Trackers are underrated. In a way, I'm a bit sad that most of the time I see them mentioned, it seems to be in a historical context.
Modern production tools have mostly settled on the combination of pianoroll, automation curves, and visual placement of samples on the project timeline. That's great for some types of music, but becomes really awkward in other cases. As a basic example, making a breakbeat sequence makes pretty much no sense with the above interface, but is perfectly represented by the "series of commands" approach of a tracker. I frequently go back to Buzz for that kind of thing (and was happy to see it mentioned in the video).
I find Buzz a joy to use as a programmable / repeatable mixer, too. I love the tracker's ability to record knob/slider positions and play it back faithfully. Quantized recordings of parameters just make so much sense to me.
I think about my Buzz files as the "source code" that will eventually be mixed-down to PCM audio. I can always go back to the "source" if I want to make modifications and re-render. I think of it a little like non-destructive editing layers in a bitmap editor, or like editing graphics in a vector format and rendering-down to raster for presentation.
What I missed in buzz was a way to apply tracker commands (shift, reverse, transpose and so on) to patterns, because I always toyed with the synths, hardly ever using samples at all (where tracker commands are traditionally applied to).
I eventually dropped out of my music dabbling phase endlessly failing at building a parser/interpreter/editor for a text-based notation syntax (as an alternative to the spreadsheet of trackers) that would do away with the spreadsheed format of trackers and add multiple levels of "notation controlling notation" for a deliberately quirky macro language (all variables were stacks and those stacks eventually degenerate into ringbuffers when pushed more than popped). It would have existed on peer ctrl level (or as a midi source if pivoted to standalone) which I believe would have been quite unique, because even CucK seems to be more focused on synthesis than on notation.
Quite possible that all or at least most of those are in there somewhere as a tiny little feature subset, I've never used it.
But at least example screenshots seem to be quite eager to dive down to the synthesis level. I'm sure that you could use it to just output midi events but the same could be said about e.g. Python or Java or Rust and I wouldn't call those notation syntax either. It would have been an attempt to retain as much of established tracker ergonomics as possible while abandoning the spreadsheet-lines-as-time metaphor.
I got myself a Polyend tracker last year, and love it (https://polyend.com/tracker/). Great for the above reasons as a tracker, but also great to get away from the computer.
If your in the niche though where a tracker makes sense, they're a god send.
I actually really wanted to use anything but a tracker, specifically Ableton, and kept trying to force myself to like it, even going so far as buying the full version of Ableton (the day before I got made redundant as well, not my finest purchase). The main reason is that I prefer synthesis to samples, though I think both the VST market and the sample market are a bit broken at the moment (VST's have become like node modules, and its getting harder to find samples of individual instrument notes rather than just loops).
That all being said, I kept coming back to Renoise as a DAW that just made sense in a way the piano roll never did.
Not taking anything away from trackers but DAWs are a lot easier to grok for the average musician.
Take your breakbeat example, most DAWs also have a drum machine style layout which allows you to arrange samples in a more intuitive way than with a piano roll while still offering a visual layout that means something to the average musician.
In fact ironically both the piano roll and drum machine layouts are older than trackers. But their birth is from hardware instruments rather than software. Thus really emphasising how familiar they are to your average musician.
The piano roll is not really "intuitive to the average musician", though. Most musicians would rather use ordinary sheet music notation, which was also supported in some trackers (like OctaMED Pro).
While that's true for some, I think you're overestimating the number of musicians that can read sheet music or underestimating the number of genres out there made up of self-taught musicians.
Quite frankly, if the piano roll was really that counter-intuitive as you make out, then it wouldn't be the norm in DAWs because the creative folk would naturally prefer to use Trackers or sheet music.
I remember using Buzz back when I was in university around the turn of the century. Lots of great memories with that one.
I came across an excellent modern alternative when my kids started getting into electronic music. It’s called SunVox [0]. Still under active development and runs on just about anything! Lots of fun!
Same here. I wish I still had some of the tracks I wrote in Buzz 20 years ago. I had a way better creative ear for music back then. I tried SunVox but I can't quite get the same inspiration that I had.
