It was a little awkward.  The crowd that was there was there to see Descendants of Erdrick, a local video game music cover band.  So while I performed they were setting up out front in the parking lot, distracting folks from my performance (which was really just me playing back tracks because I was missing everything from my rig except my laptop).

Regardless, I had a blast looking around this store (there’s a museum in the back) and trying not to go apeshit buying vintage video game crap.  I picked up a nice A/V cable for the Commodore, a couple Atari 2600 games I had lost at the firteen house, and a replacement 72-pin connector for my NES.  And this isn’t even the main store!

Yeah, so I do stuff on the kitchen counter.  Exchanging the connector was a bit more work than I thought it would be.  Somewhere around 20 screws later I got the old one out and popped the new one in.  It’s supposed to make your NES load cartridges like it’s brand new!

Oh, look at that!  I can’t tell if it’s better or worse!  Balloon Fight was the only cart I could get to load cleanly enough to play.  It didn’t last that long either.  How do I justify buying a power pak if I don’t even have a working NES?

At least I had fun at the store.  Descendants of Erdrick kicked ass and it was nice to see Herr Prof in meatspace once again, think it’s been about three years! Wish I was better at remembering to take pictures.  :D

And, around the age we got the NES, other computers found their way into our home.  I enjoyed the Apple II/e, spent a lot of time dorking around on that thing, but I always found the games laughable.  The Commodore 64 was definitely better, but you could start loading a game, go take a poop, and still wait for it to finish loading sometimes.  And even with these ‘better’ computers around, I still would go back to the VIC for it’s ridiculously large onscreen characters, writing BASIC programs that outgrew it’s limited 3.5kb of RAM.  Whether the program was any good or not, it didn’t matter, I  won the RAM battle.  :D

And then my teenage years came along, I was onto DOS based PCs and sold that crap Apple.  Somewhere in my early 20′s, I dug all my old computer stuff out of the attic. Most of the C64 disks were damaged, but all of the VIC’s datasettes were sound.  Somehow, both machines actually turned on and worked after five years in a Michigan attic?!  I had a decent job, went shit wild on eBay, and started collecting VIC20 anything.  I taught myself 6502 Machine Language and started writing real programs (not many).  The VIC is a staple of my live set, controlling it’s voices with the keyboard and Atari paddles.  I’ve gone through four of them since I started playing out around 10 years ago.  Good thing they’re cheap!  ;D

But I  digress.  If, as the media put it, Steve Jobs is solely responsible for home computing as we know it today, it had a lot to do with direct competition from Mr. Tramiel.  The Commodore PET and Apple II were both released in 1977, but the VIC-20 was the first computer to sell a million plus units, and the C64 still holds the record for the most units sold of any single computer model (don’t know if that excludes iPhones).  Commodore fell apart in the 1990′s, then Jack acquired Atari and ran that into the ground too.  The computer market grew some new legs and stomped on some conventional business strategies.

What a crap!  This next cartoon will set it all straight though!!

Important note : Microsoft was there in 1977 and on to supply Commodore with it’s BASIC kernel, mostly programmed in ML by Bill Gates himself. Bill, get outta my life!!

And then the whole SOPA/PIPA blackout thing happened.  It was a good thing.  Except, on the same day, the Supreme Court made a large decision regarding copyright – to honor international copyrights.  Basically, if the US government wants the nations of the world to honor US copyright then the US government should honor other nations’ copyrights with US copyright laws.  Many works in the public domain at this time suddenly became copyrighted once again.  Current US copyright law dictates that a copyright sustains the life of an artist plus 70 years OR 95 years from the publication date.  This includes works by Stravinsky and many, many more.

Currently, anything published before 1923 or any artist that died before 1923 works is now public domain.  A jazz standard like Tiger Rag, first published in 1917, is fair game.  But Stravinsky, who died in 1971, will not regain public domain status until 2041.  Don’t forget there is a correlation between the copyright length and Steamboat Willy, published in 1928.  Copyright laws have been extended with the help of Walt Disney lobbyists for the sole purpose of keeping Mickey Mouse out of the public’s hands.

Copyright beyond an artist’s life makes little sense to me.  It protects publishers and their heirs, not the artist.  Granted their is a talent to finding talent and then distributing that talent, and people should be able to provide for their offspring.  But 70 years?  Is that conceivably beyond the lifetime expectancy of companies and offspring?

