We have been on a sort of hiatus due to the Holidays and other things, but have ramped back up to complete the mastering of our first album! This song is lucky number 13 as far as track numbering goes. We have been wanting to do a Westerny style song since we started working on Chipsurf Pipeline, and finally ended up completing that goal with Gunslinger Ghost-Town. It even has some vocals (sort of)!

For this song, we used the GameBoy as the only chip-synth, with the NES making an appearance only for a few bassbombs. We did, however, end using some home made coconuts! Turns out, using a Dremmel to open a coconut is not the most efficient way to go about it, but it did work and the end product is exactly what we wanted. Also of note is the use of real tube distortion for some of the guitar parts. It really worked well in this song, so we ended up using it more than we have to this point. The result is slightly more edgy guitars but with a nice harmonic ring to them. Tube distortion is oh such a sweet sound!

Gunslinger Ghost-Town is available off Soundcloud as well as a few other places (see the sidebar on our website), with the high quality version being available off Bandcamp. Enjoy!

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We had quite a bit of fun with this one as we decided to have a contest to find a name for this song. It was conducted via Facebook and SoundCloud with Tom Jenkins being declared the winner for his suggestion (which is, of course, the name of the song). Big thanks to Tom and all our fans for participating! Tom won himself a free digital copy of the album and, more importantly, a t-shirt! We weren’t able to have many t-shirts made and most folks will likely have to obtain them via our forthcoming Kickstarter project to help fund a vinyl release of Chipsurf Pipeline. Therefore, they are somewhat rare and, we hope, coveted.

This one was also fun because, as part of the contest, we posted a rough cut of the song (as we were not quite done with it when we came up with the contest idea). So you can hear both the pre and post master to see some of what goes into our mastering work.

Riptide Resistor is available off Soundcloud as well as a few other places (see the sidebar on our website), with the high quality version being available off Bandcamp. Enjoy!

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In a similar vein to Phoenix Down, The Genesis Machine is about epic beginnings and the circumstance therein. Though we aimed for no direct 8-bit inspired archetype for this song, it fits many a story often found in both classic games and even some modern ones.

The Genesis Machine was the first song we composed on the GameBoy with the NES taking the role of accompaniment instead of being the driving force like it is in many of our other songs. It makes use of all 4 channels on the GameBoy and all 5 off the NES’ 2A03 sound-chip. Together they form a fairly rich chiptune sound to complement the surfey guitars. We are especially happy with the way this song turned out, both from the standpoint of the song itself, and from the mixing/mastering technicals. This is perhaps Tim’s best mastering work to date of any song and one that his is particularly proud of. Likewise, John’s guitar work really shines from the rhythmic surf to the dramatic leads.

The Genesis Machine is available in all the usual places, as well as off the Chipsurf Pipeline album page. Enjoy!

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