The way I currently make chiptune music is actually a whole lot simpler compared to everything I made before 2023 or so. I’ll usually only use 3 different plugins, and almost no effects for each channel. Once I explain how it’s made now, I’ll later explain how it used to differ.
Main vocals
The main vocal sound is 3x Osc, a subtractive oscillator built into FL Studio. I use the square wave sound, holding a 1 octave pitch for a short amount of time when the note is triggered, and add vibrato - these are all settings within the 3x Osc plugin window. I use 3x Osc for the lead vocal because it supports the pitch bending ability in FL Studio’s piano roll, which I use extensively to give the vocals extra life, whether that’s bending the pitch just as a note starts, to emulate a human imperfectly raising their pitch from a previous note, or to add manual vibrato when necessary. If this function was more easily accessible in VST plugins, I’d probably not use 3x Osc!
Everything else (except drums)
For everything else, I almost entirely use NES VST. It faithfully emulates the sound of the 2a03 NES sound chip, and has various settings for duty cycles, triangle waves, and noise. I often also use the built-in coarse pitch “LFO” to get the 1 octave pitch shift mentioned above.
To get a wider stereo sound, I’ll have two copies of NES VST panned to each side and, depending on the specific sound I’m trying to create, may use identical settings for each and play different notes to create a stereo harmony, or sometimes play the same note but with different duty cycles or octaves.
The bass line is also made using NES VST, using the triangle waveform. It’s used as plain and simple as possible - monophony, without any pitch or volume adjustments - and all of the variations will be done purely on the piano roll, including volume adjustments, and pitch bends too.
Drums
My drum sound is where things deviate a lot from a specific platform’s sound. You could argue that until now it was a very NES-orientated sound, but the drum samples I used are a mix of C64 SID drum sounds (for the kick and snare), various samples taken from GXSCC - an old midi-to-chiptune bit of software from the early 00’s (links to an unofficial mirror site) - for the hi-hats, the LM1 tom-tom samples, and various lengths of white noise faded to silence for cymbal sounds. Sometimes I’ll also add various EDM-style kick samples when I need a very specific drum sound, and the snare might be layered with a real snare sample that’s been bit-crushed, or something like that.
Due to the fact that my drum sound is so wild and uses samples from all over the place, I don’t offer a download for it.
How I used to make it
The main sound hasn’t changed much for a long time, but in the past I used to add a lot of extra synths and mixer effects to try and make the chiptune sound fuller and wider. In hindsight, I don’t really like how it changed the sound, and took away from the nature of chiptune. For example, nearly every channel had reverb on it, usually subtle, but the vocal’s reverb was quite egregious.
For a while, around 2015-2017, the bass sound was made using a saw wave, which first had a very short, subtle reverb, followed by very heavy distortion. In some aspects I’m quite proud of the sound I made, but that was also around the time I deviated most from chiptune while still calling it chiptune, as I used a whole slew of unrelated synths in addition to the main vocal sound and maybe an arpeggio.
Hopefully you enjoyed this word vomit! I might fill this out more one day, but I don’t really put a lot of time into chiptunes anymore, besides a few covers of songs I really like, maybe a few times a year.