Chiptune/Tracker/Demoscene Recommendations (Scenic)

(last edited 2021-09-05)

In case the following list doesn’t make it clear, I’m something of a chiptune enthusiast. But don’t be going thinking that it’s all bleeps and bloops. While it must be admitted that bleeps and bloops do play an important role in the chiptune ecosystem, we’re gonna cover some fringe stuff as well, okay, so bear with me!

This is the scenic (i.e long) version of this page. If you don’t have the energy for it, consider the express version.

Order in each genre is alphabetical.

The actual recommendations

Chipzel

Chipzel is probably best known for composing the glitchy 8-bit soundtrack to Super Hexagon, and, yeah, that’s why I know her. It’s a damn good soundtrack though! As an avid player of Crypt of the Necrodancer, I also know she contributed one of the soundtrack remixes for the game; for those who don’t know, the in-game soundtrack is remixed depending on what character you play as. Her other older albums are also good and true to Game Boy form.

cTrix

This guy’s a demoscene regular (and close to home – from Melbourne) and has released stuff nearly every year since 2006. In fact, I think he’s the whole reason I know anything about the demoscene at all – my memory fails me, but I think I found his prog-synthpop-ish “0 bytes left” demo on YouTube at some point maybe one or two years ago, and then Flashglide 32k soon after that, both of which tipped me off into the whole rabbit hole that there were people writing mad code for the pure thrill of overcoming technical restrictions and making awesome creative works while doing so, how sick is that. (Alas, school and COVID-19 have intersected to ensure that I’m not going to be able to attend a demoparty any time soon.) I believe A For Amiga (YouTube, Bandcamp) is his only proper full-length album, but what an incredibly fresh and funky album it is, with “styles ranging From Prog-jazz to Retro-synthpop”!

(also our national news broadcaster did an article on him once)

(and yes, he invented the gAtari)

If you want to listen to this guy’s work, it’s scattered across his YouTube channel (mostly live stuff), his SoundCloud, scene.org and, for the true fans, his WeeklyBeats. One of his live sets is on the Free Music Archive, he composed Track 11 “Bass Driven” on the third Ubiktune FM FUNK compilation and I might as well link to his website at this point.

David Wise

“Man Tasked With Making Score for a Monkey Riding a Swordfish Underwater Creates Transcendent Piece of Music”

David Wise most famously composed most of the songs for Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 3, and all of the songs for Donkey Kong Country 2. I reckon he did a pretty good job, don’t you think? Some tracks are more abstract (e.g. “Life in the Mines”), some are transcendent (“Aquatic Ambience” and “Stickerbrush Symphony” let’s go), and they’re all worth a listen.

The guy does his job as a video game music composer, and he does his job well. So iconically well that the company hired him back to do extra songs and remix his old ones when they did Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze in 2014 (see that game’s “Aquatic Ambience” remix, although I’m now wondering if this should really belong in the “chiptune” section).

Mr Wise has done many interviews and inspired a bunch of analysis videos which you can find online if you want to learn more about him, his process and his career – GameXplain’s 25th Anniversary interview and The Sound Test’s interview are solid – and he’s still composing to date, although he’s understandably moved away from sound chip limitations since that’s not what most video games today are asking for.

(You forum-dwellers have been preordering NES Battletoads from GameStop for the soundtrack David Wise composed for it, right?)

Dubmood

Dubmood (SoundCloud) is a Swedo-French chiptune artist with roots in the demoscene, but actually I only found out about him through a video game that he composed the music for. That video game would be the excellent arcade BREAKER by Daniel Linssen, which you can play at that itch.io link for FREE!!!!!!!! It’s fun! Said game OST can be found on Bandcamp. Other albums of interest include Votedisk // Scene is Dead, which includes remixes by MASTER BOOT RECORD (who is also recommended below), and Live in Nürnberg 2015 (Pay What You Want truly is a blessing).