I'm using Elektron instruments these days. They're very similar to trackers, but swap the column view for fixed, hardware step and track select buttons. Really tactile, very fast and fun.
Ahoy might be one of my favorite creators on youtube. His production value is truly 'broadcast quality' while simultaneously including content that is so much more interesting and in depth than you'd ever see on television.
Agree. Don't even remember how I discovered the channel, but it's one of those "upload rarely/infrequently but high quality". Enjoyed every single video so far. Only time I flinched was when he tried to pronounce "64'er" in this one. ;-)
Trackers are making a comeback: check out M8 Tracker, a fantastic hardware device, celebrated by the music making community. https://dirtywave.com (it's in very high demand and sold out quickly every time a new batch is available)
addendum: You can run this M8 Tracker as a "headless" version with a Teensy 4.1 on your computer. https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware
(might be a good option for tracker fans since this hardware is really "hard to get" at the moment.) M8 Tracker seems like a perfect device. In the meantime, you can try the above DIY version and practice with that.
Impulse Tracker was such a hugely influential part of my younger years. Met some great people in the local scene who’d dial in to a BBS to share IT files and samples, give advice and feedback to each other, etc.
I still use OpenMPT to listen to old IT files or play with some new track ideas every now and then, but nothing like the hours-and-hours-a-day feverish obsession of back then.
Pretty awesome, thanks. I've been bingeing on retro computing documentaries, and this is right up with the best of them.
If anyone else is interested, I'd heartily recommend:
- The entire "From Bedrooms to Billions" documentary series (3x2h pieces, spanning the UK computing scene, the Amiga and the PlayStation, with several discussions on game music and demoscene)
- "The Chiptune Story", which covers the SID chip and the Amiga (there's also "The Commodore Story")
Different people used different tools, that's absolutely true. My claim is that trackers played a major role as an instrument in the development of that contemporary style.
many musicians use a stack - I sure do. It's a bunch of tools I somehow make work together.
Unless we can track down interviews with the people, I think all we have are educated guesses. It is true to say however, that these days, Amigas sell for thousands of dollars (such as https://ebay.com/itm/224602338650) because modern musicians want to use vintage tracker software in music production.
I don't know if the supersaw was built in trackers or not, but you can use it in tracker music by pre-recording the sample and playing it back at various pitches.
A real supersaw uses free-running oscillators, so the phase between them varies with each note. This means the constructive and destructive interference between them is different each time, subtly varying the timbre, which you lose if you play the same sample each time.
re. "their instrument banks were effectively hard-coded", the Creative Music System was a PSG-like chip with only square waves and no sample ROM at all, the AdLib was a FM synthesizer with no ROM banks either (though some MIDI banks which sounded nothing like sample-based MIDI players like the SC-55), and the GUS had a mix of ROM and RAM (and I don't think it targeted General MIDI either). I don't see any reason why any of these chips would be incompatible with trackers, and I do know the AdLib had multiple trackers historically and today (Reality Adlib Tracker, Adlib Tracker II, ScreamTracker 3, and more recently OpenMPT), though I think "feeding MIDIs through per-game custom soundbanks" was more common in video games, and AFAIK the GUS had more MIDI-based composing tools than trackers. Note that I don't know much about the CMS and GUS, and I have more experience with how Adlib music is composed/played today than in the 1990s.
My recollection is that while some PC sound cards of the era technically supported arbitrary FM and/or wavetable synthesis, it was difficult or impossible to get any custom sounds out of the MIDI side of them. I remember there typically being the General MIDI sound set, and maybe some custom presets on the higher-end cards. The big exception I ran into was the Yamaha DB50XG, which had an unbelievable (for the era/price) synthesis engine, but I had to buy third-party software to customize the instruments. I heard stories that implied vaguely similar things about the Gravis Ultrasound, but never owned one myself.
I remember also that ScreamTracker was able to use Yamaha OPL series FM synthesizers, and the author detested MIDI because it did not give enough control over instrument acoustics.
In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks.
Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is not an issue, but getting a hold of any useful samples is. Typically, it involves either spending money (which is fine, I guess, but maybe not if you really just want to appeal to your nostalgia) or painfully wading through online archives of single sound samples in the hope of eventually gathering enough to create your own sample bank. That's a cumbersome process though, that would take toooo long for someone who just wants to casually try out a tracker again.
