wax&wires

Get Bent With Plogue “Chip Sounds”

Plogue, the people who brought you Bidule, previewed “Chip Sounds” at NAMM 09. Chip Sounds presents an easy way to get old school 8-bit sounds in your music, without the need to own an arsenal of vintage gaming machines or know how to circuit bend. I love what this does for music, as I’ve always loved the sound of lo-fi and 8-bit timbres mixed in tastefully with modern pop music. It adds such a rich and unique texture to songs, not found in any other genre or sound source. Perhaps it’s a bit of nostalgia from a childhood spent playing 8-bit video games too.

From Plogue.com:

Plogue today officially previewed its new “Chip Sounds” soft-synthesizer, which faithfully reproduces the sounds and styles of 80′s video game music and sound effects. The product was demonstrated during the show at the NAMM Convention.

This new synthesizer contains hundreds of unique synthesized and sampled and variations of original 80′s sound chip waveforms and sounds effects in a convenient plugin format, usable inside your favorite sequencer or DAW, or as a standalone virtual instrument.

“Whether you want an arsenal of unique RAW tones as the basis of unique modern sounds OR to remix classic game tunes – and you want the to get as close as possible to the real thing without messing with 25 year old consoles – look no further!” Said David Viens, Plogue’s President and lead designer on the product.

Chip Sounds contains seven simulated chips that behave exactly as their original Integrated Circuit engineer intended them to sound:

• 2A03 PAPU (and the portable variant, which powered the big N’s classic consoles)
• TIA Chip (from the 2600 and 7800 Consoles)
• POKEY (400/800 series computers)
• AY-3-8910 (INTV, ZX, ST, Arcades)
• SN76489AN (CV,SMS,BBC,TI,PCjr,T1000, and Arcades)
• VIC-I (from the VIC-20)
• SID (6581/8580 and all know revisions found in the C64)

Additionally, and more interestingly, Chips Sounds also faithfully reproduces the accidentally discovered sounds and abusive techniques that were made famous by innovative 8-bit composers over the last two decades in order to push beyond the boundaries of the of the original chip designs.

Powered in part by the powerful ARIA powerfull 64-bit sampler/synthesis engine (also developed by Plogue Art et Technologie) that also powers Garritan’s complete new product line, and is also featured in many third party applications. Chip Sounds reproduces the exact form spectra of the most sought-after classic sound chips, including their most well-known variations, as sonically accurate as possible without adding any non-authentic aliasing or DSP artifacts.

Research and analysis for this project has been made in house on Plogue’s large collection of cartridges, modified consoles and classic computers owned by the team and also on the chips themselves using custom made circuit boards and low level 8 bit software code.

“The most authentic emulation of C64, Nes, Vic20, Gameboy, and Atari 2600 sound chips I’ve ever heard!” -8 Bit Weapon

For an audio example of the sonic potential, check out 8 Bit Weapon and Computeher.

For more info, stay tuned to Plogue.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 7:26 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with circuit bending, plogue, plugins, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.