Everything about this makes me giddy with excitement, from the cursor to the faded out numbers in the digital display. I "miss" these times, yet I was born too late to enjoy it in real time. I hope the demoscene lives on forever and we keep seeing it pop up in future tech.
When I opened it I swear I got teary eyed. Things were so much harder that when you finally got something decent it just made you feel like you were king of the nerd hill.
I was bummed when I clicked on "Space song" thinking "Cool, they have the demo tune by the Silents!" and got something else instead. Luckily, it took just a few clicks to get to the real thing by Jesper Kyd (who later scored Hitman and Assassin's Creed):
> Things were so much harder that when you finally got something decent it just made you feel like you were king of the nerd hill.
I first started making music using a tracker (PlayerPRO on the Mac) before later moving to Pro Tools and Reason, and I actually found it much easier to finish songs using a tracker. The quality wasn't as good, but the limitations and structure helped me get a song done. With Reason, I find myself just twiddling knobs for hours and at the end of the day all I have is a few bars of something.
Though I agree about the structure (and keyboard shortcuts) being helpful, derping around endless is still how I use trackers.. and after hating it for a long time, I actually now love it to not ever consider anything "finished", and trackers are perfect for that.
Instead of a mess of giant files of things bounced from various programs or even hardware, it's just a file... and though with Renoise the VST matter a lot, since I still have those I still can load up and work on things I made over a decade ago. I can try to touch it up some, or steal parts I like to make something new, with filesizes ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to a few dozen megabytes at most. That's my bliss. I know the listener doesn't and shouldn't care about that, but it's a trade-off I make gladly. I think my music became much simpler, too, maybe "worse", but more fun for me, because instead of layering instruments that play the same melody in another octave and a lot of effects, I now remove things with equal glee as I add them with. The less I use to achieve something I can shake my butt to, the more I like it... having a rich sound is nice, but seeing all columns on one screen is awesome, as is rendering a 5 minute song in 20 seconds instead of 3 minutes. I like the agility of this one-person studio that starts up in like 1 second too much, and even if I had the ability to master well, I wouldn't want to render tracks from Renoise to then master them in another program. Other than denoising samples, I do it all in Renoise. Considering what other people are doing with it and the legacy of tracking in general, I don't feel like a king of the nerd hill though, but I do feel like the captain of my bathtub.
I recommend it to everybody, and I recommend sticking through years of feeling completely useless at it. It's what I did, and I think if you like music enough to enjoy it, and if you are making it to entertain yourself, practice might not make you perfect, but it will gift you some things you wouldn't have thought you have in you. As far as hobbies go, this is like owning a dog, it does everybody good (should they have any affinity for it at all, that is). I say that because a friend of mine thinks making music is somehow translating the music we can compose in our heads into reality, and at least for me, that's not the case. I can sing in the shower, or "think music", but when I sit down with a tracker, I'm still surprised by the results, like, I didn't come up with this, I just found it. I think the key is to not be shy... if in doubt, just don't show it to anyone (yet), but do make music regardless. It's one of the most wonderful things you can do with a computer, IMO.
> derping around endless is still how I use trackers.. and after hating it for a long time, I actually now love it to not ever consider anything "finished", and trackers are perfect for that.
I've definitely had many satisfying evenings twiddling knobs in Reason, but after a while it loses its fun for me if I don't feel I'm eventually getting to something worth sharing with others.
> I say that because a friend of mine thinks making music is somehow translating the music we can compose in our heads into reality, and at least for me, that's not the case. I can sing in the shower, or "think music", but when I sit down with a tracker, I'm still surprised by the results, like, I didn't come up with this, I just found it.
Yes, I absolutely agree that the instrument affects the music in profound ways. Music is such a physical act that what you'd compose with a keyboard (piano or typewriter) is different than what you'd compose with a guitar in your hands instead.
One thing that really helped me is to realize that many of my favorite songs are probably not that special to most people. This is, no joke, still one of my favorite little ditties:
I actually sometimes still listen and maybe even dance to the Amiga version of this ^^ And I'm not saying this isn't a great song, musically, but most people wouldn't want to hear this on the radio or in a club, while I would absolutely go apeshit if that ever happened. I know having heard it first as a kid is a part of it, but the end result matters. I love this tune, even though most normal people might not enjoy it, and would at least prefer "normal instruments". (And don't even get me started on L.F.F. by 4mat :D)
So I try to shift my standard from "is this really good, does this make me look awesome", to "is this too embarrassing, or really just a pointless amusical waste of time", and try to raise the bar for what embarrasses me... because even something I might not like that much, might be the jam for someone else, who knows. What would I tell that imaginary person, that they never got to hear their jam, because I was afraid of what other people might think of it? I also know songs where I like the demo or some dirty live version much more than the perfectly produced studio version, so I try to tell myself, the more the merrier.
