted to do that kind of stuff myself, so I started searching for general terms on YouTube and SoundCloud like “Video Game Music” or of course “Chiptunes.” Then I was introduced into legends like FearofDark, Stinkbug, Vince Kaichan and many others. My taste for chiptune has changed many times over the last few years, so I’d probably say my composing style is like the Prog jazz, “weird” ones like Cryptovolans and Chimeratio mixed with the melodic genius of Fearofdark, mixed with the creativity of Tim Follin. Jeez, chiptune is complicated.

well, in my case was from arcade machines, when they started to have something more than sound effects (but anyway, i always loved those from Moon Cresta, so nostaligic these days) - one of the first ones was that (rip) Vangelis' cover of Chariots of Fire on Konami's Track'n'Field i remember playing in my childhood, as games like Pole Position, Elevator Action, etc. (and then all other from 80's and 90's) - songs from MSX and NES games also have its nostalgic place as well, as well those from ZX-Spectrum (specially those from Gominolas and Ben Daglish, which were actually conversions from C64 version, as far as i heard about) - i actually see chiptune as everything you can do on sound chips and get some sound and noise from them, but these ones were the first contact i had - (edit..) and then, i got curious about how these songs were made (as later i found out that Toshiaki Sakoda made his own song engine for his songs, and other examples like this), how they used chip registers and so on, and then what can be done at all in these chips and how eventually can we try to push the limits of them

years ago I heard the song The Struggle by Maktone, and although it would be a little while before I started making chiptune, I don't think it ever really left me.

At some point I found myself making tunes with ripped snes sounds. I was in complete shock!

StarTropics (NES) - Piano hall theme

The Guardian Legend (NES) - Opening stage corridor

Super Mario Bros. (NES) - Water theme

Blaster Master (NES) - Area 7

Little Nemo, The Dream Master (NES) - Topsy Turvy

9999999-in-1 KD-6037-B (NES)

Breath of Fire (SNES) - Fate

Megaman X (SNES) - Storm Eagle

Megaman X3 (SNES) - Opening stage

& Toxic Seahorse

& Blast Hornet

Lufia & The Fortress of Doom (SNES) - The Earth

& Battle 2

The Legend of Dragoon (PS1) - Shana's theme

Dragon Valor (PS1) - Brize Forest

*tro of Spanish Final Fantasy IX by paradox

*tro for Vagrant Story (PS1) by best amiga dominators (BAD)

A girlfriend at the time (~2007) showed me a nullsleep track and I was blown away, not necessarily by the track but that you could make your own music like this outside of the construct of games. I tried out lsdj and nanoloop at the time but the learning curve was too steep. I think I briefly accidentally discovered this site in 2010 but didn't actually start making anything until 2011 when watching danooct's famitracker tutorial kind of made everything click, or beep anyways

tldr girls ofc

i used to play hella games when i was little, and i was obsessed with my super nintendo. i loved that thing, and i remember playing super castlevania iv a lot and loving the music in it. i think that was my first exposure to old-school vgm since the only other system we had was a ps2. then i entered my early teens and decided to see what the retro gaming thing was about, and i liked the way that chipmusic sounded. when i was 14 i found danooct1's tutorial for famitracker, and everything just kinda spiraled from there :)

Around 5th/6th grade, I started listening to Anamanaguchi, Monstercat artists, and video game cover bands. At some point, around 7th/8th grade, this led me to search something like: "video game music maker". This brought me to BeepBox. That was the beginning of my chiptune adventure :)

my friend made this album https://blitzlunar.bandcamp.com/album/triptunes

i was jamming to my snes as far back as age 4 though, and all the subsequent nintendo things that came out... and i got my personal start with computer music by perusing midis on vgmusic.com, later opening them in Finale and then writing my own stuff in Finale. i checked out some of the sequencers' original tunes too and loved them. it's very much in my bloodstream

as best i can remember though, that album was where i really came to understand the level of power one could wield in a chiptune style that was more than "video game music". i remember hearing "kind of bloop" too, maybe even before that. it's been so long, i wish i remembered more specifically. i didn't start making chiptune in earnest until much much more recently, learning trackers was intimidating, but i've been using game samples for what feels like forever

one day i got into a university and i discovered that someone in mine class did music!!! exciting!!!

