Here's some tracker music I made - 22/09/24
I was browsing through my files today, when I decided to listen to what I had in "~/Music/TrackerStuff/", the directory contained
a couple songs I made a year ago with Schism Tracker, a mod tracker.
Now I'm not really qualified to tell you the rich history of mod trackers and tracker music, considering I didn't even start existing until
the 2000s, if you want to learn, then watch this video by Ahoy!.
The main thing that sets mod trackers apart from modern music production software is its interface. Each instrument and sample has
its own (typically monophonic) channel, and notes are placed in a grid that goes from top to bottom. Each note can be modified with effects
like volume or panning, which are usually specified with one letter, and the value of these effects are written in hexadecimal.
The other notable thing about the interface is that it's mainly keyboard-driven, allowing experienced users to work extremely fast, although
I'm nowhere near that level.
At the time, I got curious about trackers when I was discovering the demoscene, the thing I admired most was the capacity of the people in
the demoscene to make cool shit with strict hardware limitations since, for most of my life, I only had horrible low-end computers that
couldn't run anything, where I considered gaming at a stable 30 FPS a blessing and a luxury.
But enough about that, let's talk about the music I made!
There are only three .it files in the TrackerStuff directory, named "FirstSong.it", "Second Song.it" and "FAST!!!.it". We will only be
talking about the first two since "FAST!!!" is an absolutely abominable attempt at speedcore/breakcore that is painful to listen to :)
Pretty much all the samples I use, I have downloaded from a collection of old 90s sample CDs on archive.org that has since been taken down
for copyright reasons, most likely.
For both of these songs, I tried to go for a spooky, surreal, RPG-Maker game sorta vibe.
Here is "FirstSong", it's fairly barebones, the pads are just ascending
chromatically, but I still think the bass and the drums are pretty groovy and tight, plus I like it when the hi-hats get more intricate.
For "Second Song", I tried to tell a bit more of a story, where the mood
goes from eerie, to melancholic, determined, before finally breaking down at the end.
I like how "squelchy" the full drum loop sounds due to being slowed down, and the idea of alternating between cutting the main samples off/on
and playing them in full, I find helpful in preventing the track from being too monotonous.
Also I added a spooky little easter egg in the pattern editor at the end, I still find it pretty neat!
Making music is pretty fun.