C64 Chiptune Tracks

This album is about my musical roots. I started composing electronic music around 1990 on my second home computer, a Commodore 64. It was a challenge to get the most out of the limited hardware, but these limitations pushed my creativity to the maximum. I started using existing composer software but soon wrote my own to implement my vision of unique sounds I did not find in other software.

I created the tracks on this album between 1992 and 1996. Most of them fade out at the end because these sounds, mostly made for computer demos and games, are looping infinitely, and I manually fade them out after the first loop.

Do not expect complex melodies or genius compositions; this was the start. Most tracks contain one musical theme, repeated repeatedly, just with a few variations. Some are experimental, and I did my best mastering damp, extremely harsh sounds, trying to make even these enjoyable.

At the end of the album are two bonus tracks. The first is an old interpretation from 1999 of the original C64 “Zoomsong”. I created this version using MIDI and a simple sound card to play sampled instruments. The quality of the original was inferior, it was the analogue output of the card recorded, so I remastered this track as best as I could and adjusted the speed a little bit.

The second bonus track is a new interpretation of the original “Blue Sky” song. I created this track using Ableton Live in 2013 as an experiment to recreate this chiptune sound. To achieve the correct background sound, I made a synthesizer using Max for Live for the special arpeggio effect.