On March 18th. 2010, Josiah Tobin released the album Test Subject under his chiptunin’ alias Bit_Rat. Some of his previous works include Channel 1, an album composed entirely on one channel, and Ant Attack, the soundtrack to the NES-styled iPhone game of the same name. You may also remember his track “Warm Green Something” as the opener to our first compilation, Love Songs from the Future.
Whether your first exposure to Bit_Rat was any of the above, or even this very interview, there’s no question that he’s one of the most unique artists working with chips today. We caught up with Josiah and asked him a few questions about Test Subject, his preceding works, and what’s next for that wily, scampering rat.
You can, and should, download all of Bit_Rat’s albums free of charge here.
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Can you tell us about your musical background? What instruments do you play, and how do you incorporate your traditional way of making music into composing chiptunes?
I first got into making music when I was somewhere around the age of 10-13, using the PLAY statement in Qbasic/Quickbasic on my very first computer– an ancient-even-then IBM XT running DOS 5, handed down to me by my older brother (known these days and on the album as MC Fen, actually)… so I suppose technically, chiptunes were my introduction to music! Not that I’d know it at the time, though.
From there it was a program called FM Tracker that simulated classic FM Synthesis sounds, and shortly after that I was introduced to Impulse Tracker. I stuck with IT for years while I slowly taught myself what actually sounded good and what was just awful self-indulgence, and was still using it around the time that I started teaching myself to play real instruments– starting with Mandolin and shortly afterwards harmonica and acoustic guitar.
As for what instruments I play, let’s see… I sing, play guitar, drums, bass guitar, mandolin, at one point I played the harmonica (though I doubt my present-day ability), and I’m currently learning to play the piano/keyboard. I love learning to make new sounds!
Seeing as my roots are in tracker-based music and I currently use Modplug Tracker to create chiptunes, my ‘traditional’ approach really doesn’t differ all that much from my approach to chiptunes.
How long have you been working in this genre?
Personally, I would have to side with the folks who look at Chiptune as a production style or instrument rather than a genre, but I’ve only been making chiptunes for about a year, give or take a month. There were a few small novelty attempts before the Channel 1 EP came out, but it was around that time– I’d say March-April of 2009– that something finally ‘clicked’ and I just started cranking out a lot of chiptunes that I was extremely happy with. I put together the name Bit_Rat as a pun on “bit rate” (and because really, rats are among the most radical and under-appreciated of creatures) and off I went!
Have any specific games, or game composers, inspired your songs?
I don’t really draw the comparison in that sense. I make music that, in many ways, sounds like old video game soundtracks, but most of the time I don’t directly get inspiration from them. Sometimes I will hear a chiptune by another artist and it will inspire me to start writing one of my own (I am actually very surprised that no one who’s heard Test Subject has drawn a comparison between the opening track “Bait Thief” and Mr Spastic’s own tune “Sloppy”), but generally I don’t think I could honestly give you any names. I find it hard to clearly trace the origin of a lot of my inspiration.
As far as classic game soundtracks I greatly appreciate, though, some that immediately come to mind are Zelda II, Uniracers, Illusion of Gaia, and the battle music in most early jRPGs I remember playing– I adore the genre of game and one of the things I would always look forward to the most with a brand new RPG was the battle and boss themes.
When did work on Test Subject begin?
Almost a year before its release– April or May of 2009, I believe. The chiptunes themselves were actually finished in very short order, probably in under a month’s time, but it was the collaborations with the various guest artists that delayed it. Very worth it, though!
Tell us a little bit about your set up you used for recording. How much of Test Subject was done using traditional tracker means and how much was done using non-computer-related sources?
All the chiptunes you hear were created in Modplug Tracker with chiptune samples– the snare was a NES DPCM snare sample which I edited to give a little more punch. Guitars were recorded direct in (a first for me; I usually mic an amp when recording guitars) through an E-MU 1616M breakout box with a Peavey Reactor tele-style electric (Little ’59 single coil-sized humbucker in the bridge w/ series/parallel toggle). Vocals, such as MC Fen’s rapping on “No Reason” and “Who Can Stop Us?” as well as my sung parts on the title track, were recorded with a Shure SM-58.
