MusicRadar

A is for… AY-3-8910

The AY-3-8910 is a sound chip designed by General Instruments and famously used in the ZX Spectrum 128 and Amstrad CPC.

It offers three channels of sound, each able to play a square wave with filtered noise optionally mixed in. There's also a single volume LFO/envelope that can be applied to any or none of the channels - chip musicians exploit this by setting it to very fast LFO speeds, to create triangle-style waveforms, or to cause crude ring modulation with the square waves.

AY Riders are a group producing music exclusively using the AY chip, while ProjectAY collates many AY tunes in one place.