After I finished my 1st Chiptune album Bits N Chips, I immediately started working on a 2nd album. I named my 2nd album The Return of Chippy based on my song "Chippy Van Nathaan", which was the 1st Chiptune track I ever made. I wanted the 2nd album to be even more versatile in genres than the 1st album, and have some original vocals on it. Bits N Chips was originally going to have 18 songs. I trimmed the tracklist down to 10 songs. The album took me 3 years to complete due to working on other peoples albums. The only artists featured on this project are Pittsburgh Artists JKJ and Iamusick. I'll only speak on 3 songs off the album. The first track I worked on was a house song called S.S.T.
S.S.T. or Sines Squares and Triangles is an uptempo dance song that uses simple synth sounds to give an 8bit feel. The song starts out as house and builds into a dubstep drop. It was my 1st house song where I incorporated a sidechain to the drums (audio nerd alert lol). It was just great making an instrumental track using the instruments to tell a story, rather than incorporating vocals. I released S.S.T. on Soundcloud in 2014 and So I continued to make more Chiptune songs and experiment with different genres, synths and sounds to make a crazy project!
I made a lot of Chiptunes and fakebit (Chiptune mixed with regular sounds) between those 3 years. I made genres from boom bap, to drum and bass to hardstyle to pop music. I was still trying to figure out what direction I wanted to go. I thought I'd make an album with half rap/hiphop beats and half EDM tracks. The 18 songs I ended up with got split into 2 projects. Before I released The Return of Chippy, I released a beat tape called More Chips.
More Chips is a 8 song tape of hiphop rap beats that I didn't want to put on The Return of Chippy. A great track off the track off the album is 8bit Based Neva Die, a heavy bass rap trap beat which has a moving sine wave going up and down in the background.
Another track off The Return of Chippy is "Never Falling Down" featuring JKJ of RARE Nation.
The beat took less than 10 minutes to make. I'm actually singing on this track on the hook. I couldn't come up with any verses, so I reached out to my fellow RARE member to lay some verses down. JKJ killed it, his verses totally complemented the few emotive lines I said on the hook. At the end of the song, I decided to re record the hook in a different style.
The third track I want to mention is the track "Final Boss" featuring Iamusick. This track Is like a hiphop, twerk like beat with dark tones and a deep intro, the track builds into a heavy 8bit lead with 808s under it. I was stuck with the beat and wanted to make a 2nd drop that was sicker than the 2nd drop. So as the homie Iamusick always does he help me produce the 2nd drop! He came up with this sick moving sound and we made the drums slow down half tempo, and ad a lot of pitch bending on the 808 bass.
More Chips and The Return of Chippy are sort of brother sister projects. Just that The Return of Chippy has more production value. These two, along with my 1st album, Bits N Chips are my favorite albums I've ever made. I've always wanted to make video game music. So this is def a personal accomplishment to me. Next is to actually get the music on an actual game.
Bits N Chips and The Return of Chippy can be found on NateKodi.com, Bandcamp, Spotify, Itunes and other major streaming services. More Chips beat tape is exclusive to NateKodi.com and Bandcamp.