Here’s a neat thing: Reverberations: an 8-bit approach to J.S. Bach
It struck me that, at least in theory, organ pipes should generate quite primitive sound waves. If so, how come a church organ doesn’t sound like a chip tune, which is also built up from simple waveforms? Well, actually it will, if you remove the church. And if you connect a Commodore 64 home computer to a loudspeaker in a large hall, it will sound like an organ.
Since the 80s, nearly every digital keyboard ever sold has had some kind of half-decent pipe organ preset, if not several — though maybe let down a little bit by faked reverb, which then starts to run into polyphony limitations. It turns out if you use a good convolution reverb, and a human performance rather than on-the-grid sequencing, even the SID chip in the Commodore 64 (or two of them anyway, for 6-note polyphony) can do a convincing job.
This is probably the least chiptunes-sounding music I’ve ever heard from the C64. I’ve often thought that there aren’t really any bad synthesizers, it all comes down to how you use them. (The SID chip was not bad for its time and price, particularly compared to the primitive beeps other computers and video game consoles had then, and is still prized/fetishized by some. It’s just a tall order for it to compete with modern synths, or other analog synths that aren’t crammed onto a single chip with 1981 technology. I’m not really into the sound of its filter compared to many other offerings, for instance. And it’s super buggy and quirky.)