at th time i only did transcriptions and crappy original touhou-like songs, where i insisted to using those little fm blips in.

well anyways that guy is Goopa-Troopa, a good cool dude who is awsom. he told me smth like "hey maybe you cld check out this site" so i did. i got scared of the confusing layout and ditched the site for 2 weeks or smth lol

but i went back for some reason, and saw that a series of 4hbs was about to happen!!! not that i knew what that meant. anyways i got accustomd to the site, and i started to learn the terms, and get draggd down into trackerworld, and...

tldr i ate botb and got suckd into th chiptune hole at around the same time

It started somewhere around 2015 when I looked into covers of VGM done in Famitracker. There was just something so interesting to me about trying to recreate these songs I'm familiar with on such limited hardware.

This would lead me to finding out more about Famitracker and all sorts of other systems as well. I tried my hand at making covers in FT over the years as well, which enabled me to learn how to make chip music in general. I did these covers mostly for myself tho, cause I felt like there wasn't a good outlet for me to share them anywhere.

I would continue to mostly listen to covers, with the occasional original stuff as well, but that would change once I found out about a free Guitar Hero clone called Clone Hero. I became interested in making my own charts for that game, so I tried doing a couple of them for the few original chiptune songs I had known about. With a bit of time, I eventually ended up as a verified charter on the discord server, which led me to start hunting down more original chiptune stuff because of the lack of chiptune charts for the game.

used to watch silly smw romhacking Videos in 2010, found silly lets plays of romhacks because of that in 2010. those lets players also made silly Sparta Remixes and ytpmvs in 2010, but it took me 2 more years to actually get into that stuff more.
In 2013, i decided to start doing my own silly ytpmvs.
That got me into international ytpmv scene in 2013/14, which heavily used chiptune and/or mod files as bgm.
Made me discover openmpt and its module files in 2014. Robyn suggested botb to me in 2016 bit it took me 2 more years to actually become active on here. I think i only rly got into chips and chops after starting botb stuff, before that i was just fascinated by the fact that u cld listen to a thick and sexy bassline on solo if u have the module file and open it in mpt.

My route was some mix of discovering keygen music and then NES remixes/covers. Then at some point FamiTracker happened and I dabbled into making covers there, and now I'm here :)

iirc i tried out famitracker in 2011 for some forgotten reason, but didn't touch it again until 2013/2014. that time it was due to mlp -> ipi music -> find botb + mess with famitracker again

it was the year 2000AD and i was but a Teenager on the Internet, and irc addict. there was this scandinavian metalhead who, i guess because i was curious, showed me the thing he uses to make music, something called modplug tracker. it looked really interesting, so i opened up the demo module, "aryx.s3m" by karsten koch and was kind of blown away. because these were BOOPS. many of my first experiences loving music were the OG bloop songs. my first video game as a child was "Super Mario Bros" for the NES. my second video game was "The Legend of Zelda" for the NES. you get the picture. so i set to work making my own fakebit "video game music" by doing 4 channel mods with 3 pulse chans and a rhythm channel (or something like that, i'd mix it up). i would also make covers and remixes of various songs (as one does). ofc in the 90s i'd use whatever i could to make music. loved mario paint. loved trippy-h even though it was terrible (gameboy camera thing). and i actually used one of the first versions of lsdj, like, in 2001 or something like that, and also made a few things in nanoloop. anyways, i soon expanded outward as a musician, and left the confines of chipmusic in 2003. i had no idea chiptune was a thing other people cared about, and was so distant from the scene that i wouldn't find out until 2017! in the interrim period, my thing was old casio keyboards, that was my personal retro music addiction (i wasn't aware that many other people were that kind of nerd either).

