I got a Pocket CHIP recently too. I'm having lots of fun with the music tracker in PICO-8.
I just wish I could figure out a way to write chords that didn't take up three of the precious four channels! Makes you realise how impressive some of those 8-bit chip tunes really are.
>I just wish I could figure out a way to write chords that didn't take up three of the precious four channels!
As a semi-long-time tracker user (BTW, if you've got a gameboy or gameboy emulator, check out LSDJ. If you don't, try LGPT, which should work well on the pocketCHIP. They are both fantastic trackers) I can tell you the secret: arpeggios. You play several notes very rapidly (and I mean very rapidly) on a single channel. This is so common that most trackers have the capability to do so built in. In PICO-8's tracker, it's effects number 6 (arpeggio slow) and 7 (arpeggio fast).
Strangely, PICO-8's docs claim that it arpeggiates over groups of four notes. Typically, (in, for example, MilkyTracker), the effect command would be 0xy, where x and y are semitone offsets for the second two notes in the arpeggio, for a total of three. I am unsure how PICO-8's arpeggio works precisely, as I don't own it.
Thanks for this! Strangely, I had tried fx 6/7, but I was putting them over the existing chords, which was as ugly as it sounds! Guess I should RTFM :D
I just wish I could figure out a way to write chords that didn't take up three of the precious four channels! Makes you realise how impressive some of those 8-bit chip tunes really are.