Music Trackers: A Brief History
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- Опубліковано 1 лип 2024
- Trackers have been a staple of music production and videogame history since the late 80's. But what are they? Why do they exist?
My bandcamp:
idaidaida.bandcamp.com/
pUwUlsewave invite link:
puwulsewave.gay/discord
Some other places you can find me and support my work:
/ imathrowawaylol
spacehey.com/deer
idaidaida.itch.io/
Music:
0:00 ida - funky lesbians
0:18 ida - chasing sunlight
0:42 ??? - occ-san-geen
1:21 Bobby Prince - At Doom's Gate
1:39 ida - ghjghfgjhjhfjh
2:08 Patrick Phelan - Lotus III
2:24 Tim Wright - Full Title
2:40 Alexander Brandon - Carrotus
2:56 Purple Motion - Hard Metal
3:01 Kenny Chou - Menu
3:16 Purple Motion - UnreaL
3:26 ida - droog
3:51 Bay Tremore - rockin' steady
4:08 Urban Shakedown - Some Justice '94
4:21 Aphex Twin - Vordhosbn
4:29 ida - funky lesbians (LVS ost)
5:37 ida - funkyshittt
Video sources:
docs.google.com/document/d/1U...
#pUwUlsewave
© 2021 SVL
*some additional notes about this video:*
- i mentioned OpenMPT over Renoise because Renoise basically has no s3xmodit support from what i know. this video is all about the s3xmodit formats so it wouldn't make sense to recommend a tracker that can't do anything with them. as far as i know, it is able to open them but it just converts them to its own format, and you can't save any s3xmodit files with it.
- i didn't mention FastTracker/MilkyTracker mostly because this video was made from my own experiences with trackers and i basically have never used either of them before, so i overlooked them. sorry!
- yes, occ-san-geen has an artist. no, i'm not going to give credit to someone whose artist name is a racial slur. the module itself doesn't have an artist name embedded anywhere in it, so most people think it's uncredited, which i think is a much better angle to go with than having to credit this artist.
- from what i remember from reading the page that i found it on, the song i used during the Shadow of the Beast II segment was made for the game's soundtrack, but it went unused. i really liked the vibe of it and how it utilizes guitar samples, so i decided to include it in the video, even though i don't think it was directly a part of the game.
- this video was specifically made to bring across all this information in an incredibly bite-sized way. most of the information used in it just came from my own personal experience with using trackers for over a decade, and additionally i probably must have sourced Wikipedia and various tracker music resources on the internet such as The Mod Archive or Amiga Music Preservation. as such, i wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of things i didn't cover - FastTracker missing from the video being one of those things. there's Ahoy's video "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" which does a much better job at going in-depth about the history of trackers, but that video is also 40 minutes long and it has a completely different scope than my video. i mostly made this to quickly educate people on the history of trackers, using fancy visuals and graphics to bring across the general *idea* of how trackers came to be and how they are used. it wasn't really meant to be super in-depth; if you want that, i can highly recommend checking out Ahoy's video on the topic. :)
ua-cam.com/video/roBkg-iPrbw/v-deo.html
- i am not a guy, stop calling me a guy, thank you
I made an album between 1994 and 1998 when I was a teenager. I used a Mac IIsi and a mod tracker called 'Meditor'. I sent in a demo cd in 1997 to a national radio competition, I didn't win but they played my stuff and invited me on the radio for an interview (I was 17). I even sampled some good stuff with a tape recorder. The song 'Goats are very intelligent' contains samples recorded while shearing cashmere goats on my Grandma's farm! The album is called 'Weinermart', by Brendan Hoffmann, it's available everywhere now.
Definitely gonna check it out! Always love some goat content hehe
when someone tells you that you're too old to be on UA-cam, copy and paste this and tell them this
That's not an album, it's a musicdisk! c:
@@Rikaisan not exactly: a musicdisk isn't a simple collection of music module files on a floppy disk, but a self-running software with a custom graphic interface that plays a fixed selection of music modules, usually stored into a floppy disk.
I know that it seems the same thing but it isn't: in the last case, you just have to boot your computer from that floppy to hear the music, without doing pretty much else
Thank you for mentioning Polyend Tracker! We are developing the concept of hardware trackers even further, so definitely more to come.
Just for some clarification, almost no games used MIDI in the mid 80s, the only computers to have support for MIDI at all were the Atari ST and PCs with the MPU-401 card. The standard wasn't even finalized until like 1985. Most music was stored as "playlists" or "notelists" which were exactly what they sound like - Big lists of notes. In the case of some software, it was executable code which changed registers directly in the sound generator. Tracker music is just an abstraction of this originally designed for the Amiga.
This is why I usually bring up the direct table of music type programming first, then discuss how trackers assigned note names and human-readable tempos and everything to that big list methodology. Plus the scrolling interface to keep a better eye on where the current playback was from.