Note that Votedisk and Scene is Dead were both originally composed for a pair of Razor 1911 64k demos, which can be watched on YouTube: We Have Accidently [sic] Borrowed Your Votedisk, The Scene is Dead.

Fearofdark

The composer of music that is chill, distilled. The chillest. The purest, sweetest tracker vibes. Also, prog as hell sometimes: “This Room” is in 15/8, or 15/4, or “3x 4/4 + 1x 7/8” as one commenter would put it. Surely “Rolling Down the Street, In My Katamari” has appeared in your YouTube recommendations already? It has six million views, so the odds are pretty good… “Dreamscaping” is also divine. It’s all divine. You can listen to their whole discography on Bandcamp.

flashygoodness

Did any of you guys ever play a little game called Tower of Heaven back in the days when Adobe Flash was still alive? Yes, I know, we all lost a lot when it went away. It still stings bitterly. Yes, there were a lot of fun memories. It’ll all be OK in the end.

Right, so… that game had a really beautiful faux Game Boy OST, right? I don’t know how much of it is personally tied up in nostalgia for me, but there’s just something about listening to all the themes and variations that does it for me, like I’m back there at the base of the tower, looking up in glorious 2-bit colour at the trials to come.

Dang.

Flashygoodness composed that soundtrack, and basically everything else this person has composed is also great. The OverPowered OST is great (well, it’s really just “Broken Elevator to Revelation”, but keep in mind the whole thing was done in just 72 hours!), and “Nihil Descent” off the Pause Ahead OST is insane. That’s, uh… why I’ve put them on this page. Because it’s good music. Like all the other music on this page. :D

Goto80

Swedish demoscener since the age of 12. (These guys sure start young, huh!) This guy has made… too much music, perhaps: at least 54 releases if his website music page is to be believed, and where to find all 54 is left as an exercise for the reader. His sounds can get probably the most raw of all the other artists in this section at times thanks to an apparent fixation on just blasting dirty low tones and white noise on the Commodore 64, but his catalogue is, as mentioned above, ginormous, so there’s a lot of listenable, if eccentric, stuff there. Zyndabox (free archive.org download) and the later larger compilation 0407 are relatively good starting points for that classic ‘8-bit’ sound (“Killer Piller” is dope!). Files in Space is very nice with some strong 80s vibes. w93.m3u is unapologetically lo-fi with the samples it uses and is like the soundtrack to a rave held in a dingy computer lab; it can be played in-browser as .mod files on Windows93.net. I’m having a hard time believing parts of Floptrik were designed to be listened to by humans at all.

He has a page on the Free Music Archive and his chiptune culture research may be of interest to some of you, I don’t know. His blog seems to have some interesting reflections, too.

Jake Kaufman

See virt.

Koji Kondo

I would be remiss to leave out the composer of possibly the most iconic chiptune tracks of all time: those on the soundtrack of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. C’mon, odds are pretty good that you thought of the World 1-1 theme or the main theme to Zelda just then. There’s not much to add here; he composed tracks to basically all the Super Mario Bros. games, even the more modern ones such as 3D World and Odyssey – yes, he’s still on the team to this day! So, keep an eye out for him in the credits of Nintendo games.

Linus Åkesson

Yet another Swedish demoscener! This guy is a software engineer by trade and a C64 junkie (see his personal website), and by God does he rack up the demoscene wins. You can see that last link for all his scene entries, most of which have a music component. If you’re happy watching a 10-minute technically and aesthetically impressive demo to go with it, Lunatico is a lovely piece of SID melody, and A Mind is Born is astonishing for its program fitting on 256 bytes. Bytes! He has a page for his more generalised chip music and a music downloads page; his Chipophone project is very cool, and I would highly recommend checking out his Music for Microcontrollers album along with each track’s associated project notes.

He also composes piano music, which I also find very nice.

MASTER BOOT RECORD

Synth metal! Synth metal! 486DX-33MHz-64MB-synthesised metal! Hell yes!

