Today we’ve got a new release from Baltimore based chiptune musician Mega Flare. This time he turns his focus to the dark melodies of Castlevania. Using his Nintendo Gameboy running LSDj, Mega Flare collaborated with Dj CUTMAN to record each channel of the Gameboy’s sound-chip separately to mix them using Ableton Live. The result are two huge chiptune tracks with massive bass-lines and crystal clear leads. You can hear the influence of Baltimore’s clubs in Mega Flare’s drum programming. Download Hunter on Loudr or iTunes.
Tag Archives: gameboy music
Mega Flare – Maverick ( Chiptune Remixes of Mega Man X )
Mega Flare is a DJ, producer and chiptune musician, and Maverick is his first release with GameChops. It’s an EP of chipmusic inspired by the soundtrack of the Mega Man X series for SNES. This album was written on the music tracker software LSDj ( littlesounddj.com ) and recorded on a single Nintendo Gameboy,model DMG-01. Maverick is considered a “de-make” of the 16-bit soundtrack for Mega Man X; Each track was re-written on the 4-bit soundchip of the Nintendo Gameboy.
The results are crystal clear, expressive chiptunes that would have been worthy of any hand-held adventure. Download Mega Flare – Maverick from Bandcamp.
Mega Flare writes:
Maverick is a chaser ride back to my childhood when I would play Mega Man X with my big bro. Tracking these songs brought back some of the feelings of wonder and dread from the MMX series. It was a challenge working complex 16-bit melodies into one LSDj cart but I some how pulled it off. My hope was to pay homage to the composers who inspired me.
Music Stuff: Getting Started with Chiptunes
This is an excerpt that Cutman wrote about a year ago as a guest blog author. While this is some stuff many of you probably already know, it goes great with our indie musician series and is the perfect place to start if you’re thinking about delving into creating your own tunes!
8-bit music, or Chiptune, is the art of creating new music with classic, nostalgia-inducing sounds found in antiquated video games and computer hardware, like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Gameboy. Originally restricted to almost exclusive use within video games, Chiptune music has now grown well beyond the cartage into its own unique style of electronic music.
The word Chiptune was affectionately applied to this sub-genre of electronic music in the 90′s, as communities of musicians around the globe began to assemble around the love of this classic sound. The word “Chiptune” was given because the music was primarily created on a system with a single hardware sound chip (much unlike modern computers and recording equipment) Now-a-days, there are many ways to create this type of music, from running homebrew software on a modified Gameboy, to downloading standalone software and plug-ins for modern Digital Audio Workstations (DAW).
Continue reading Music Stuff: Getting Started with Chiptunes