Favorite Atari chip musicians?

[Awol]

Who are your favorite Atari chip musicians? Anything by any of the YM Rockerz is guaranteed to be high quality. Their music disks rock. I'd say Stu, gwEm, and 505 are probably my favorite. I got into Atari stuff after seeing gwEm play Blip Festival 2007 (which Bodenständing 2000 also played). I think my favorite gwEm song is "You Sold Your Rock'n'Roll"... you can download it from Micromusic.net. If you want to hear more of that Atari/guitar/drums metal-rave style check out gwEm & Counter Reset's 8bp release Live From *. Maybe my favorite pure chip song by gwEm is "Future Gone Wrong" from the YM Rockerz release WarptYMe. However, although I got into Atari because of gwEm, I think my favorite Atari musician overall is Stu. His GreateST HITs 8bp release is amazing, especially the track called "MEGAblaST." My forum avatar is a woodcut I did inspired by the track "A.U.C.R." Also check out his track from WarptYMe called "Audiosphere." I saw Stu play Blip Festival 2008, and he was definitely the highlight. He inspired a stage invasion by the audience, who lifted him up so he was crowdsurfing on the stage!

[Crazy Q]

I say Damo is my fave YM composer !!! I love his grooves!

[Cornervizion]

So many to choose from, I've heard gwEm recently and was very impressed, But as I got a lot of catching up to do. I'm naming the old-skool musicians such as Jochen Hippel (Mad Max), Gunnar Guabatz (Big Alec), Joris De Man (Scavenger) and Frank Seemann (Tao) as my personal favourites. Although my favourite ST Tune is composed by neither of them. The piece of music is called "Virtual Escape Theme" and it's by Furax. Absolutely superb and "Virtual Escape" was the first ST demo (Via Emulation) I've seen in 10 years, so understandably it has a special place in my heart.

[yerzmyey]

Cerror
Scavenger
Stu

and in general - YM-Rockerz.

[Xyno]

My Top5 YM2149 musicians...no particular order...
-STu
-gwEm
-Big Alec
-Divag
-Paza

[yerzmyey]

Hmm, I assumed we're talkin'bout Atari ST musician. And actually I was wrong because the topic is: "Favorite Atari chip musicians".

In this case we have also people from XL/XE and 2600 (or more?).

I don't know 2600 specifications to say anything resonable about it, I'd just wanted to add some people making music for Atari XL/XE.

Jakub Husak wrote music for "SoftSynth" - an utility to play music on XL/XE using POKEY and CPU. It can generate totally new synthetic sounds. He made several songs in this editor and my favourite is "Wodospadem czasu".
Seems like the player is attached to his site (I am at work now, so I don't have sound at the moment) but You can probably find it here:
http://muzyka.husak.com.pl/atari/? and press ">" sign which is PLAY.

Also I like some classic usage of POKEY, like music from "Draconus", "Jet Set Willy" games and so on.

For some time people from Atari XL/XE mount two POKEYs in their machines to get 8 channels and avoid certain POKEY's limitation too.
Effect is really interesting, like this song http://student.agh.edu.pl/~epi/msx/epi-meryb.mp3 by Epi or or music by GreyScale band.

[Cornervizion]

Agree with Rob Hubbard's "Jet Set Willy" tune it's absolutely brilliant. I know there's a Pokey player for windows so i'll track it down and have a listen to some others.

[yerzmyey]

I know there's a Pokey player for windows so i'll track it down and have a listen to some others.

Yes it is. SAP_Player - http://asma.atari.org/bin/sap2.zip
pretty accurate, not perfect 'though.

The biggest collection of SAP files (musix from Atari XL/XE) -
http://asma.atari.org/bin/asma33.zip
Contains 2843 tunes.

Enjoy.

[Cornervizion]

Done and done, there's some cracking stuff on here, and I particularly like the "Digidrums" I'm hearing on some the songs, they sound clearer than the C64's. (But it could be the emulation)

[yerzmyey]

Oh, they sound even better from real hardware.

[BitPusher2600]

Stu, gwEm, Paza, for sure. I'm also glad you're here yerzmyey, your stuff is awesome as well.

[yerzmyey]

Thx dude. I do appreciate this. Although on ST/e (and F030) I make rather digital music (project on-line soon! ). Some of my synthetic music that can be found on ST comes actually from ZX Spectrum. (The same soundchip).

On the other hand, I'm getting acquainted with Your stuff only lately and I'm fascinated about fighting with so many limitations, what You have to do. I'm very interested in this kind of noise-making (for instance I would be also interested in musicmaking for Commodore 116/Plus4 because it also has only 2 channels ).
I even tried to advertize Your WWW site on one of Atari forums.

Byez.

[BitPusher2600]

Well, my stuff is designed in my style but oriented for folks with subwoofers in their car (i love mega bass).
Anyway, Modus Operandi is my last release using the 2600 exclusively. If you knew how far back my attachment to this console goes though, you'd better understand, but i'm always going to use it in every track I produce. I'm working with Nanoloop, and several other drum machines and etc on the ipod for my 3rd EP, they are incredible softwares. I'm going to implement a more electronic and expansive sound because i'm running out of ideas for just the 2600 alone. Very limited sound selection, but beautiful as all heaven they are, so I will always use it.

Lol, man I wish you could hear the low-end that comes out of the woofers in my car, the 2600 being as ancient as it is has more low-end than anything i've heard yet. Yerzmyey, by the by, I was cranking Freakuencies a couple days ago. If I had a top 10 favorite chip albums, that EP of yours is up there.

Anyway, hope I'm not disappointing, I just want to expand my sound with what I have available to me. Opinions?

Take care. I'm kind of honored you're checking out my stuff, let alone mentioning my WWW to anyone because I was listening to you well before I ever decided to even try my hand at chipping. Awesome
Till later.

[BitPusher2600]

Oh, if I may interject, how I make my tunes is mainly in Audacity (I could never do squat live i'm afraid).

I play a sequence, or even just a singular sound on my 2600, recording it in Audacity. I then add silence, multiple stereo tracks, and hand edit the waveforms to create a beat. I then play a bassline for example while the drum track is playing elsewhere, layer that in another track, then add effects, and so on and so on. Thus, the tunes you hear are impossible for a 2600 to reproduce alone, yet every element of the music (except things like echoes and fades) are pure TIA. Sometimes I achieve certain sounds by using two 2600s at the same time. A time consuming process but the results are fun. With the kind words I get from the likes of you and our host here, i'm kinda wanting to start taking myself far more seriously and see what happens. Done rambling now

[moonove]

@CornerVision : I've heard you like virutal espace music. You may like a remix i did. Keops the coder liked it very much .