but yeah in 2017 i found famitracker and it was like "oh. of course".. it was like coming home. i didn't take it too seriously yet, was still focusing on developing pianoplay powers. but i joined botb in 2019 and, yeah. proceeded to crash course the world of computer music. it's been endlessly fun and enriching. music is so good y'all. anyways that's my story

you could say that i got into chiptune before botb, at least referring to the original meaning of the term which is module files that sound like something written on a PSG (i didn't write proper chip music before botb).

i was, and still am, obsessed with the game star control 2 and its modern source port: the ur-quan masters. about 5-6 years ago i started messing with the game files to discover that all of the original music for the game (there are other music packs for it as well) used .mod files. i discovered milkytracker as a means to open and mess around with these files and i would take the original music and replace the samples of them to make "remixes" of them.

eventually i had learned milkytracker enough to be able to write simple musics, where i drew all the percussion sounds and waveforms by hand, thereby creating "chiptune". i later transitioned to using mostly amiga st-xx samples for a while after that but there was a time when i was writing drawn sample stuff on a regular basis during my study classes, probably as some kind of creative escapism

I found Next by Fearofdark in a copy of OpenMPT. I found BotB years later through his Bandcamp commenters.

Since I was... I guess 13 judging by the version Next was in, I used OpenMPT for basically all my music. I never learned to "grow up and use a real DAW", so instead I learned how to make samples sound realistic-ish. Though I've never uploaded any realistic-ish songs on BotB, because they're for larger projects. The files sizes would probably be too big for MPTM, so they'd have to be uploaded as Allgear.

I started using Famitracker when i first heard of it, also from FoD.

Technically Fearofdark isn't the first chiptune artist I heard, though. I heard SpellingPhailer first because of Science Blaster, the theme he made for Game Theory. It's just that I never got really into chiptune until I heard FoD.

well, my parents were both into music in some form and i had a famiclone as a kid. late 2007/early 2008s i got internet and discovered emulators, was a very affordable way to experience a lot of games i missed out on and also ran well on my at-the-time terrible computer.

i used to use mario paint composer to do music originally, the only thing of note i did was do a cover of un owen was her that i couldn't even post online so i just showed it to my parents, then later on i just discovered famitracker and was like oh shit, cool, a thing that lets me make nes music?? which i already liked, and then it was also free so imagine some broke eastern european child trying to use the internet and just relying on everything that's free

i got familiarized to it using danooct1's tutorials like pretty much everyone else at the time, tried to get into the forums when i was like 12 (don't tell anyone but that wasn't a very legal move on my end), got basically shunned away because, surprise, an autistic 12 year old can't exactly interact well with adults who probably had their own issues but could control them much better, and that scared me from famitracker for a good year lol

---

extra bits that are more about how i got here rather than chiptune in general but if it wasnt for this site i woulda prolly quit like a year or two later idk:

i was playing some minecraft knockoff and decided id make a youtube channel to post my music on like other people were doing, i called it, uh. 5tapl3rguy (this channel is now deleted)

around the summer of that time (2013) is when i first laid eyes upon botb actually but i saw my country's flag at the time and was like fuck theyre gonna discover where i live, i was super paranoid about it at the time

come round 2014, keffie posts abt winter chip 9 on famitracker forums, and i decided id join and well the rest is history at that point lol

state mandated punishment for my crimes

I'll try to provide some context to the youngest of you...


👴🏻

Back in the early nineties, the term chipmusic referred to music made with a PSG, while music based on samples like Protracker modules (A.K.A. amigamod) were referred to as soundtracks, at least in the Atari ST scene.

I was lucky enough to have an Atari ST as a kid, so at about 11 years old I started making music with it, as soon as I got a music software. Back then to get such software, you had to know someone who had it and get them to lend it to you. Hopefully sometimes magazines would include demoscene software on floppies and if you could afford the magazine you would be a happier person. I think my uncle subscribed me to Atari magazine and I was lucky to get a floppyfull (726Kb) of freewares and sharewares in the post every month for a couple of years.

