- Dan Behrens is a musician, producer, composer and recording engineer that releases music under the name Danimal Cannon. He composes music for video games and commercials, and his album releases has received accolades from the rock, electronic and even classical music scenes. Danimal Cannon has performed for audiences all across the world in venues as grandiose as orchestra halls to punk rock shows in a sweaty basement. His diversity and creativity is only surpassed by the intensity of his arrangements and performances.
http://danimalcannon.bandcamp.com/
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
I'm glad you appreciated it! It's truly a niche scene that most people don't even know exists. I can't speak for all of the communities, but I've yet to experience a push for something beyond what is currently being used, which are chips in anything from a Gameboy to a SNES to something more modern like a PSP. My opinion is that if you were to expand to something more powerful and easily integrable into music you would be losing modus operandi of chiptune. A big part of it is pushing the boundaries of something simple to see just how complex of a sound you can get, and to make that piece of technology into an instrument.
There's a few people that I can think of that do some crazy things, such as Oneohtrix Point Never who takes vocals and turns them into drum beats in some of his songs on R Plus Seven. Another example of somebody creating their own stuff is Dan Deacon. That said, you can take a sample or take a DI instrument, record it, and tweak the settings within a DAW to effectively make something very cool and all your own. However, I can't think of anybody or any other scene where what you make starts with nothing, and everything that you hear has been programmed from scratch instruments included. Chip is great because you have a blank canvas every time.
That Oneohtrix Point Never track was interesting, but not really up my alley. I am glad to have checked it out though, especially given the context. I think that's a really interesting idea. For some reason, it reminds me of Michel Gondry and Bjork's Paint Piano, I guess in the way that things are brought together to make something new. I really like the ideas that Dan Deacon has. That thing with the phones has some serious possibilities. Good stuff man, thanks.
NICE! I want to hear the TI-83 tune. I'll admit, until I started listening to the tunes you were posting I hadn't heard of chip-tunes, thanks for that. This talk brought my appreciation for the genre (I mean instrument) to another level. I hadn't realized the DIY aspect; people building their instruments. It was great that he waited until the 4:30 mark until playing any music, nice to get the description tease and then he doesn't disappoint with the music. Pretty bad ass. To a lot of people watching though it may just seem like a dude playing the guitar over a sequenced part that was pre-recorded. For sake of the presentation, it may make more sense to not have the guitar. But, then we get to see him creating a sound and that was really cool. An entirely new world to me. It's definitely a lot to do with programming as well as musicianship. "It would be very difficult to create that sound on any other platform" -This is an important point. These sounds do sound extremely unique and evoke an emotion that is all their own. Thanks for sharing. Tell your friend I said, "great talk."
I'll pass along the word to him. He's a great guy and an extremely talented musician. That's the thing about chiptune, it's not just VGM like a lot of people think, it's been described as having a punk rock aesthetic due to the DIY nature and because of the fact that presets and other user-friendly things are typically rejected by the community. Case in point: Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) comes with some preset drum kits that don't sound bad, and some of which we all use from time to time, but for the most part we all create our own drums. I would say that 95% + of the instruments that you hear across chiptune is musician-created instruments. Similarly, everything that you hear is programmed from the instruments to the tables that Dan briefly showed (which are the most useful) to the song structure. It's not really intuitive and definitely has a bit of a learning curve. Also the best part of the scene is something he touched upon, which is the workshops and generally friendly nature of it. If you make chiptune everybody else in the scene supports you and vice versa. Everybody is willing to share their knowledge with everybody else for the sake of making good music.