How did you go about getting together with your guest contributors, like Shawn Phase, Norrin Radd, and MC Fen?
No special tricks, really… MC Fen is my older brother and we have collaborated before on a few occasions. Shawn and Norrin are just super nice guys and real easy to talk to!
Can you explain how the collaborative process worked when dealing with these three very different musicians? For instance (and for those unaware), Shawn Phase provided analog drums to “Honeydew.” Did you track out the drums using synth means first and have him play along, or use some other method?
Actually, “Honeydew” has chip drums going on behind the acoustic drums, and Shawn just recorded his track to a rough mixdown of the chiptune with chip drums. Originally he was going to drum on a few more tracks, but because of time contraints and stylistic concerns we decided to just go with the one song. He basically worked out his parts based on the chip drums already in the song, and did an amazing job of it! With Norrin Radd, I just asked him if he would like to track out a solo for the end of “Who Can Stop Us?” and he pretty much just jammed something out and sent me what he had– pretty laid back way of doing things, and awesome results! For MC Fen, I just pointed out the parts I thought would be ideal for his rapping and he laid out the lyrics based on that. Basically I put down the basic guidelines and we all just did our respective things!
How does writing something like Test Subject, which is very geared toward a cohesive album, compare to writing something specifically for a game, like Ant Attack?
Within the context of writing the individual songs, not much is different– there are of course the thematic requirements of the song within the game’s soundtrack, but besides that criteria the process is pretty much identical for me. It’s more in the arranging of the tracks, really; for an album like Test Subject, flow is very important to me, making sure each track sounds great coming after the last, breaking up the pacing nice and evenly, etc etc. Writing for an arcade-styled game like Ant Attack, it’s more about making each song memorable and distinct enough from every other song on the soundtrack so that they all sound good cutting into eachother when the situation arises… I would almost say it’s about making the transitions or the silence between tracks as memorable as possible, for example, the gap between the menu tune and the first level music– you start to get used to it, know what to expect, and get excited by it. I guess that’s what I’d go for.
Your previous album, Channel 1, had an interesting gimmick involving using only one channel for all the songs. Do you find limitations like this to be effective exercises for crafting chiptunes?
Definitely, and I would recommend that everyone try the one-channel exercise at least once! I found myself writing some of my most creative and memorable songs because of the limitation. It’s impossible to create dissonant chords or harmonies since only one note can be playing at once– even if you fake chords by moving everything at a very high speed, it’s a completely different animal (to be a little esoteric, I would perhaps compare it to a mouse as opposed to a rat). In addition to that, everything has to interrupt everything else to make it work, so for example you have snare hits interrupting a square or triangle wave and you *really* have to work to get a nice flowing bassline in between the percussion and squares! Often it’s just one or two notes per pattern that’s suggestive of something much more, and that’s where the magic is for me. It’s extremely liberating, and really stretches the imagination both writing it and listening to it! I’d even go so far as to say the exercise of writing the Channel 1 EP is what got me into shape for crafting the songs for the Test Subject album.
Do you consider yourself a performer? If so, have you considered putting together a band to perform your songs live?
Absolutely! I love performing live. I have yet to do it with this project specifically, but I would jump at the chance. A live band for Bit_Rat would be great, but of course one of the wonderful things about chiptunes is how portable they are– I could probably get away with a backing track and an electric guitar if I needed to.
What’s next for Bit_Rat?
I’ve got several ideas floating around, but nothing I can say I want to do for certain just yet. I don’t want to rush things– with my last band, Swimfail, I was making a fresh album every year for four years straight, not to mention original EPs… while I was very happy with how things turned out, I think I would rather take my time and sit on things for awhile this time around. I’m also working as half of the indie game dev team Bridge Unit Orzo and as a pixel artist/audio person for Broken Kings software, as well as writing my own solo music and doing mixing and mastering work for others, so there’s a lot going on… that said though, there is definitely more Bit_Rat in the future– no doubt about that!
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us!
Always a pleasure.