I guess I got from a friend the composition software Quartet, which I enjoyed but then I got Protracker with a magazine, and used it a lot more. I still have a tape with a backing track I made, with a guitar solo on top played by a friend. As a kid who didn't understand English, it was fairly difficult to understand how chip trackers worked (remember a chip tracker controls the PSG as opposed to playing samples). Trackers came without manual and there was no Internet to provide you with tutorials so I just stuck to Protracker which was more user-friendly than SIDsound Designer, the only chip tracker I had.

But those tools are not what got me into chiptune, because as soon as I could get a more powerful computer I started making "regular" electronic music (or more accurately acid/IDM), I had no particular interest in chiptune.

What triggered my personal chiptune revival was the early 2K's chiptune scene and in particular the Gameboy and Atari ST scenes. Being into IDM/experimental electronic music, I thought chiptune was cool AF and I loved that you could take your Gameboy anywhere and make cool music with it. So I bought a LSDJ cart (still have my DMG-01 brick) and proceeded to make shit music. More importantly I could now understand how to use chip trackers and quickly chose to focus on maxYMiser for the Atari ST, with which I could finally get rid of a long forgotten frustration: not being able to make chip music with the unmighty YM2149 as a kid (and having to stick to sample-based soundtracks).

At that time I was considering YQN a side project, focusing on my DAW/Eurorack music which I deemed more serious lol, but after discovering botb it started shifting as I got more and more pleasure making chiptune. Now I'm only active as YQN and quite happy with it, even though I'd like to start mixing the Atari ST with the modular when I get a chance to setup a studio in my apartment again. (GF is now working from home, in the room that once was my home studio)

Zère you go!


TLDR: Chiptune was the only music you could make from a computer when I was a kid / BOTB made me wanna spend more time making chiptune versus my other projects.

In the early 2010s, I frequented a Flash website called Sploder, a website that had tools that allowed users to make their own games Mario Maker style. Looking back on it, it was all super simple shit, but for a site from 2007, it was way more advanced than it had any right to be, with games like arcade platformers, topdown shooters, and even a basic sprite editor for creating your own custom graphics.

One cool feature was that when making a level, you had the option to pick background music, with the soundtrack consisting of Amiga modules, featuring tracks from old chipmusic artists like Vim and Syphus. At the time, I didn't even know what chiptune was. To me, it was all just beepboops, but I still fell in love with the unique sound. I remember sifting through pages of modules to find the perfect song for the level I was working on, eventually listening so much that if you played one for me, I could tell you the name within 2 or 3 seconds.

That was in 2013, but it took me almost 7 years to truly get into chipmusic, when I played Scott Pilgrim and heard that iconic soundtrack by Anamanaguchi, and it all clicked. I started trying my hand at doing chiptune myself, making a few fakebit demos in FL that I didn't really like, while spending most of my chiptune days just fooling around with different trackers. Fast forward to today, I still don't know how trackers work, but I can make cooler music now. :)

Becoming a listener was as simple as being a 90s kid with a Sega Genesis. I rented Rocket Knight Adventure once and the music instantly beamed pure heavenly light into my brain and all I wanted from then on was to hear video game music forever.

as for starting to create it, that's a long and convoluted journey with a bunch of false starts. In fact, I'm still not entirely sure that I'm a chiptune artist yet. Still working on it

When I first played Shovel Knight and the classic Mega Man games, I was blown away by the music. This led to me trying to make similar stuff myself and eventually stumbling upon Famitracker. (Before it I'd used the WarioWare DIY's surprisingly good music maker and some dumb in-browser chiptune thing, though neither extensively.) virt is still one of my biggest inspirations.

I always had an interest in game music. I'd listen to it while working on schoolwork because it didn't have lyrics and wouldn't distract my ADHD ass. At some point I discovered Beepbox and from there I went backwards in time with software

many years ago i ate a dorito and it tasted good. soon after, i ate a tuna sandwich and it tasted even better. so the logical conclusion was to combine chip and tuna.

this was a false start, but I actually had a close encounter with famitracker and pxtone back in 2013 or so when I was trying out game dev things; I downloaded the two programs from seeing them used in the community, but I never touched pxtone and got turned off by famitracker, and that was that lol.

