I will make a very short 8bit intro theme song to your fictional podcasts

Describe your made-up podcast that you've been meaning to set up but will never get around to making,
and I'll make a short 64-step looping intro for it in the style of bleep bloop gameboy chip tunes.

For example:

Description:
The What I Fed My Cat That I Probably Shouldn't Have Podcast: Each week I confess which new nutritionally suspect human food I gave my cat

Theme Song:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/test

Description:
B-Boyz Day Out: Each week I team up with a celebrity guest to go sneaker shopping and then have lunch at a local deli.

B-Boyz Day Out Theme: https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-sneakerhead-lunch

Description:
Wine, Women & Song

When you're too old for the club and too young to stay home. Tasting notes, etiquette/grilling/financial tips, and a new man-with-guitar music discovery every week. (Week of March 23: Jason Isbell.) Sponsored by John Varvatos and Trunk Club.

Wine, Women & Song Theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-winetime

v good!

This 'Murrican Life:
This American Life but with an emphasis on gun shows, monster truck rallies and strip clubs, etc..

This 'Murrican Life theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-tam

That's going to work great as bumper music between the snake-handling children and the inner workings of a machine-gun shoot.

The Bachelor Pod: Microwave recipes, carpet cleaning tips, bathrobe reviews. Sponsored by NatureBox.

The Bachelor Pod theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-bachelorpod

Nintendo-esque theme incredibly appropriate for The Bachelor Pod

awesome

awesome theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-awesome

"older folks who dance capably in unlikely styles: video podcast" i.e. YouTube clips in the general vein of rapping grandmas

Numismaticz

12-year-old Cameron Sweeney isn't your typical coin collector. Tune in every week as he takes time out of his busy life — doing ollies at the skatepark, canoeing with his parents, tagging trains at the depot — to update you on the latest coin auctions, hoard discoveries, and state quarter releases.

"older folks who dance capably in unlikely styles: video podcast" theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-geriatric-rap

Numismaticz theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-tween-coin

Weird shit I've encountered traveling for my dayjob - photos & stories from the odd local sites and sights mixed with examples of how business logistics, organizination, and communication fail constantly to finish a project

On Creativity -

Conversations with Portland creative and technical types about what sparks their ability to create and where they get their ideas from, shot thru with a surprisingly sarcastic tone

omg kingfish, if ever a faux-podcast/excellent ILX thread required a theme song it is "weird shit I've encountered traveling for my dayjob."

I would appreciate a theme song for
Forks' thread for inexplicable/fascinating/awesome/jokey YouTube music/theater/comedy/brilliance that I will undoubtedly vote for in Pazz and Jop or that I just think are excellent in general

Weird shit I've encountered traveling for my dayjob theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-dayjob-nuggets

On Creativity theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-creatlandia

Forks' jokey Youtube theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-youtubejoke

i like my overstuffed theme. will add now!

i just realized ilx threads are kind of a fictional podcast

These are GREAT! thanks!

I made a theme song to the "indefensible: john gruber" thread

https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-indefensible-gruber

Here are the lyrics if you'd like to sing along:
john gruber: indefensible
john gruber: indefensible
o-cas-sion-al-ly reprehensible
enjoy your claim chowder!

best ever

I made a theme song to:
Earworm mashups: the thread for having multiple songs stuck in your head

https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-shinyhappy-downtown

I like my theme, but let's just say I'm really close to actually starting a podcast that's a mix of "Get Up On This" and Jackie Kashian's "Dork Forest", yakking with people about both cultural/historical(pop or not) recs as well as their pet obsessions.

I'm thinking of calling it "Giving the Mic to the Wrong Person"

the middle: middle children share their experiences flying in middle seats over the middle east or the american midwest.

Giving the Mic to the Wrong Person Theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-pass-the-mic

the middle: middle children share their experiences flying in middle seats over the middle east or the american midwest theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-middle-in-the-malcolm

these are great philip! do you mind sharing what program(s) you use for your chiptuning? I tried once with a piece of software that was supposed to be pretty close to what the og videogame composers would have been working with and I was immediately hopelessly lost and haven't tried again since

I'm using renoise, which as a tracker has some lineage back to what might have been used for older amiga and PC games, but it wouldn't necessarily be less legit to use garageband or whatever you find comfortable, since it's all a kind of affectation anyway.

if you want chip tune "authenticity", working with original c64 or nes/gameboy formats is the way to go, though.

Thank you, these are fantastic

How does Renoise compare with something like FL Studio, which I have but haven't really cracked yet?

ha ha that "middle" theme, awesome!