MBR (Bandcamp page, SoundCloud) is rumoured to have been connected to the demoscene, which is absolutely plausible given the references throughout his song titles and album descriptions, not to mention the labyrinthine CTFs this guy sets up for his fans to find bonus tracks for several of his albums. (One day I’ll give them a crack, but… not right now…) MBR remains fairly anonymous to date, though; you can read his first interview with Bandcamp and his later interview after releasing the point-and-click game VirtuaVerse he composed the music to and assisted in the development of. Maybe he is on the demoscene under a different name! I don’t know! In any case, I gotta respect anyone who hosts their own IRC channel and server for livestreams.

But enough of that, you want to know what to listen to! Well, INTERNET PROTOCOL got recommended to a fair few people (myself included) on YouTube, and it’s packed with a range of tasty dark riffs, so may be a good place to start and get you hooked. FLOPPY DISK OVERDRIVE has some lovely floppy disk shredding solos that will melt your face off. You might find the old EPs worthwhile too.

Hot tip: MBR has a bunch of synth metal covers of classic video game tunes available on his YouTube and downloadable as a .zip from his website. He also has a sister project, KEYGEN CHURCH, which is pretty similar to his main stuff I guess, but check it out!

Manami Matsumae

Mega Man 2 for the NES gets a lot of (well-deserved) love, but spare a thought for the original Mega Man, whose soundtrack was composed by Manami Matsumae (Wikipedia article). It doesn’t have the polish that the sequel had, but it’s still distinctive and evocative in its own right. However, I would have likely have never found out about her at all if not for the fact that she collaborated with virt (recommended below) on the soundtrack to the original Shovel Knight, a game released over 25 years after Mega Man. How sick is that?! Two songs on the main album are credited to her (“A Thousand Leagues Below” and “Flowers of Antimony”) and she arranged “Flying Machine” in the separate arrangements album. All worth a listen – 2A03 virtuosity that takes the game’s atmosphere to that next level.

Maxo

On the chiptune side of things, Maxo’s roots are in the 16-bit sample era, and his sound is comparable with that of Fearofdark, with delightful prog melodies and rhythms that really evoke a sense of a theme. His Bandcamp consists entirely of albums issued in “Level Music” packages – 5-track EPs that each evoke the background music for an imaginary video game level. They’re all very fun, but I find the first one, Level Music Purchase, honestly just the coolest project of them all: he scored all the different locations of his university campus (SUNY Purchase) as if they were areas in a video game! The way the themes and leitmotifs work together across tracks is very cool (for example, “Bookstore” is just an upbeat remix of “Library”); there’s clearly a lot of work gone into it. Plus its “Social Science” theme was used as the intro to the now-defunct CoolGames Inc podcast (RIP).

However, he has a healthy mix of electronic synth stuff free from the arbitrary constraints of 90s hardware on his SoundCloud and YouTube (I don’t blame him). While this is supposed to be the chiptune recommendations, I would give any of the tracks on there a listen too.

naruto a.k.a. naruto2413 (Kazuhiko Naruse)

This is the guy who wrote “Artificial Intelligence Bomb”. According to the Bandcamp page:

This song participated in the NES (Famicom) music competition, and won first place in the original songs category. A classic chiptunes, it is still loved by many peoples today!

It is indeed an excellent NES song, and some of the remixes/covers are in a whole extra world of fun (e.g. remix compilation on SoundCloud, AI Bomb on vocal)! But it’s certainly not the only thing this guy has made, as a cursory glance at his Bandcamp and YouTube channel will reveal. naruto seems to have a particular fondness for the MSX sound system and the soundchips associated with it (e.g. the OPLL (YM2413) and the PSG (AY-3-8910)), seen in his tranquil soundtrack to the 1995 MSX JRPG, Shining Crystal.

Several of his songs are accompanied by (or act as accompaniment to?) vocals by Aya Futatsuki (Aya Majiro), such as both tracks featured on Ubiktune’s FM FUNK compilations: “Machine Wave” (FM FUNK 2) and “Modulation to Move the Mind” (FM FUNK 3), so, uh, neat!