In the olden days, and maybe that was just because the Amiga trackers I had came from less than official sources, always came with at least one substantial sample bank included. Probably not the greatest samples, but you got a decent amount of bass sounds, some drums (kicks, snares, hihats) and some lead instruments. Granted, there were also many garbage sounds that you could probably never use (I remember samples from Star Wars movies, etc...) but besides those, there were enough actual musical sounds/instruments that you could use to make your own songs.
Like I said above, maybe it's just that I'm not looking in the right places, and I really hope that I'm just doing it wrong. So if you know how where to get samples for any tracker program (like, a comprehensive mixed set, not just single samples and not just a bank of 1024 bass sounds or so), please post a link.
There's always the way how I got most of my samples at the time: Extract them from your mod collection. The downside is, you'll have to name and organise them yourself, as the sample names are usually (ab)used for text, ascii art, and maybe greetings.
Maybe not quite what you're after, but Bassoon Tracker is written in Javascript, runs in a webpage without installation and has access to thousands of mod files in modarchive and modules.pl, including their samples:
If you wanna be a traditionalist then search for “st-01 adf”. Try other numbers instead of 01. That should find you both the sounds that came with the original Soundtracker and a bunch of peoples’ personal collections that they posted.
Love to see this here, a very well researched video!
It was an awesome scene, I used to put out jungle and trip hop tracks on Mono211/Monotonik/Voodoo and a couple of other mod labels back in the day.
Everything was free, in an era where studio time and studio equipment was really expensive it was mind-blowing to be able to do it with just a PC, all in software. Lots of friendly competition between artists and the file format was such that you could open a mod and see exactly how it was put together, and reuse the samples if you wanted to. Gave birth to many people's careers in music and software!
Fun fact, VLC and ffmpeg have fantastic support for most classic tracker formats. This opens up literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of songs to listeners.
I really wish modern media servers (e.g. Plex) that are built on ffmpeg would support tracker formats since it's basically "free" for them.
Also modern musicians working with modern trackers like Renoise work very heavily with VSTi instead of just samples. Though trackers really give an absolutely incredible amount of expressiveness to sample playback that I don't really think anything else can quite match.
Caution: VLC uses libmodplug on Windows (and probably macOS), which is barely maintained these days and plays many modules incorrectly. Many Linux distributions replace libmodplug with an emulation layer that lets libopenmpt do the actual decoding and playback, though, so module playback through VLC is much more accurate on those platforms.
Disclaimer: I'm developing OpenMPT and libopenmpt.
Thanks so much for the info! OpenMPT/libopenmpt has hands down the best rendering of these classic formats that I'm aware of. It's helped me recover "lost" songs many times.
Excellent video! While looking at the machine code listing from the C=64 German magazine from the 80s, I realized once more that there was an extra, ninth column for the hex code, which was quite upsetting for me as kid (I think it might even have slightly slowed down my learning of 6502 programming).. turns out it was a checksum code of course!
Obligatory plug for Renoise [1], the best modern tracker. It supports VSTs and AUs and is my favorite composition tool. I've been a happy customer for a decade and a half. My production breakdown these days tends to be 70% Renoise 30% Logic.
It's also sort of the tracker that most of the PC demo scene has settled on. Many of the ultra tiny synths meant for 4kb demo production only really work as vsti in Renoise.
Good content. Covers the Amiga heavily, then naturally the PC. But it felt like Atari was massively glossed over. Sure they mentioned MIDI and Cubase, and sure the Amiga was a more powerful machine. However Atari was used heavily for music production as well and there were plenty of trackers available for that too.
Modern production tools have mostly settled on the combination of pianoroll, automation curves, and visual placement of samples on the project timeline. That's great for some types of music, but becomes really awkward in other cases. As a basic example, making a breakbeat sequence makes pretty much no sense with the above interface, but is perfectly represented by the "series of commands" approach of a tracker. I frequently go back to Buzz for that kind of thing (and was happy to see it mentioned in the video).