I haven't tried FL, but fruity loops had a reputation of being beginner-friendly. Just looking at it though, it looks like as steep a learning curve as anything.

It depends what you're going for. It would be hard to input specific melodies (for say a TV theme cover) in something like nano loop but it does look easier conceptually to get a beat going:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ4yCiUSTc4

If you want something a little less feature-packed than Renoise but still in the pattern-based tracker family, you might try https://openmpt.org
In some sense, MPT is closer to "real" VGM composing since it saves/opens files in some game formats like .mod

There are also neat web experiments in programmatically generating chip-py stuff:
http://idroppedmyphonethescreencracked.tumblr.com

Is there a lot of interest here in making chip tunes? what kinds would you want to make?

these rule i have an actual podcast called illogical contraption that wants a thing!

I'd just like to make cute little tunes as an intro to basic songcraft. I'm not a hardcore era-specific creator or anything, just basic waveforms maybe with the ability to add fuzzy synths later. Here's a beat, here's a bass line, here's a coupla melody lines, etc.

This Amway Life - stories from the trenches of multi-level marketing

illogical contraption theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-powerhouse

have you tried general sequencer programs like garageband? (they should have waveform instruments as options)
there's also a lot of interesting web tools now:
http://www.beepbox.co/

The only iOS device I own is my phone, but yeah I do have GarageBand on it.

Could you make the Pass the Mic sound clip downloadable?

Ball-ywood Babylon:
Step behind the scenes, as we interview the actors, directors, cinematographers, and foley artists behind the greatest crotch-hits in cinema history.

This Amway Life theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-nina-totenbag-pyramid

Ball-ywood Babylon theme:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-ballywood

all clips now downloadable

That's amazing! O_O

Excellent. Thank you.

Is there a lot of interest here in making chip tunes? what kinds would you want to make?

Is there a rolling chiptune thread? There's the "songs that sound like earthbound" thread that sees a revive now and then, anyway I am very interested in chip tunes, I love that in many cases the music playing in an NES game was an afterthought, and in many other cases whomever was tasked with programming the music obviously put a lot of time and thought into it, and somehow quite a few of these computer programmers were also brilliant music composers, fascinating stuff!

Hearing the music from Mega Man 2, at the age of four, was almost certainly a formative experience for me

This Amway Life theme is spot on! Sadly, I know enough people involved in MLM schemes I could actually use it.

Garageband isn't a bad way to get into this -- just pick simpler sounding instruments and heavily quantize everything:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/beat-brat

Megaman music is really dense and I think it was designed to allow some tracks to drop out during game play to make room for sound effects, so it's a particularly challenging set of constraints to work with.
I'd recommend starting with Ramones covers, then work your way up to Dr. Wily.

That's another thing, that the NES could only handle so many (four?) tracks at a time, and the sfx would take up one or two of them during gameplay, and they'd have to account for that! That a punch or an explosion would just cancel out an entire track of your song quite all of a sudden, just tremendously interesting constraints to work with.

It's the limitations I think that elevates the "chip tune" into some kind of bizarre instrument unto itself, an instrument that only a handful of people learned how to play and then just as soon completely forgot about as soon as videogames could incorporate any kind of recorded music, for better or worse...

Philip, are you a chiptuner in a professional capacity?

haha no! unless some podcaster has a dumptruck full of squarespace money to unload...

also, the sample-based way of tracking is a bit different from the NES paradigm, though there was some crossover whenever you had space constraints, like fitting the music + samples to under 1K.
but mostly it tended to be more maximalist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAcWkfww30I

Philip, how should I credit you for the theme music?

The Mysterious Breakfast'r Cereal

Right then

Philip, are you still doing these?

as long as there are fictional podcasts without themes...

What about one about holding conversations with engineers located in the PacNW?

OK!
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-rainy-day-singularity-conference

Hey, that one sounds familiar. Thanks!

I really want to do a podcast about video stores but I know I never will. if I heard a theme song, I could dream a little more vividly

I have an actual podcast with no theme tune, is it ineligible? https://centuriesofsound.wordpress.com/about/

Video Stores are Still a Thing?

Lyrics:
Video Stores
Are still a thing
You owe 10 grand in late feeeeees

https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-video-stores-are-still-a-thing

A centennial song for a century of sound:
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-centennial-party

Though this old one might be more apropos, given that it spans both Daisy Bell (1892) and The Message (1982)?
https://soundcloud.com/chiptheme/8bit-geriatric-rap

that rules philip thank you

Brilliant, Philip, I love both of them, might make something with the second one...