Regrettably, I do not speak Japanese, but I believe this ‘Personal Website’ showcases the majority of his work and has links to music sites on each post. It would appear he most recently composed a handful of tracks to a 2020/21 game for the MSX computer system called Caravan Boomer. SweepRecord published the soundtrack and the OST is available on Spotify (just search “caravan boomer” on there), YouTube and Amazon Music. The tracks have definitely grown on me after listening to them a few times.

Nikku4211

Obscure artist, but has some fairly cool stuff nonetheless. I think they’re a friend of 2Bit’s, judging by various links on that site, but I honestly couldn’t say. Possibly still a high-schooler? He’s made stuff for the NES and the OPL chip. His channel is filled with pretty random stuff, but I like his original tracks “Honour Roll”, “Neo NES Headquarters” (groovy techno bass!) and “Full Frontal”.

Also, he’s a Neocitizen! Nice. Probably should have led with that.

Omodaka

Omodaka is a project of Soichi Terada that takes chiptune and melts it into some very interesting contexts, most predominantly traditional Japanese music and vocals. That is about as good a description I can do because it’s really quite foreign territory for me, both musically and linguistically.

Their first 2001 EP, Monkey Turn (title track), is best categorised as RnB with the interesting addition of Japanese folk-style vocals, but it’s not until the 2002 Fortunate 1 Mark (title track) that what could be called chiptune is introduced, taking the tracks somewhere more energetic with the introduction of a danceable arpeggiated electronic backing. The NESesque “Kokirikobushi”/”Kokiriko Bushi” is released along the way, and its video is something else entirely, even in 2007’s 360p. Their first full album, Cantata No. 14 (full playlist of songs on YouTube), collects previous tracks and adds new ones in their vein: the title track, “Cantata No. 14”, for example, is a remix of a Bach composition of the same name but put to the lyrics of a Japanese folk song (no idea which!).

It’s eclectic, and I think the only thing for it is to experience it for yourself. The artist’s YouTube channel, fareastrecording, has tracks and live performances, and two notable live performances on YouTube are the Square Sounds Tokyo 2014 performance and the Boiler Room Tokyo Live Performance. From what I can tell, this artist is best experienced live. Their music is predominantly available on Apple Music and Spotify.

Takashi Tateishi

Ah, Mega Man 2. What a game. What tunes. This section is really just to give a shout-out to its excellent soundtrack, which, you guessed it, Takashi Tateishi composed (with Yoshihiro Sakaguchi as sound programmer). He did work with Manami Matsumae (mentioned above) in doing so, too. His Video Game Music Preservation Foundation page has some interesting notes on his life and gameography. Such as:

At Capcom, the development staff was often given disparaging aliases, and Tateishi was often credited as Ogeretsu Kun which translates roughly to, “worthless person.”

How could they do the composer of “Dr. Wily’s Castle” so dirty. How could they.

Career-wise, Mr Tateishi just composed the Mega Man 2 soundtrack for Capcom and then dipped, joining Konami shortly after. But then he found the environment there too competitive and ending up leaving composing altogether. He has some interesting words in his Square Enix Music interview:

Like stars in the night sky, many young composers overflowing with talent were enlisting at Konami. So many talented composers — Akira Yamaoka, Michiru Yamane, Miki Higashino, and Motoaki Furukawa, and the list goes on forever. Kinuyo Yamashita-san, who became famous through Castlevania, is also from Konami.

Surrounded by such geniuses, I felt that “I can’t live up to these people. I’ll quit composing.” So I almost entirely stopped composing. I primarily became involved with voice recording and music production — work that involves recording in a studio.

Looks like I’ve got some names to look up! Anyway, godspeed, Mr Tateishi.

