Newbie: Chiptune resources

[TheDraug]

Hi guys,

after having searched old threads for a while I feel that my questions haven't been answered before - sorry if I missed something. So here I go:

Recently I got back into the world of synthesizers after having played almost exclusively the guitar for 14 years and bought a Yamaha MOXF6. I started creating some music with a modern DAW, Cubase AI 7 (last time I used something like this before it was Cakewalk on Windows 98). Now since I always loved Chiptunes I thought I could do a remix of some old songs to get into this. I have however, few to no experiences with Chiptune sounds in modern setups.

Are there any existing tutorials, texts, anything that I could read to get into this? I have a basic understanding of oscillators, waveforms and filters, so I manage to get some sounds that go into the right direction with pulse and squares, but they always sound still 'wrong" compared to chips like the SID (or even a ym). Not wobbly enough, too clean and so on. In a DAW I used bitcrushers to make it sound 8-bit-dirty-ish, but I am not sure if something like this can be done on modern synthesizers.

Can someone give me a nudge in the right direction?

Thanks a lot and best regards,
Draug

[daXX]

Try this one...

https://refx.com/products/quadrasid/summary/

[Mordi]

I would recommend choosing a good overall synth and then sticking to it. Maybe find some tutorials on youtube or elsewhere. Personally I stumbled over the Zebra 2 softsynth a few years ago, and now I rarely use anything else. What's nice about it is that it only shows what you need on screen (for the most part), so it doesn't completely overwhelm new users. At the same time, it's incredibly deep and modulatable.
It also has a bunch of tuts on youtube.

That said, all synths work in the same way - depending on whether they are additive or subtractive synths. I think the usual way is subtractive synthesis, where you start off with a waveform and filter it down or expand as you go along. AFAIK, an example of additive synthesis would be FM (frequency modulation). FM synths have a distinctive sound. I've been playing around a lot lately using FM-synthesis in Zebra 2. Michael Jackson used a lot of FM synth during on, for example, the "Bad" album.

I'm no expert on synthesis though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

[TheDraug]

Thanks for the answers so far, I wasn't talking about sid VST plugins though, got one of those already. That won't help me, though, with understanding what makes a sound sound chiptune-ish. If someone could tell me a rough example how he does such sounds on modern equip it would already help me tremendously.