Here’s a blog post that’s a departure from the content I usually post here. If I was a normal person, I would make a video essay about how I make the 8-bit covers of music that I regularly post to my YouTube channel, but I don’t enjoy video editing at all, so I’m going to discuss all this in a blog post instead.

I’ve lately come to realize that my style of chiptune covers is very different from what most people doing chiptune on YouTube go for: instead of making a reinterpretation of a song based on simple chiptune instruments, my covers are made on a basis of translating songs to Famitracker as faithfully as I can. Though I used to be a big fan of chiptune covers of all kinds, I now strongly gravitate towards such translation-based covers because it’s incredibly impressive when the overall feel of a song, whether it be hectic, dramatic, funky, or relaxing, is recreated within the limitations of an NES console (or more often, expansions thereof). It’s also because I enjoy transcribing other music much more than making my own music, so in a way these covers are really just transcriptions under constraints. A lot of people really enjoy this style of covers I do, and I myself think I have improved by enormous amounts since I started doing chiptune covers in 2016. So I thought it would be fun to make a blog post list my personal tips and tricks for translating music into chiptune form.