I think what really helped in my case is that it all became coupled with lyrics that are either very personal or very political, and it took me so much.. wrestling, not being able to sleep well doing it, but also not being able to let it go for good... and also the world (and rap music) becoming a lot more crazy, and probably me getting older, to become less inhibited -- and being embarrassed about too simple music was completely overshadowed by that. It used to be a concern but it got lost along the trek :) And I also discovered that as far as "beats" go, less really is more, at least, very little is more than enough. The same goes for chip style melodies, and those two are all I need to be happy musically, basically forever.
Well, that and compos with small sample packs becoming more of a thing again. Nothing more fun than that IMO :)
Oh man, this is amazing. I'm teary-eyed with nostalgia, too.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the demoscene and tracker music, here are some recommended old-school tunes to spin up to get a feel for the art at the time. (Someone more in touch than me will have to lead you to the new school!) Just keep in mind the technological limitations on some of these songs: 4 channels, maybe 100k all-in for such wonderful music. Truly amazing.
My recommendations, running from 1986-1993ish:
Karsten Obarski - Crystal Hammer
Firefox - Galaxy 2
Uncle Tom - Poseidon
Jester - Elysium
Captain - Space Debris
Tip + Firefox - Enigma
Mantronix - Act Of Impulse
4-mat - Red Sector Theme
Romeo Knight - Cream Of The Earth
Greg - Odyssey Part 2
Jugi - Onward Ride
Laxity - Desert Dream
Damn - this player is awesome; I was never someone who could make tracker music, but I loved to listen to it back in the day on my Amigas (both of which I still own). Getting new MODs from Fred Fish and other ways was always a treat.
Ah...and Octamed...this has brought a touch of nostalgia, etc - for me. Those times are long past, but a bit of them can still be enjoyed with this software.
Catch that Goblin was amazing, when it started playing at the partyplace, everyone sort of stopped not paying attention to the compo, and turned their heads with a "wtf" face. IIRC some of the samples got Skaven in trouble with Disney.
Audiomonster's music on Ice by TSL was phenomenal. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JaG1vIkmhk4 the first track was worth removing the disk to be able to listen the whole thing. I believe he now scores movie soundtracks.
I wanted to also link Economy 5 by XTD, the hidden track for Technological Death by Mad Elks IIRC, but the player seems to choke on the hashes, or I did something wrong: http://modland.com/pub/modules/Protracker/XTD/
I coded a modular software synthesizer as my final year project in high school, without any previous knowledge of digital signal processing. C++ with a simple GTK+ user interface, sound output via JACK, and MIDI input via ALSA.
The difficulty of just generating correct square waves really surprised me. I thought you would just flip between 1 and -1 at the desired frequency, but of course that sounds awful because of aliasing. So I followed the paper by Tim Stilson and Julius Smith, Alias-Free Digital Synthesis of Classic Analog Waveforms, which presents the "band-limited impulse train" method, and got it working nicely.
Then I added a simple delay line, a convolution reverb, a resonant low-pass filter, a flanger, a compressor, all pluggable through the UI. That project was one of the most educational and fun months I've spent in my whole life... Playing a synth that you understand from the waveform level is really cool!
Some other guys in my class built an electric guitar which is also cool... Maybe I'd be more interested in that kind of project now that coding is my day job...
This isn't just some subtle implementation detail; the aliasing noise is obvious and IMO it's an important part of the sound. I personally like it, because it adds some extra high frequency content that would otherwise be lacking in many Amiga modules because of low quality samples. libopenmpt supports Amiga-style resampling with the render.resampler.emulate_amiga option. Although it's not documented in the man page, you can enable it in openmpt123:
> Additionally, it is possible to engage a low-pass 12 dB/oct Butterworth filter tuned at approximately 3.2 kHz by turning the Amiga power LED brighter with a special protracker command.
This didn't happen on the earliest Amigas. It just changed the power LED brightness.
I had one game (Psygnosis "Baal", otherwise fairly unmemorable) that flickered the LED with the beat of the title track just because it looked cool. It sounded awful on anything besides an A1000.
This is a classic "you ran out of pins / wanted a convenient debug feature, didn't you" design indication.
I'm slightly unclear on what the Paula pulse train would have looked like; is it what would normally be called a "1-bit DAC", or is it PWM at the PAL frequency?
IIRC when the machine crashed while playing sound, with the well-known blinking of the Power LED, you could hear the filter going on and off, too. And most games that had polished music turned the filter off.
I graduated from Amiga trackers to a full fledged studio, with hardware mixers, synths, effect racks etc. And then, years later, back again to just a computer. Full circle.
I messed around with the Amiga trackers back in the day. When I look at the software available today, e.g. on my iPad, I have a hard time getting anything useful out of it. Which software are you using now?
True, but SunVox is so much more than just a tracker. In my experience with (PC) trackers they rely mostly on modifying pre-recorded samples. SV on the other hand allows you to chain together a crazy array of synth modules to produce sounds "from scratch".