5:25 Whoa... "Celestial Fantasia" is mine! Was not expecting to see that. I'd actually never looked at ModArchive's Top Favorites tab before, and had no idea it was so far up the list o.o
Anyway, thanks for putting this together! Really well-produced summary & retrospective that does an awesome job introducing tracking and its place in computer music history to the uninitiated.
0:06 - A tracker is a sample sequencer that derives from 'Ultimate Soundtracker', the first of its type, written in 1987 by Karsten Obarski for the Commodore Amiga. Tracker is the generic term for a class of software music sequencers which, in their purest form, allow the user to arrange sound samples stepwise on a timeline across several monophonic channels. A tracker's interface is primarily numeric which adopted programmer‑style conventions for creating music sequences; notes are entered via the keyboard, whilst length, parameters, effects and so forth are entered in hexadecimal. A complete song consists of several small multi-channel patterns chained together via a master list.
It took me a while to figure out, but now I finally understand why they're called "trackers". The Ultimate Soundtracker was originally designed as a video game sound developer. So in other words, it was for creating a soundtrack to a game. Soundtrack...Soundtracker...Tracker.
@@k-leb4671…I’ve been into this stuff for 15 years and didn’t put that together 😅 I’d come up with other ideas like it tracks the note table directly so if you jump on one track you jump on all of them. What you said makes waaaay more sense lmao
@@k-leb4671TIL!!
Great job! Not only a great overview of trackers and their history, but those production values? Woooah.
... this feels..familiar... something something AHOY
Did I just learn from a deer?
OpenMPT, what an elegant piece of software. I hope to be able to use it to full extent someday.
I’d like to recommend one of the demoscene artists that were in Future Crew, Skaven252. He composed for the Bejeweled series and some other PopCap classics such as Dynomite and Big Money. He still makes great music on his SoundCloud to this day.
Oh yeah he's frikin awesome!
he's the god of trackers, (fun fact: he still uses tracker these days)
Hell yeah, no wonder Bejeweled 3 - Butterflies reminds me so much of EDM, despite being a "medieval" song. One of my favorite pieces of VGM.
i've been a fan of his work ever since i heard his fantastic music in popcap games i played when i was a kid
he even made one of the best tracks in ut99, razorback!
I contacted him because I wanted to buy the Bejeweled album because I couldn't find it anywhere and signed by him. He ended up printing out an album cover that he made himself I believe for Bejeweled and signed it for me. I have it kept safe in my "black box" with some other signed albums by other music artists that has made game music!
Really sweet guy and I love his tracks from Uplink!
THIS VIDEO IS SO AWESOME THANK YOU THE ESTROGEN TRANSITION WAS PURRFECT
that was really good! great production value and really informative. would love to see more stuff in this style
very nicely put together, awesome job with the design on the video! and very cool explanations. thanks for putting this out there!
This was a great and informative overview. Thanks a lot for the hard work you put into making this.
This was a great little dive into trackers. Always have a hard time explaining what trackers are and their importance in a bite sized way. I feel like a vid under 7 minutes is a good run time to get folks up to speed but not overloaded. Thanks for this.
bro I watched the first few minutes of the video vibing to the modules, then I went to search about the author and found more modules, and I was like "damn this guy is really good so lucky the creator of that video linked the original songs" and then just after I finished the video I realized that you were the one that created those modules lmfao
nice video and nice songs
Great edited and thought out video. Also: your english is very good for a Dutch guy. Subbed!
I use Milkytracker that is a fastrtracker clone and has no VST support but is so darn lightweight and multithread, love it! I mostly use it for doing Amiga retrogame musics and the occasional indie
Love the FT2-clone available on Linux!
Who needs multithread for tracking in the actual CPUs???
A Tracker video that doesn't mention Renoise?
3:26 LETS GOOOOOOO
Keygen Music! My favorite B)
Man, seeing that stuff sure gives me the feels, It's been a long time
Of the like 4 or 5 popular "history of music trackers" videos, this one feels way more thought out and researched. Great job!
This is so underrated you deserve more praise!
Love Renoise, it's just so fun!! :)
Cool! I'd like to know more how trackers and MIDI split historically. Since both are somewhat similar. I always wondered why there's such low interoperability/compatibility between them. Trackers are awesome!!
Old-school tracker here (SYRiNX of N.O.I.S.E. / Landslide / Nebula). MIDI was all about using a PC + expensive commercial MIDI software to control external sound-making devices (synthesizers, etc) that were typically too expensive or rare for most young hobbyists to get their hands on. Trackers were free /cheap software, written by passionate hobbyists (rather than industry corporations) for other passionate hobbyists, to enable anyone with an Amiga or a PC (with a sound card) to write similar-quality music without needing anything more than their computer. The other advantage to tracker modules is that the only thing anyone else needed to hear them exactly as the composer wrote them was a computer running that tracker or a player program -- whereas with MIDI, only someone with the same exact expensive synthesizers configured the exact same way could hear a MIDI file exactly as the composer intended.
Quite a lot of trackers, at least on the Amiga, would let you (step-)sequence notes via MIDI if you wanted. Since the Amiga supported MIDI on the OS level, programmers just needed to call those OS routines rather than write MIDI directly. It was often kind of convoluted to get working though, and the implementations were still pretty basic.
