tgies | PSA/tgies going on about trackers (Reply)

Everybody who was just trying to talk to me on AIM: It's broke, sorry. I was messing with some QoS stuff here and I managed to break AIM horribly because I am hilarious. I'll get back to you as soon as I fix my router.

So for some reason I'm sitting here wishing it was 1995 again. I would really like to be able to hold impromptu tracking competitions, as people once did in #trax and such. Does anyone who reads this still do trax? I use FastTracker 2 and OpenMPT all the time, sometimes just because I enjoy the particular eccentricities of the medium and sometimes because it's a quick way to bang out a demo.

Even with all this fancy new shit I have, and the Real Instruments and everything, there's something fun and rewarding about taking a few small samples and making this tiny (on the order of 80 kilobytes, often) little self-contained Unit of Music.

The constraints of the medium also have some interesting results. One doesn't really have the opportunity to worry about production at all — there is no facility for in-depth mixing; no compressors, EQs, or reverb sends — so that attention winds up getting focused on the dynamics of the music instead. When making music in trackers, I tend to turn out arguably more musically detailed work — melodies are meticulously ornamented; dynamics and articulations are more detailed than most sequencers or real instruments even allow for, with multifarious and unusual affectations capturing the exact dynamics I hear in my head; long freestyle chord progressions with elaborate experimental harmonies. I noodle around in a tracker (or, of course, with my harp, organ, keyboards, ocarina, or accordion) when I feel like I'm Losin' the Music, because it forces me to stop twiddling pretend computer knobs in an attempt to find the ideal Top 40 equalization to apply to this mediocre bassline, and start actually writing music. I can then take the better of these ideas and apply them back in the land of limiters and harmonic exciters. It's a bit like just picking up an instrument and playing, only it remembers what you've just played and you can go back and change it and keep building upon it until you've evolved a catchy two-bar rock hook into an entire classical piece.

Going off on a tangent for a moment, I feel like those same limitations and eccentricities served as a sort of de facto quality control. It was not ever possible to just install a tracker and bang out some crap in eight minutes without really learning the software and foist it upon an unsuspecting Internet. One certainly had to crack open a manual and look at a few other people's modules, at the very least, and there were no default included patches or construction kits or whatever. These days, anyone can download FL Studio, load up one of the horrible "template" projects intended exactly for this loathsome purpose (why do they have those? this seems like a stupid idea!), and click buttons and get noise, just like that. Ten minutes later, bam, we have a rave track. Ship it. I certainly like the idea of all these fancy tools of self-expression being available to everyone, but the no-effort shit certainly isn't fun to listen to. Everyone wants to be an Internet DJ or hip-hop star or get their iNdIe CrEd, no basic competence asked or given. And, for God's sake, the next time I hear an otherwise decent and inventive piece of music which uses the same FL demo samples I've heard a million times before, I am going to throw up.

There's definitely a nostalgia thing there for me too. My first experience making a serious effort at music was in 1995, with a commercial ProTracker ripoff called Creative Labs Instrument Editor. We had recently gotten a crappy keyboard, and I dove into it like I dive into most things, soon realizing that our horrible 386 computer was a pretty decent way to explore my ideas in a more structured setting. Back then, everything was new and amazing, I didn't know enough to find anything terribly objectionable about anything I made, and I could easily just lose myself in trying to figure out How To Music, without another care in the world. If, while using FastTracker 2, I squint just right, it's 1995 again.

Whatever the reason, I find trackers pretty interesting, as obsolete and clunky as they are, and I can't see myself shutting up about them any day soon.

It would be fun to hold a stupid 24h compo or something, if anybody's interested.