Anyway i think the real start was around 2017 when I found the music of "burrito galaxy" on youtube, which led me to the eclectic but somehow nameless (yet-to-be-called-"digital-fusion") circle of chiptunes, botb, vgm, fusion, and s3xmodit(mania) choons on soundcloud. Special shoutouts to stinkbug, jimmyoshi, Tony Thai, and all the staffcirc friends, whose songs and sounds were all completely awe-inspiring and motivated me to try and make this music that I loved listening to so much---my goal was to be able to join staffcirc someday!

From about 2017 to 2020, I made "some" progress towards this, mostly by making meme reharmonizations of things on youtube, slowly and sluggishly warming up my chordwielding chops. However, when things really took off was when I had a chance encounter with a maj7 server member on another server (this was even before the digital fusion boome) who led me there, and having stepped foot "into the scene", I eventually joined botb and subsequently acquired an approx. 3x acceleration in the rate of gains in my musical training grind, met all you wonderful people, and somehow even managed to sneak into the frog friend circle (! :'O)

I'm not done yet ofc; the more I do this the more I realize I still have to learn; maybe some day I might even be really "into chip tune" hah!!!!

Motoaki Takenouchi (Shining Force II) and Norio Hanzawa (Gunstar Heroes) are two composers who stood out to me since I was a kid.

My memory is foggy, but A few years ago, I really got into retro VGM. At first, I made VGM covers in Mario Paint Composer, but I eventually started wondering if it was possible to make music for some of these systems, specifically the NES.

Eventually, I found FamiTracker in 2017 and after 5 years (already?) I ended up where I am today.

I admittedly forgot how I found this site at all, But I owe a lot to this site because I had never found this site, I wouldn'tve made as many original songs as I have.

Wow guys! Interesting stories!! Didn't expect this thread to reel in so many of you!

I’m autistic. Back when I was a wee lad I had a special interest in Mario, and when combined with my love of music (I grew up on 60’s rock and classical) I was in for a treat when I discovered Mario music. Eventually around 2012 I started to make my own. It all blossomed from there.

I found out about the chiptune scene through chiptune compilations on youtube, and various tracker module re-upload channels and the like. I was already into VGM so I was hooked. I didn't really know how to make music at that point and felt way too intimidated to even try it. I had famitracker but I just used it to listen to the pre-packaged demo tunes and whatever I could find on the internet.

Fast forward by like a year to 2014. I tried to get into game development by faffing about in game maker studio, and failing miserably. I was trying to make some tracks in famitracker for the game I was working on and eventually I realized that poking around with that software was a lot more fun than somehow stitching together a working game. From there I dabbled in milkytracker, renoise, LSDj and then DAWs like ableton.

How BOTB fit into all this, I think I heard about it through other chiptune artists compiling their various BOTB tracks into albums. I made an account and got anxious and just never got around to submitting stuff. Last year I was in quite a rut and needed something to do and I found that making tracks here was a lot of fun. The social aspect was kind of scary at first but I slowly got over it. I've always been quite shy with sharing stuff but having been on here a bit has helped with that quite a bit!

the bideo jame

pirating video editing software when i was 15 but actually liking the music from the keygens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP1uvEtxJs4

supah mayro bros (got me to nes music)
then escalated quickly to deflemask, openmpt and then furnace

Cool thread! I'm going to try to keep it short (to my standards).
I fell in love with the AY/YM soundchip when my father put me in front of his Atari ST when I reckon I was about 6 years old (this would be 2005). This

is the first tune I remember hearing. I didn't get into composition until 2013, when I asked around for software to use and got recommended MuseScore.
I learnt about LSDj through Super Hexagon, which I played a lot (until I eventually beat it) in... 2015, probably. However, I was disappointed to find that carts weren't on sale anymore, and didn't look further into it.
In 2016 I came across a cover disk with Quartet (also mentioned by YQN) in my (then deceased) father's diskette collection. I made some tracks with that but really wanted to get into a tracker (I knew about trackers from OpenMPT, which I had briefly used in 2015). I found MaxYMiser and started creating.
That's it. :)