Despite all this protection of intellectual property, artists (or their publishers) have to pay out of pocket to take legal action.  Stravinsky spent his whole life trying to protect his work, and also suffering from infringing on other works he himself thought to be public domain at the time.  There is an awesome radio program regarding Stravinsky’s copyright story.  It’s well worth the listen.

So now I will leave you with a nice 8bit version of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in it’s complete 33 minutes of cacophony. I think it was made with a midi file and GXSCC.

here’s my silly track
Download audio file (b-knox-good-job.mp3)

EDIT – people seem to have problems running bitbin in older and crappy browsers. I suggest the latest version of chrome for anything you do on teh interwebs. :D/

Having done a one hour workshop at Blip Festival years ago, and a 30 minute battle demonstration at 8static, I thought I already had this thing in the bag.  This workshop, however, differed in one major way – it was interactive; all participants had a machine and headphones to follow along.  Instead of doing a presentation I was going to be instructing.  Plus, there were two sessions at 3 hours a piece all starting at some time in the morning I’m not at all used to.  :D

So, I figured I’d make some kind of handout.  I put all the famitracker effects commands on there, and info about the different voices and their instrument settings.  I also included a “musical keyboard to computer keyboard” graphic like so -

I have a hard time believing that no one has made one of these online, but I couldn’t find one.  The way that the notes map to the keyboard tends to be a huge learning curve for seasoned musicians.  After a decade of tracking, it becomes second nature.  I can play on it better than a piano.  :D

I started the class with a 20 minute crash course in sound chip history. I talked about Atari’s TIA and Pokey chips, Commodore’s VIC and SID chips, Nintendo’s 2A03, how the Gameboy’s Motorolla CPU builds the sound, and a few examples of FM chips; playing back examples from Battle of the Bits as I went.  I did my best to describe their differences and advances, making special notes about which chips could attain correct pitches and which ones were dedicated solely for audio.  Really, I would have rather had everyone watch the following video -

…but the workshop wasn’t meant to be a history lesson on chip music.  Today is another day!  Let us create in the now!

I went into this whole thing thinking it would be cake.  My other workshops were cake. But this, as I stated previously, was an interactive workshop, not a lecture or demonstration.

So, after this workshop’s history lesson, we jumped into Famitracker.  I broke down the interface, we built instruments for each of the channels, I made a pattern, and then I set them loose, pacing around, ready to answer questions.  And many questions I answered.  Next, we made a second pattern, and I showed them how multiple patterns build together into a song.  Then I set them loose again for 40 minutes or so with more pacing on my part, answering questions as they came.

For the first of the two workshop sessions, I had library staff member, Matt, and one elementary student.  It felt kind of like a practice run.  There was good dialog, trivia swapping, we didn’t get too off track. …or maybe I just didn’t feel that much pressure.

The second group contained Matt, my girlfriend, two friends from the bar, and three younger folk.  During the final hour with this group, I realized my “let ‘em loose” strategy for leading the workshop was naive.  Of the three younger folk; one was paralyzed after playing with and deleting the patterns we made together, one made a bunch of wild noises and then logged into newgrounds, and one was already familiar with Milky Tracker and felt she wasted her time.  Everyone else seemed to have a good time and entertained themselves.

I used the last 30 minutes to show everyone how to convert their song to an .mp3 by exporting to .wav and using a free online conversion service.  Then I talked about various websites they could meet other chiptune artists and/or share their music.  I was pretty exhausted after that.  :D

Milky Tracker girl left the following track on her desktop -
Download audio file (whoareyou.mp3)

When I get to do this again I’ll be a little wiser about it.  Demonstration is key.  I didn’t talk about music theory, I didn’t talk about song structure, about hard and soft changes, about holding a solid groove and layering on top, about playing in the pocket, or anything that really had anything to do with the music itself.  I only demonstrated the software itself as if everyone was already a musician ready to compose for a five piece band.  Slight error or epic fail?  I’ll know for next time.