Well there's Renoise, there's Jeskola's Buzz (the changelog starts at 2008 but I'm sure I used it well before that), Noise Trekker had a synth as early as 1999. Adlib Tracker? You're still right in that for the most part, for a long time, tracking on the PC meant FastTracker or ScreamTracker, and those just used samples. But we've come a long way since then in the early 2000s.
Buzz was around in 1999 (I think - I first used it in 2000/2001) but circa 2001 the coder had a hard disk crash and lost his code, and finally resumed work on it in 2008 from a much older codebase or possibly from scratch. I assume that's part of why the changelog starts in 2008.
I personally have left trackers. They are fun but the learning curve! I use Waveform 9 from Tracktion. (Tracktion open sourced the engine and it works on Linux, Win and Mac.
This is the fastest DAW from nothing to something like a song, and for people just starting it has pretty much everything you need to make some kind of song. https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform
Post trackers, I've been using Cubase since it was delivered on a single Floppy disk. Had about 13 years of silence (sold my gear, had kids) and then got back to it a couple years ago (shameless plug: https://soundcloud.com/earlofwoffington).
Also super eerie to listen to tunes I wrote in 1999 when I was sixteen on a mobile browser 20 years later.
That said, there's some things not entirely right with the XM mixing. Something with the volume or the effects is off here or there, haven't pinpointed yet. Some songs sound perfect, others sound totally wrong. Nothing a PR or two won't fix I bet :)
Writing a .mod player is a fun recreational programming project. I kind of want to get an Amiga so I can hear the sound of the Paula chip doing resampling by changing the audio clock rate instead of my PC doing digital resampling to 48kHz.
I've been trying to get into trackers for sequencing for a while, but the learning curve is very steep. Has anyone got resources to learn how to sequence one of these beasts with a keyboard? They seem to be the key to making lots and lots of intricate breakbeats.
With "keyboard" you mean, a musicians keyboard, right? I assume you need a midi interface to the software but I don't know of any tracker that supports midi.
My personal favourite tracker is Fast Tracker II, but it also don't support midi. However, it has some really good documentation that might help you get into working with trackers:
Actually my understanding is that you can use a computer keyboard to very rapidly enter lots of notes quickly and precisely without relying on your own human limitations as you would with a musical keyboard. I've seen it billed as sort of like Vi for music.
Yes, I'm pretty sure you can set FT2 in a record mode and then "play" notes on your computer keyboard, but I don't think that's what OP is asking.
How I understand OP's question is; you make a drum pattern in FT2 which you can trigger to play by pressing a key on a musical keyboard. I think the context of OP's question is for during a live/real-time performance.
Not only has the author collected a great library of classic mod files to play back, they compiled a fantastic starter library of mod samples for composing new work. These have such a delightfully retro sound to them, I'd love to use them in other software as well, such as the sampler in my primary DAW – anyone know how to extract a WAV file from these vintage Amiga DMS archives?
The "immersive experience" would have that cursor move at a solid 60FPS and negligible latency. Amiga had hardware sprites, and even software-managed sprites had comparable performance.
This tracker seems to resemble a PC tracker such as Fast Tracker II. Did Amiga play 16bit 32 channel XM files? Hardware mouse cursors on PC were fast, software (custom graphics cursors) were much slower.
I love this. Like many people here, I mucked around with modules on the Amiga using OctoMED. I could never match the great songs that came with the games and demo of the time but I had a lot of fun.
This brings back memories. For the life of me though, I cannot remember what the music format was that I could use to play background music in turbo pascal. Happy days.
I did that for years, too :) On the Amiga, that's all I did music wise, rip modules (I still miss that) and listen to / look at them, first in trackers and then with EaglePlayer and DeliTracker and their visualizations. Then on the PC, I made painfully short stubs, like 10-30 seconds, for a long time, with FastTracker (painful because I just didn't know how to make them longer, they were little rhythmic or melodic figures I guess). Then I got into Renoise, and I guess for the most part sampled and looped things I liked, and added speech samples to that. If I count from the first moment I fell in love with Protracker at age 11 or so, and me making something I would call a song in my 20s, it took me over a decade to even begin sucking at music, before that it wasn't even music. And I feel I owe so much to the Amiga, and the people who made music for it, and cared about playing back music for it.
Quite true, in spite of favouring native over Web when given the option, it is demos like this that show how much we have evolved and make me reassess the current state.
I am really impressed by the responsive layout -- the UI adapts to different window sizes! Nice touch :)
Some favorite modules to check out. First link is link to modarchive site, second link is direct link to Bassoon Tracker with the module pre-populated so you can listen instantly! So handy!
Unfortunate some mega favorites like Skaven's "The Alchemist"[0] and Vincenzo's remix of 2nd Reality[1] are Impulse Tracker modules and won't play in Bassoon Tracker. Maybe .it support will be added? :)
Everything about this makes me giddy with excitement, from the cursor to the faded out numbers in the digital display. I "miss" these times, yet I was born too late to enjoy it in real time. I hope the demoscene lives on forever and we keep seeing it pop up in future tech.