Music has been prominent in my family, and between us, friends and relatives, some interest for video games and computers has also been around to enough extent for some kind of related gadget to be around in the household.
In my case, from the first day there was a PC with Windows 98 with a SoundBlaster AWE32 and a nice DAW with good MIDI support (Voyetra DOP) along with some PC-games for 3-6 year olds, and a SNES with Super Mario Kart, Super Mario Allstars and Donkey Kong Country iirc. So it came naturally as interest-crosses for me starting to pay more attention to the video-game music.

These were also rabbitholes that naturally opened up as I grew, as we would get almost any new Nintendo console with some games (we skipped some since they didn't cost nothing lol), get new computers, internet started to show up more at home and in school, etc.

With the crossing also led to finding more specific and unique areas in interest, which with the deeper rabbithole-exploration became its own rabbithole.

Eventually I think chiptune just showed up on multiple places I would go on internet back in 2007; in YouTube videos, flash-games, etc. Then I just progressively, over the years, came over Mario Paint and Mario Paint Composer, soundfonts, and other ways to make video-game music with MIDI at first, until 2012-2013 when I also discovered trackers. Since then it has become close to me.

Tried to keep details low, and I'm not good at that xD

I grew up on video games and always loved the music. Some games I would let run for a while without even playing just to listen (like Zelda Link to the Past, the rainy scene at the beginning).

I spent a while out of country and when I came back, a friend played a Postal Service

song for me and it was non video game music with chippity stuff in it! I'm sure I'd heard other music like this, but the memory of that song stands out. Later on around 2010 I discovered Ubiktune and listened to everything released there. I have gone back to listen to the Equilibrium

album (featuring some BotBrs!) about a zillion times.

I can't play more than very basic piano, so trackers worked for me. I messed around off and on for a few years in OpenMPT writing random stuff and covers. I don't think I ever finished a complete song until I stumbled across this place. I guess having a place to share helps motivate me :)

Cave Story inspired me to learn music using the program Pxtone the thing about Cave Story was that the game was made by one guy I am pretty sure so I sorta was like "If they can learn how to do so much stuff then I can learn music and art too"

A bit of a story? [As usual coming from me]

Was into classical music since very young as an interpreter, then at 18-or-so, I discovered the world of YTPs when the most iconic French YTP came out [Bonne Nuit les Tipeu].
Got very appealed by this YTP world where everyone did what it wanted and made their childhood heroes say the most awful things in the name of creativity, especially since I quite always felt very restrained about personal expression in modern society [Yea, I often saw poopers make characters talk about absolute taboos, like Nazi behaviours and stuff at this level, as an absurd / 2nd degree thing].

From YTPs, I discovered YTPMVs, which introduced me to japanese modern pop music, and since the harmony in these was [and still is imo] quite above western modern pop [well most of it], it made me spend hours on Youtube trying to find cool music through mostly-japanese YTPMVs and recommendations. I fell on my beloved artists like Koronba and its imitators, Protodome, Yura Hatsuki, but also Fearofdark who got me introduced to chiptune music.

With all that, I really wanted to hop into composing, but as I was afraid to hop straight into modern daws and all the stuff about that, I went towards trackers [MilkyTracker at first], also because Fearofdark was really inspiring.



About why I stay in chiptune :

-I'm mainly composing for harmony and effects, so I don't really want to have to invest time into sound design, mixing and related :'D

-Having a strong influence from my "previous" life of interpreter, I really like to put very precise effects everywhere, to "code" a track as if I played it live... Non-tracker DAWs can sure do that, but those that I seen so far were quite less optimized for such thing.

