Defender

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Tim

Or why Bandcamp is awesome! It’s been a little over a week since we let Chipsurf Pipeline loose in the wild and the response has been just amazing! We think transparency is important, however, so I wanted to take some time to talk about our numbers. I should preface this by saying – numbers are just numbers. They don’t really mean much. What matters is people – our fans! And we truly appreciate our fans for sticking with us and, hopefully, digging Chipsurf Pipeline as much as we enjoyed making it! But for the curious::

Playing Defender on Bandcamp

Ok well so that’s a game of Defender using our Plays graph off Bandcamp 🙂 That top peak hits 1,082 plays, which is the most plays we have ever had in a single day! In the last 30 days, we have had 2,643 plays. This number is really the number of individual song plays – we don’t have an accurate number for full album plays, but it’s around 70. Total album downloads is 16 (one which included a t-shirt). 16 is a bit modest, I’ll admit, but many of those were above our album price ($5.00) which I thought was really cool!

On Soundcloud we have had a total of 1273 plays since the very beginning, 69 of which was in the last month. We are massive fans of Soundcloud, but did most of our latest promoting off Bandcamp as this is where you can find the highest quality versions of our tunes for sale, as well as our custom t-shirts. Still, Soundcloud has been incredibly helpful for getting our music heard and we will likely continue to use Soundcloud. Of note, you can listen to our music for free using the Soundcloud app on your portable device, so that’s pretty awesome!

We do not yet have any stats on the big name stores and sites yet as we are still waiting on getting are album uploaded there and it may take some time to get a good idea of how that’s doing. Really, apart from Spotify, if you want to have a copy of the tracks, we would highly advise you use Bandcamp as the quality will be unmatched.

Anyways there are the numbers! For us, they are something pretty special but mostly because they represent fans, both new and old. So, again, thanks everyone for the interest and support!

Hardware Stuffs!

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Tim

For the past I don’t want to think about it years, I have been working on building a complete, fully populated, SID-based synthesizer based on the MidiBox platform. For Chipsurf Pipeline, we used my SammichSID (and SammichFM) here and there and it worked out well. But it lacks a full control surface to make some things easier, and I want something in a rack. This is what I have been working on and, in fact, I am getting fairly close to getting boards for a working control surface.

That said, though I do intend upon continuing work on it, John and I decided that what we need more are ways to help synchronize the NES and GameBoy as that would be extremely helpful for the different ways we are building songs for the next album, as well as for performing live. So, I am shifting gears a bit and will be focusing on completing my ArdunioBoy project. I am looking into building a shield, specifically, as it lets me use the base Ardunio board for other things if the need calls for it. The ArdunioBoy will allow us to both sync up LSDJ and use mGB, which was also developed by Trash80 (the dude behind the ArdunioBoy). mGB understands MIDI note data, turning the GameBoy into a real-time synthesizer of sorts.

Second to that, we want to MIDIfy the NES. The best solution I have seen is MIDINes. I have been trying to pick one up for years but opted not to for Chipsurf Pipeline since our songwriting catered more to a tracker interface and we also didn’t have the funds at the time. Assuming that project is still living, I plan on ordering one very soon to see how things go. In some ways, it is less flexible than FamiTracker; but in others, it is more. At least this gives us an option and the ability to more easily do live shows that can involve more dynamic interaction with the NES (as opposed to just press Play and playing along).

Anyways, this stuff makes me excited and I wanted to take some time to share it with any of our fans that are also interested in the topic! I plan on posting updates like these as I continue to work on these projects. On that note, I am also going to update and move over my NESA documentation so all our stuff can be found in one place. More info to come!

What’s Next?

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Tim

Now that Chipsurf Pipeline is out in the wild (which you can purchase it on our BandCamp page and, soon, from most of the other online music stores), what are we going to do next? Lots! The biggest things right now are getting our Kickstarter project fired up for putting Chipsurf Pipeline on vinyl, and some periphery stuff around that (such as a Chiptune Pipeline special EP); putting together some chiptune related workshops with Hackerspace; and working on our next album.

We will, of course, let everyone know what we are up to as we get to it. I will admit, we are enjoying a slower pace for a while since the launch of Chipsurf Pipeline was getting a bit intense. On that note, we are wanting to do a release party at some point for it, but would like to finish Kickstarter first so we can, hopefully, have something more tangible for the release party itself. More info will be forthcoming once we know more.

There’s lots to do really but we’re going to take things one step at a time and will keep everyone updated every step of the way!

Post Launch Info

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Tim

First, a huge THANKS to all our fans, both old and new! The support and kind words about our album, particularly on /r/chiptunes has been wonderful! Thanks also for folks sticking with us while it took so long to release the album!

There have been some really good questions asked, mostly in the above link, that I will likely also answer here. For the moment, I am working on getting our stuff up on cdbaby so we can be on the more conventional outlets, as well as Spotify. We recommend anyone wanting to buy that album go through Bandcamp. Not only does more of the money go to us, but you can also get the highest quality version available anywhere.

As we have mentioned before, we also want to try to put Chipsurf Pipeline on vinyl and that will be our next big goal. In tandem to that is starting our next album, which is already starting to take shape and more details will follow for it hopefully soon!

It’s Here!

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Tim