(He apparently composed exactly one of the tracks on the Mighty No. 9 OST, but I have no way of figuring out which one it was…)

Tim Follin

Tim Follin is a chiptune legend. A chip veteran. He started out his career by professionally writing music for the ZX Spectrum in the 80s and went from there. And the technical feats he pulled off in some of the music… According to Wikipedia, he never got involved in the demoscene, but I’ll be damned if he couldn’t have blown the folks there away. I don’t know enough technical information about any chiptune hardware platform to fully grasp what he managed to achieve, but he was pulling sounds out of the NES and ZX that were way ahead of their time.

He wrote the soundtrack for goddamn NES Pictionary, and it has to be one of the coolest-sounding NES OSTs ever written (despite not really being suitable for Pictionary at all). Same goes for the Silver Surfer (NES) soundtrack.

But he wrote scores for practically every platform at the time: Amiga, C64, Dreamcast, PS2. Time Trax for the Sega Genesis (YouTube, Internet Archive (50Hz), Internet Archive (60Hz)) is particularly nice, even though the game unfortunately never got released. So it goes.

The funniest part is that he actually hated all this work composing for video games. Wikipedia:

Around August 2005, Follin announced on his website “with much delight” that he had chosen to stop composing music for video games, citing its irregular work not providing a substantial income, light-heartedly adding that the situation caused him “distress and illness.”

There’s a really well-done mix of his music and various interviews on YouTube that provides a fascinating look at his music composition career. As for his music, a large chunk of it can be found on the Internet Archive.

Last I heard, he’s directing video games at Baggy Cat Entertainment, primarily FMV stuff. I’m happy for him! He deserves to enjoy what he does these days. The games look pretty good, too.

virt

Jake “virt” Kaufman has composed way too much computronic ear magic over the last 20-ish years, making it frustrating to try and condense down highlights here (they’re all highlights!). But I’m going to give it a crack. Because this man is worth it.

virt got his start in video game music composition for the Game Boy Colour in 2000, composing the soundtrack for the freeware indie game Drymouth, which was praised by IGN at the time. This was followed up later in the year with the professional soundtrack for the GBC port of Q*Bert. I thought his earliest entries would have been a little rougher, but they’ve aged well, with some nice sound texturing and jazz-inspired passages. Still on the GBC, 2002 gives us the soundtrack for Shantae. This fuses jazz/blues melodies with the “stereotypical Middle Eastern” set of musical techniques, which is peculiar but executed surprisingly well, as demonstrated on tracks “Scuttle Town Ablaze!” and, virt’s own favourite, “(Something’s Not Right in) Bandit Town”. (He did a high quality redux of the latter in 2007 (?), archived on archive.org or available on YouTube.) Concurrently with these soundtracks, he releases albums FX (Netlabel Archive) and FX 2.0 (both archive.org links) in 2001 and 2002 respectively, which just further illustrate that, yes, this man knows his dang way around that lovely NES sound.

From all this, we can see that virt is a jazz enthusiast at heart. He cites Dizzy Gillespie as one of his musical heroes in a 2021 rapid-fire interview, and this passion is partially manifested in those grace notes and triplets in a lot of his compositions, especially those made outside work restrictions. He contributed “Freddie Freeloader” to the 2009 Miles Davis chiptune tribute album, Kind of Bloop, which is unmistakably jazz, although I must admit not hugely original work. In 2016 he published the Crypt of the Necrodancer “Freestyle Retro” remix playable in-game, which exhibits his improvisational virtuosity (Bandcamp page: “Each song was played 100% live”), and in present day, present time (at the time of writing), you can catch him on YouTube livestreaming jazz improvisations on the Otomatone.

However, he’s composed music for all sorts of things! I may have buried the lede here, but he channels the classic Mega Man musical spirit on the iconic Shovel Knight OST in 2014. He followed up the FX series with FX3 and FX4 (available on Bandcamp). I could also mention the gargantuan stacks of not-strictly-chiptune video game and television music he’s composed (Contra 4, Double Dragon Neon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the Nintendo DS, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes), but then we’d be here all day! Aw geez, just take a look at his Bandcamp page and SoundCloud, will ya?

