Hi, my name is Victoneix and I need your help. I'm studying music theory and I want to become a game music producer. My favorite style is chiptune, and I also love C418's music style. I'd like to know how I can improve and how I can practice more to become a great producer. If you'd like to see what I've already produced, here's my SoundCloudaccount. Please help me, I'm very lost; I don't know what I should practice or what I should do. YouTube tutorials don't help much; even using AI didn't give me any direction. What I want to know is how I should practice, how I can apply what I learn about music theory, and what the main concepts are for creating chiptune-style music. Please, I really want to improve in this area.

Hi, I'll be honest, I'm not a musician, but one piece of advice I can give you is that if you're going to produce that kind of content, you should also consume it to learn.
I make NSFW games, and to make them, I have to consume that kind of content.

For example, you can analyze the music packs for RPG Maker sold on Steam, but don’t just analyze the music itself...
also consider:

How much do they cost?

What do they offer?

And most importantly...

Take a look at the backgrounds of the musicians involved.

How did they get there?

When you're in doubt, it's okay to ask for help, but the most important thing is to be observant.

What I see as having a market today isn't pure 8-bit music, but rather hybrids between 8-bit and more complex music.

I spent a whole summer learning under a music producer that went to my college. One of the most useful exercises that we did together was taking a basic song and simply trying to recreate it without any tutorials. You can look up the BPM and the key of the song, even the chords if you wanted to, but everything else is up to you using your ear to figure out what sounds are going on. 

The guy I was working under used EDM as an example. This helped me learn the basic structure of EDM, how to program drums for EDM, and even helped me sharpen my sound design skills. 

What I'd recommend to you is to follow a chiptune tutorial and recreate what they do to a T (this will help you understand the basics of composing chiptune), then take a chiptune song you like and try to recreate it without a tutorial. Just use your ears and see how close you can get to the original, cross-referencing it as much as you can without finding a tutorial for that song.

From what I understand about chiptune music, at its core, it uses the most basic waveforms due to the restrictions of older consoles. For that, I recommend a couple VSTs that specialize in chiptune. 

- Magical 8bit Plug

https://ymck.net/app/magical-8bit-plug-en

- NES VST

https://www.mattmontag.com/projects-page/nintendo-vst

These helped me out a lot when I dabbled in chiptune. If I recall correctly, they were also used in Undertale's OST, so they're perfectly capable for video game music.

Sorry for the word vomit, but I hope this at least helps a little bit. 

Which DAW do you use? Personally, I mostly learned music by creating different genre variations and composing single instrumental tracks daily, no matter how bad they sounded at first. My main goal was simply to keep composing music and improving the mixing so the tracks could gradually sound better over time.

At the beginning, I think it’s enough to focus mainly on understanding major and minor scales along with BPM. Even for chiptune music, those basics are more than enough to get started. I recommend sticking to these simple music theory fundamentals first instead of jumping into advanced theory too early. Most of my compositions also stay within major or minor scales. In freelance work I sometimes go more advanced when clients request it, like off-scale or chromatic variations, but you don’t really need those unless you are doing client work. Over time, usually after 1 or 2 years of consistent practice, you naturally start understanding more advanced theory through experimentation and experience.

I also recommend listening to simple instrumental music on YouTube. Rap instrumentals are often easier to recreate or learn from. Listen to professional rap instrumentals, take inspiration from them, and identify the scale (major or minor) and BPM used in the track. Then try creating a composition in a very similar style using the same BPM and scale. Start by focusing on four core elements: melody, chords, bass, and drums. Keep practicing and releasing music, and you’ll gradually improve naturally. By doing this repeatedly, you start to memorize tones and patterns, get used to note placement in the piano roll, and internalize rhythm techniques.

You’ll also face different DAW-related problems during the process, and solving them helps you learn the DAW’s functions more effectively through experience.

I personally recommend composing melodies and chords directly in the piano roll first instead of only playing with a keyboard. This method helped me self-learn a lot of music theory by experimenting with note placement and blending inside the DAW. Of course, learning with a keyboard is also completely fine.

By learning this way, you can also create chiptune music. I’ve released some chiptune tracks on my profile as well, although they’re not typical chiptune. They’re more of a modernized version where I experiment with gate effects, time effects, and other processing, so the sound changes slightly in certain sections.

Also, the music on my profile is mostly from around 2022-2023, so the mixing quality in those older tracks isn’t very strong. Only my newer releases have improved mixing and overall sound quality. I’ve already started reshaping and reworking the mixing on some of my older soundtracks, and I’ve updated a few tracks with better quality. The rest will take more time to refine and re-release.

I make music (not necessarily game background music though), and one thing that I would say is that making good music is a bit of a trial and error process. Yes, you should watch some tutorials, listen to some songs to get inspiration, and stuff, but the best thing is for you to actually go and make some music. Even if your songs sound bad now, they wont sound bad forever

Honestly, try recreating simple songs you love and mess with them 😅 Remaking tracks from C418 or old chiptune games teaches way more than endless tutorials. Small practice every day adds up.

You can try Fl Studio For PC to learn and make your own music. Free Source to download: https://flstudioz.com