I’d like to thank Matt Dubay for setting this event up and inviting me.  I’d also like to thank Eli Neiburger for networking Matt and I together, and a thanks to Kip DeGraaf for setting an entire Mac lab to run Famitracker on VMware.

famitracker workshop handout PDF download

Kind of Bloop is an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’ most successful album. It was curated by Andy Baio who’s been blogging and posting links forevers at waxy.org, and is a cofounder of kickstarter. Baio did everything he could think of to make this a legitimate and lawful release. With the help of kickstarter, he raised the needed funds to pay the licensing fees for all tracks on said album. It turned out to be an awesome stroke of cross promotion; being covered by Time Magazine among others.

Kind of Bloop was released nearly a year ago. I listened to it a couple times, it’s fun; Shnabubula’s “All Blues” is all over the map. I do wish, however, that all the classic jazz lovers who abhor this conceptual tribute would give it a solid listen. I understand some folks can only tolerate acoustic music, but I wish they could also appreciate the skill, effort, and detail that make these ‘computerized’ renditions so organic, human, and unique. It’s all jazz — even when Hannibal, of the A*Team, is forming a plan.

So here’s the crap — the cover of the album has it’s own copyright holder, photographer Jay Maisel. He never gave consent and claims he never would have if asked. Even though Kind of Bloop’s cover is an 8bit translation, it apparently failed to diverge enough from the original. Maisel, with money and lawyers, managed to pin Baio for a mere $32,500. Maisel is an artisanal juggernaut, people pay him $5k for weekend workshops. Jay Maisel is the man.

Campbell’s Soup never sued Andy Warhol for making their cans look like vomit. I’m kind of worried about Campbell’s masculinity.

I’d like to make an analogy using a Mr. Show skit from the perspective of the legal world. The guy with the bloody ear is a younger generation of artist who flirts with mashups and chipmusic covers. The donut clerk is the court. The seated acquaintance is the elder established artist, the hipster from the 50′s bronze age of jazz.

Fair Use has always sounded like a trap to me. Yeah, you’re in the clear as long as you make no money. But what if you had something that went mad viral, containing copyrighted material, and it launches your artistic career? Can that copyright holder, with enough lawyer power, find a way to garnish your new professional wages? In most lawsuits, the court sides with the established juggernaut mother.

Please read Andy Baio’s account on the situation.

Every once and a while I search ‘knoxburry’ in soulseek to see how accessible I am in that network.  I was pleasantly surprised to see my track from this compilation show up!  It meant that it was finally released!!

The official release page is here.  But I found spam on forums first when googling for the damn thing.  We’ve got some reviews on WATMM and xltronic and overall they are positive.  I’ve known for a long time that IDM/breakcore enthusiasts often don’t enjoy chipmusic even though there are many artists who jump back and forth between these mediums.

My track is ‘alberto balsalm’ and I am not totally satisfied with my effort.  There is a section of the song I just could not get the chords right no matter what I tried.  But that’s ok, I suppose.  I did my best to catch the essence of the song and the rhythm is spot on.  I substituted the wooden chair squeak with the Legend of Zelda’s “the dungeon boss is in the next room” sound.

Download audio file (Baron-Knoxburry-Alberto-Balsalm.mp3)

Here are a couple things said at WATMM —

Yeah, somebody said they didn’t like the Alberto Basalm but that’s one of my favorites because it’s so fucked up and authentic. I hate how most 8-Bit is “simulated” and then what’s the point? You’re not fooling anyone because you’re doing things that exceed the capacities of a SID chip. You have to admit that the percussion breakdown is the tits because it’s so metapharstic. But that huge, blat of a minor chord does not belong at all lol–makes it sound like Castlevania

I disagree. Doesn’t matter if it exceeds the capacity of an SID chip. Its all about the sound that it produces. I have no interest in what hardware/software they’re using. Its all about that squarewave sound :spiteful:

And, so, you can see that these Aphex Twin fans don’t know the difference between the Commodore 64 SID chip and an NES with a VRC6 expansion (what I used). Of course you can’t expect people who are :spiteful: against simple square waves to know the difference. Comments on chiptune forums like chipmusic.org and 8bitcollective.com don’t even touch what systems or methods were used.  What I don’t get is why Aphex Twin lovers won’t allow themselves to enjoy such a tribute with his early history of frankenstein hardware.  How is programming antique hardware that different?

Much respect to Emar for organizing and hosting this compilation!

Download 126mb .ZIP here