Chris's journey of making the intro music is used as a backdrop to
explore how to make music in Milkytracker,
a FOSS program for making tracker music, as well as to explore a bit
of sound theory, what chiptunes and tracker music are, and even a bit
of exploring what it's like to learn something new even when you
aren't necessarily very good yet.Links:Milkytrackersfxrdrpetter's sound theory and synthesis pagemusagi and the
musagi tutorialThe Impulse ProjectThe Commodore 64
computer and its famous SID chipc64.com, an archive of Commodore 64 games/programs
(pretty much all proprietary though).
Many of these have interesting cracked demos that are as interesting as
the programs themselves.Monty on the Run
with its music by the famous Commodore 64 composer,
Rob HubbardListen to the Monty on the Run main themeRob Hubbard's Music: Disassembled, Commented and ExplainedNot shown in the podcast but you really also ought to listen to the
Commando theme for the Commodore 64Moments by Mr. Lou (mp3)
and the original XM file (zipped)
Really worth listening to the XM in Milkytracker so you can see
how things work.More cool music on the bottom of
Milkytracker's downloads page
and especially on The Mod Archive.The demosceneChiptunesMusic trackersFamitracker
(Free software so why the heck is it Windows-only still?
Someone finish porting it!)Milkytracker's documentation page
has of course its own manual
but also a number of interesting historical music tracking guidesBrandon Walsh's milkytracker / chiptune tutorials
(Content warning in that he does say an ablist slur somewhere in those videos.)Music theory stuffOpen Music Theory8-bit Music TheoryLearn music theory in half an hour
(well, some of it)freesound, amazing commons of useful samples
for your music composition needsI guess maybe you want to look at Chris's sound file sources (but probably not)
(All CC BY-SA 3.0, like the show)Conversations with a ComputerDollhouseEcto Housethe arpeggio example shown in the showAnd yes, the FOSS and Crafts intro themeMade it all the way to the end of the podcast and this blogpost?
I guess you really did stay awhile...