-Honestly, besides that, there's not much that prevent me from jumping into modern DAWs, but there's still quite a bunch of stuff to experiment on a canvas as simple as Famitracker...
Plus I kinda better be able to sell my stuff at some point for living...

shoutout to Fearofdark! referenced here by multiple botbrs

fearofdark is by all means one of my biggest inspirations. Him and Tim Follin lol

There were a website in the "net of yesterday", keygenmusic. A good friend of mine shared the website with me where I could find many music from keygens. Of course, it was mostly chiptune. I loved how it sounded but back in the day, I didn't know how to make music. I still kept the musics with the hope someday I'll be able to make music that sounded the same.

Of course, if I wanted to do more self-history, I would have talked about my childhood with the MegaDrive and later with the Game Boy. Back in the day, Internet was not so popular. In other words : like many gamers of these years, I listened to chiptune before even knowing the existence of the word "chiptune"

I found out about chiptune from the 8bit weapon performance on screen savers which inspired me to buy a gameboy camera to get the video game sounds but not much progress in my own creative juices flowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fOvcpG0mL0&t=90s

in about 2003-2006 I found out about tsu ryu and nulsleep making nsf files and led me to 2a03.org where I could get the latest original nsf files and the nsf archive download. from there I was led to 8bit peoples and it blew my mind how cool everything was. Found out about alex mauer, virt, and anamanaguchi here and I was hooked on chiptune for life.

one day I saw an announcement for famitracker on 2a03.org forums
and when I downloaded and opened it, I had no Idea how to do anything like how to get a sound, how to put in notes, why do the notes start at c?
So I had to learn to make music if I was going to make any progress with this. so I learned to use a piano to make music compositions much to the annoyance of my family <3
I than would use a translated dezaemon rom has a music composer on it and record it on a flip phone voice recorder

example: http://2a03.free.fr/dl.php?file=1503

after doing a bunch of times I finally got into learning famitracker by looking at ftm files and stealing as many dpcm files as I could get. from there I finally just made a song

my first nsf: http://2a03.free.fr/dl.php?file=1359

from here I found out about 8bitcollective.org that led me to the concept of OHC and battleofthebits.org

I Don't remember well but i think that was it

I wanted to make music and i meet famitracker but i gave up because i didn't knows the tracker interface

Some years late i meet the mod music when i was looking the files of a game and i found some protracker, and pc modules

Don't knowing how open this files i meet fastracker 2

Some time later i meet protracker and i make some (bad) songs on this program

Later i meet OpenMPT and make some tunes using vsts and wav samples

And i think was how i got into chiptune

i played video game that let you make music (punk-o-matic)

someone on video game's website chat linked me to "epic chiptune covers" (the infamous gxscc stuff we know now)

took me 4 days of trying to use gxscc to make nes music before i realized that what gxscc was presenting me was way beyond what would actually work on an nes (i found a really easily-written basic technical reference very fast)

i then googled "program to make nintendo music"

famitracker forums came up

Back when I was a young lad (early 2000's), I used to browse YTMND like all the cool kids. One time I stumbled across a YTMND site which used a chiptune-style cover of Bright Eyes (Simon & Garfunkel) by radix. I had never encountered anything resembling chiptunes before (other than actual videogame soundtracks). A few hours of research later, I was hooked.

I started with Modplug Tracker and soon transitioned to Famitracker after the erstwhile B1itz Lunar recommended it to me. The rest, as they say, is history.

I wanted to make music for Mario ROM hacks

I've always had an interest in retro video games, and when I heard the OST for Silver Surfer on the NES I was blown away by how much complexity the composer was able to achieve with such limited hardware. Limitations breed creativity; I think that's what drew me to chiptune and old video games and computers.

8bitdanooct1 and rushjet1

but also ironcladphazon/dukeonklednukem

I discovered the program George and Jonathan used to make The Best Music and just gave it a whirl. I had also recently been let go from a job so I had time on my hands. But it was really the coincidence of meeting a new local friend who shared a similar newness and interest in music that kept me making it; lightly competing with him and sharing what we’d made whenever we got together. Watching obscure 80s movies, nerding out over the little things those movies’ synth artists were bringing to the table. Then kfaraday referred me to this site from a different private forum, and here we are.