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Best Tracker Tracks - one a day

Festoon

By Festoon
in Retro & Arcade Gaming

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Festoon

Festoon

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Hello, thought it might be a good idea to create a tracker music thread here as an accompaniment to the Game Music track thread - some can be game music, demoscene or tracker generally.

 

Here's one to start that, courtesy of being on the coverdisk of Amiga Format, introduced many to tracking. If you read the comments, the author u41A is commenting.

 

 

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Don Rosco

Don Rosco

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It's made in a style of sequencer called a tracker. Don't ask me how they work, outside of "maths", I don't have an answer. They're very light on resource use, so came in very handy in the 90s when broke ravers couldn't afford fancy computers. There's one DnB producer who still uses an Amiga, plays live shows with it and all.

 

 

Trackers look like this:

 

ftII.png

 

 

One thing i've noticed on a couple of producers, is that once they stopped using a tracker, their music became less interesting to me. I believe Omni Trio stopped after his volume 5 release, and for me, he didn't get anywhere near those first releases. 

 

 

 

Sorry, none of this is remotely game related!

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Vimster

Vimster

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I've been using trackers since I first got one off the cover of CU Amiga in 1991. I still use trackers today, and there are plenty of other people who do too, whether it's Protracker on the Amiga, PC trackers or one for other systems. Plus there are people using tracker modules to DJ tunes, they make regular appearances at demo parties.

 

 

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dumpster

dumpster

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On the day I bought an Amiga I got a handful of random demo disks, including Mahoney and Kaktus Music Disk 2.  Instead of having complete modules this had song data of about 50, all using a combination of the same basic ST-01 samples so they fit on 1 disk.  There were a few absolute bangers on there. Like this lot:

 

 

 

Anyway, this lead to discovering a tune by Uncle Tom of Northstar called Magic Tubes.  Sadly not on Youtube but can be downloaded here:

http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=33145

 

I loved the way, in those early days of Amiga ownership, this song had so much going on.  You can hear the way that elements of the song disappear to make way for another layer. The drum track has heavy guitar in between drum notes. The baseline drops notes now and then to let something else happen. The blocks on screen are very full. There are notes in the main tune that have a harmony by slipping that note between hihats or whatever.  As someone who was making his own music at the time, I was using channel 1 for drums, 2 for bass, three for main tune and 4 for anything else.  Magic Tubes sounded like it had loads more going on. Loved it.

 

When I got a PC I loaded the MOD into an 8 channel tracker and put back as many of the missing notes as I could.  I made a new mix, sadly lost to the mists of hard drive crashes, that I was really proud of.  A full 8 channel expansion of the original, where every instrument had it's own complete clean track.

 

I tried to make my own version again recently using a Workstation. This isn't perfect, it has many bum notes but the feel is there.  I took the MOD file, converted it to Midi, transposed and re-voiced and then replaced the whole drum and bass notes with a drum machine and extra layers. It sounds something like this 

 

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/ocqku

 

There's a talk online by Hoffman dissecting methods used in tracker music and it is really great, I'll see if I can find it.

 

Edit: found it.

 

https://youtu.be/IdbgeFAus0k

 

Check out the last 5 minutes of that video it's awesome. Animations hidden in the note data for rippers to find.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edit :this video is wrong and I can't delete it from the post.ignore this one the coorect one is above.

 

 

 

 

 

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bplus

bplus

Posted
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5 hours ago, Don Rosco said:

It's made in a style of sequencer called a tracker. Don't ask me how they work, outside of "maths", I don't have an answer. They're very light on resource use, so came in very handy in the 90s when broke ravers couldn't afford fancy computers. There's one DnB producer who still uses an Amiga, plays live shows with it and all.

 

 

Trackers look like this:

 

ftII.png

 

 

One thing i've noticed on a couple of producers, is that once they stopped using a tracker, their music became less interesting to me. I believe Omni Trio stopped after his volume 5 release, and for me, he didn't get anywhere near those first releases. 

 

 

 

Sorry, none of this is remotely game related!

Thats fascinating!

 

I think unreal tournament has one of the best sound tracks of all time. I have it ripped from a cd version of the sound track. Found this on you tube, skip to about 49 mins in

 

 

 

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bplus

bplus

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3 hours ago, Wiper said:

It still pleases me to note that the best video game soundtrack of 2000 was entirely composed in a (DOS-based) tracker:

 

 

And what the later Deus ex games completely missed. That original sound track completely suited the atmosphere of the game or made the atmosphere

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Festoon

Festoon

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Great stuff been posted here so far, really cool - Hoffman's talk is great and the Deus Ex and Unreal soundtracks are high points of the form, if you ask me.

 

Here's a real unusual one. This track was on Atari ST, as part of a piece of software called Mandel-Boot which, *sigh*, displayed a mandelbrot set as you booted your ST for some reason. BUT! The installer had a track that was a real surprise to ST users, as the ST only had a shitty music chip and couldn't really handle samples well. This was a tracker tune that was a real revelation for many.

 

 

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elyuw

elyuw

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I got this on a floppy in the post (along with 10 disks full of others) from my mate in 1990 or 1991, loved it ever since. We were both Atari ST users, but he'd gone to Uni and clearly met an Amiga user. But also somehow someone had managed to get NoiseTracker ported and working on the ST (which I'm surprised was/is possible) so I was able to enjoy all these MODs for myself.

 

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