Bitpop

What it is

Sweden in the early 2000s, roughly: Slagsmalsklubben in Norrkoping, Machinae Supremacy in Lulea, and a wave of bands who liked the square waves but had no interest in the drum limits that came with them. That is the whole distinction. A bitpop record puts a Game Boy or a SID through a mixer alongside a real drum machine, a sampled kit or a live drummer, so the percussion has as many voices as it wants and the chip is left to do what it is good at, which is a lead line no other instrument makes. The songs are pop songs with verses and choruses and hooks written to be sung. Purists in the chip scene have argued for twenty years about whether this counts, which is a good sign that it is its own thing.

What it sounds like

Bright and layered in a way pure chip music cannot be. The kick is a sampled acoustic or a 909 with real low end under 60Hz, which is the first thing that gives it away, and the snare has a body and a short room on it. Hats are sixteenths from a sampled kit, panned and shaded. Over the top sit two or three square and pulse channels doing the melody, usually with a fast arpeggio holding the chord and a vibrato on the lead. Bass is often a real bass or a saw synth rather than the chip. Everything is in stereo, everything is compressed, and the chip parts get a plate reverb the original hardware could never have produced.

Key elements

• A kit the chip could not playSampled or acoustic drums with real low end and real overlap. Two or three drums sound at once, which is the line between this and chiptune proper.
• Chip as a lead instrumentOne or two pulse channels carrying the hook, with a 6Hz vibrato and a pulse-width sweep. It sits where a guitar solo would sit in a rock record.
• Song formVerse, chorus, middle eight. Chiptune tends to be loops with variations; bitpop is written to be sung and has an arrangement that goes somewhere.
• Arpeggio as harmonyThe chord still arrives as a fast three-note cycle even though a polysynth was available, because that stutter is the signature the genre keeps.
• Real bass underneathA DI bass or a saw synth holding the root, so the chip parts can stay in the top three octaves without the track sounding hollow.

How to get them

• Layer the kickA sampled kick with content at 55Hz under a short chip-style click at 1kHz. The click ties it to the chip parts and the sample keeps it audible on a big system.
• Program the hats in sixteenthsSkip the e of most beats and keep the a. That gap makes the hat feel played rather than drawn, and it is the difference from a chip hat, which has no gaps to spare.
• Set the chip leadA 25 percent pulse, vibrato at 6Hz and about 30 cents depth starting 80ms after the note, and a slow duty-cycle sweep from 12 to 50 percent across four bars.
• Arpeggiate fast, not slowThree notes at 16ms each, looping. Anything slower reads as a synth arpeggiator and loses the fused-chord effect the chip is standing in for.
• Give the chip a roomA 1.2 second plate at 15 percent wet with the return high-passed at 800Hz. Keep the drums dry against it so the two layers stay separable.
• Write a chorusGet to it inside forty seconds and let the chip double the vocal an octave up. If the track has no vocal, the lead line has to carry the same job.

Reference points

Slagsmalsklubben, Machinae Supremacy, Welle:Erdball, Anamanaguchi, Unicorn Kid, Yuppster, and the Hybris and Spelbrott catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not endorsements.