Demoscene? Who said anything about the demoscene? …alright, maybe it would be a stretch to call him a demoscener, but he’s no stranger to demos and demoparties. He appears on several musicdisks in the early ’00s, but his entries at Blockparty 2009 are a particular highlight: the vocaloid-featuring “Lorem Ipsum” won 1st place in the Music (Streaming) category, “Micro Media Broth” (.it version) won 1st place in the Oldschool Music category and the demo he composed the tune for, “Sans Titre” (at the last minute, according to his old website!), won 1st place in the Combined Platform category!!! How sick is that!!! He also composed the very bloopy music to the “8088MPH” demo – I reckon it was a good job given the restrictions.

OK, final round-up of my favourite tracks and albums. The “Noise Channel Theme (Full Mix)” absolutely never fails to bring me joy to listen to, what with it’s adorable vocaloid lyrics and chirpy accompaniment plus proggy jamming that we’ve come to love from virt. (LiterallyHifumi, if you’ve made it this far, take note!) Choice Nuggets is packed with gems of similar adorability, and of course there’s the ubiquitous FM FUNK features: FM FUNK 1, FM FUNK 2. “A Daring Escape” (.it direct download) is also a gem from the year 2000.

His professional website, Big Lion Music, has bitten the dust, as has its successor, virt.rocks, but both of them can still be viewed on the Internet Archive: archived Big Lion Music, archived virt.rocks.

Also, maybe a bit of a downer, but it seems like he’s been struggling with/is currently struggling with occupational burnout at the moment. Hopefully he figures out what works for him. All the best, Jake – take care of yourself, man! <3

…OK, I couldn’t resist including this. Jake’s old website has the following to say about that Drymouth soundtrack:

This was my first Game Boy soundtrack ever, done in collaboration with the absolutely formidable homebrew monster Steve “Demi” Demeter. He’s since gone on to get mega-rich making iphone apps. This game brought me my own fortune, too: My first contact with my adorable geek wife, Kristi, was after she heard this soundtrack and wrote to me. Yes, I got a girl by programming Game Boy music. I still kind of can’t believe it.

There’s hope out there in the universe…

Wally Beben

I’m including Wally Beben (VGMPF page) solely for the fact that he wrote a 15-minute long title theme for Tetris for the Commodore 64. There was no theme for the actual gameplay, just this title theme. He was not credited. The theme takes zero inspiration from the classic “Tetris theme”; rather, Beben chose to conduct a cinematic long-form exploration of the form using the SID chip as an earthly medium. Wally Beben’s Tetris main theme for the C64 is, at once, a masterpiece, a question and a challenge, and the world may never see anything quite like it created in such a context ever again. Download Wally Beben - “Title” from the VGMPF (.ogg file).

Yoshihiro Sakaguchi

See Takashi Tateishi.

Post-Scriptum

While writing a short[dubious – discuss] paragraph and showcasing my personal favourites from each of the above artists has been fun, doing the research for each of them turned out to be more time-consuming that I originally thought, and of course I ended up coming across more chiptune artists worthy of mention along the way, so this section is just to fire off a bunch of names that are worth checking out but that I’m not going to write a full bit for; you’ll just have to look them up yourself.

Additionally, the Ubiktune collective is home to a lot of great chiptune and electronic artists (including many of the ones on this page), so check them out.

If you want to actually start making chiptune of your own, you could, as I did, start with something simple and web-based like BeepBox, which is easy to use and surprisingly capable. However, if you want to actually take things seriously and use a tracker, limiting yourself to specific hardware, well…

FamiTracker is good for the NES soundchip if you’re using Windows (but is showing its age and might be abandonware), OpenMPT is a great all-purpose tracker also for Windows, Schismtracker is a functional FOSS .s3m/.it tracker for all platforms featuring AdLib soundcard instrument support and I’m seeing Renoise pop up a lot in chiptune circles as a general DAW (paid software). If you want to know how to actually use any of that software, I have just as much an idea as you, sorry. Good luck though!