For me to tell about my musical background, I pretty much have to just tell my life story, cuz music has been my life all my life. I'll try to keep it brief.
I've been fascinated with music from birth...my mother is a pretty good pianist, and comes from a musical family. My dad isn't a musician, although it's not for a lack of trying...but his mother is also a good pianist, so music is in my blood I suppose.
For my 3rd birthday I got my first turntable, and spent many hours from then on playing records. I also started plunking around on the piano and guitar, although I didn't actually learn how to play guitar till many years later. By the time I was 5, I was already developing my ear, picking out the tunes from my favorite TV shows on my little Yamaha keyboard (which was a PSS-140) and toy piano (both of which I regret getting rid of).
Fast forward to 1994, when I was 11 I joined the school band. I wanted to play drums, but the teacher talked me out of it, and then I said sax, and he talked me out of that. I guess everybody and their brother wants to play drums or saxophone, and they have to try to balance it somehow...so I decided on trumpet.
Playing in the school band was the thing that sealed my obsession with music. Well, that and finally accepting that I sucked at baseball and basketball.
My dad gave me his nice Sigma acoustic guitar that he hadn't played in years, and I finally learned how to play it. I also taught myself how to play drums by playing along to the radio with two pencils on a metal filing cabinet. By the time I was 12, I was playing drums and piano in church regularly.
I learned bass about a year after that, and played bass in the high school jazz band before switching to drums.
My mom had played piano and Hammond B3 organ in church since I was really little, so I came up hearing that stuff (Black Gospel style music) my whole life. There was always old school funky gospel music playing in my house, either that or 50s-60s "oldies" pop/rock/soul. I spent the weekends at my dad's house, and he always had a habit of playing the radio all night long while he slept. I often would just sit up next to the speakers and listen until I fell asleep. It was always the popular soft rock/pop stuff of the day, like Phil Collins/Genesis, Peter Cetera/Chicago, Mr. Mister, Berlin, Fleetwood Mac, Michael McDonald, that kind of stuff.
In my high school years I was really into 70s jazz fusion like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Miles Davis...and some alternative rock, especially Foo Fighters and Smashing Pumpkins, and the Flaming Lips...and lots of avant-garde and early electronic music, and funk like Parliament and Zapp/Roger.
It was never a question what I wanted to be when I grew up...I was already doing it...and I still am, and thankfully, I get to do it for a living!
How I got into chiptune:
My other big interest since I was a little kid has been video games. I got my NES in 1989, and was of course really into the music. I always dreamed of being able to make my own video game music.
I never really tried to find out about the technology behind video game music until about 2006, when I started reading about how the NES hardware worked, and what a 2a03 was. I started making fakebit stuff not long after that, using VST instruments that were supposed to emulate the NES sound. Sometime around then, I heard about trackers, but that all seemed way too complicated, so I didn't look into it any further. I eventually lost interest in the fakebit NES music because I just couldn't get it to sound authentic enough.
Around 2010 I got involved in ROM hacking, and became heavily involved in the Super Mario World hacking community, and started trying my hand at SNES SPC music. That eventually led me back to 8-bit music, and sometime in 2011 I became completely obsessed with chip music. I started listening to NSFs constantly (NES music is the BEST workout music BTW!), and it wasn't long before I bit the bullet and started learning Famitracker.
It was really overwhelming at first...it just seemed like a completely alien way to make music. After watching danooct1's tutorials though, it started to make more sense to me.
gyms led me to Battle of the Bits, and that has been a lot of fun. Chip music people are some of the most interesting I've ever met. I'm really glad to be involved in it.
i taught myself near everything i know about this program through studying NSFs of games such as silver surfer and the FTMs of more advanced users to study technique
I did pretty much the same as Ares64. The "more advanced" users in my day were about as good as "decent" users nowadays though, since a lot of cool new techniques have popped up over the past few years...
I think Strobe's MEchanicalC2.ftm is what really opened my eyes to the 2A03's full potential (we didn't have dem fancy expansion chips back then!).
Most of the projects I initially attempted to learn from were actually really bad, but the authors were kind enough to share their .ftm projects, so that's kind of what I had to work with at the time. I learned a lot of sloppy techniques that I didn't stop doing for awhile.
I didn't start browsing the famitracker forums until I had already made a few songs, and I didn't bother to register an account for a long time
I've never actually seen his tutorial, believe it or not.
How is that even physically possible?
The same way it's possible for me not to have seen it either?
You *don't* need to have seen it. I think a lot of people are better for it if they've gotten to a decent skill without having to look at that blasted tutorial, no disrespect to Dan.
I was learning to play guitar in 5th grade until my guitar teacher tried to hit on my mom, after that i was kicked out of beginner band as a percussion player, and in 8th grade a taught myself the piano/harpsichord/clavier. Then i started to learn about musical theory in 9th grade, and now here i am, a idiotic 10th grader with a basic understanding of music theory that did jack **** in helping him make decent songs.
TLDR: I fail to do basic music.
Wait Dancoot made a tutorial, i figured out this bloody program via the wiki and others help, and all this time i could have watched a tutorial.
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-Smilies are more offensive than any word could ever be.
i picked up piano by ear when i was about 5 or 6 and could play various fairly-simple songs. parents took notice, got me into piano lessons a few years later. i was never very good at them, never got into reading music very well though the core principles of music theory were there i guess. i'm still kind of dumb when it comes to technical music theory terms, etc. anyway, did piano for a few years and quit after 5-6, then didn't do any music stuff for awhile other than just dicking around on piano / improv / etc (and a weird cover of the mega man 1 final boss theme for ti-83 - it works if you hold the calculator up to an AM radio due to the interference it gives off). then went to college, nullsleep finished his "how to set up MCK" guide and i started writing chipmusic. oh and i submitted a couple terrible midi creations to OCR back in 2000 or so.