MsMadLemon has some videos showing how she did it back in the day, which is also how she’s been making music again (after a while on ModPlug/OpenMPT).
This was the best video about Tracker I've ever seen, your channel having few subscribers is a crime, seriously! you deserved more recognition
I think this one is the best:
ua-cam.com/video/roBkg-iPrbw/v-deo.html
But of course, it's One of the best ones available.
i know this video is old but this video (and some of your modules) are the reason I started playing around with editing game OST modules to make meme edits
I loved the music you used to make in a certain franchise under a different identity online! It's so great to see you move on and become powerful and make incredibly entertaining videos and music even more banger than they already were at the time!! deers kinda rad and this one is no exception
yo sorry for the late reply!! that's crazy, i never expected anyone to remember my LBP2 music (if that's what you're referring to but i assume it is). how did you even find my current stuff from there? funnily enough we also have a mutual friend who recently told me about landitube, as i mentioned i was curious to find any software that could replace veadotube mini. it's such a small world lol
@@idadeerz being a furry has its perks, and those perks are small world-ism c: I knew about the whole thing because you mentioned it recently in um.. hm... i wanna say the name but idk since its a public commenting thing. i'll just say "s-inima"
No mention of Renoise?! Surely it's more commonly used than OpenMPT.
This deserves way more views, great video!!
Great video! Love that it was short an concise but i was a bit stressfull at some points. I need to check out mor of your content! :)
Excellent video and I love the editing!
Really good explanation on how tracker music worked. Even if there's a little thing that was overlooked: the size of the floppy disks was 720 kb (or 840 kb in the AMIGA filesystem) as before the 90s they were 2DD (double side double density). The 1,44 MB was the size of the 2HD (double sided high density) floppy disks, which became standard in the early 90s (even if AMIGA still used 2DD floppies)
i read the notepad title on 3:29 an i agree with it
I discovered them first thanks to Fearofdark, and then I started discovering cool channels and the Mod Archive which has lot of cool music trackers!
Nice video, definitely a good introduction to the topic
Absolutely amazing video editing
just looked through your channel and you seem like the coolest person ever
Love the video! I also really like your little deer character, it's cute!
This was awesome! Thank you!👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Great description. Had no idea but this was awesome
I would say that firstly, trackers are not necessarily sample-based. You will find such software on the C64 for example, such as Chris Huelsbeck's SoundMonitor. This software already used the pattern layout that was later adopted by The Ultimate SoundTracker on the Amiga.
And secondly, it's not like trackers were some kind of alternative for MIDI. Trackers were developed on C64 and Amiga, where MIDI wasn't even an option, as the hardware was far too limited in polyphony. MIDI was mainly a thing on PCs, because the PC had no audio hardware whatsoever, but there were expensive third-party options available, which were often based on synthesizer hardware from Yamaha or Roland, and had far more polyphony than most home computers or game consoles.
But even on PC, the trackers were adopted, because sample-based music could be made to sound much better than these MIDI synthesizers. Initially the PC got a few straight ports of Amiga trackers, so you'd get 4-channel 8-bit audio (via software mixing on the CPU). But as PCs and sound cards became more powerful, PC trackers could quickly move up to 32 channels and 16-bit stereo.
I feel like anything that precedes The Ultimate Soundtracker shouldn't be called a tracker.
@@k-leb4671but when Famitracker and LSDJ are brought up, the lineage to both C64 _and_ Amiga becomes clearly important.
Trackers are thus just a kind of sequencer at the end of the day, and merely happen to be connected to sample-based engines/chips a lot of the time (SNES and GBA developers used them too when they were new, precisely because it was pretty Amiga/Paula-like)
My first instrumental album back in 1999 wss interely composed with Fasttracker, at the time I was more a classical musician, at the beginning the hexadecimal sustem was such a pain but creating songs that way seemed so powerful.. nothing but good memories.
Thanks Toru, thanks to Sixty-seven, and thanks to the authors of this video!
What a time it was to be alive..
🏆👀🔥❤️💚🩵🧡💜
thank you so much for this video!!
Wow, this video is awesome. I barely know anything about tracker music as I didn't even exist when it was popular, but I still found this video easy to understand.
Sick video-editing also!
Awesome job dude. Used to be a Fasttracker2-composer, now I mainly use Renoise, SunVox (so, so good) as well as FamiTracker (first vanilla, then 0cc and now Dn-version) I have a few reeeally old tracker-plays of my own stuff on my channel. :)
Thanks bro
Wow! You are amazing, I like how you edit your videos and your script writing skills. I would like you to talk a little about music visualizers too pls
It's my pleasure to give the 1k like on such a well done video ~
How are you soooo underrated with such high quality content bro?
excellent visuals dude
great history summary! ty
2:08 - 2:24 these bang
35 years of awesomeness and I hope there'll be more
Ooooohhhhh!!! This video lived up to my hype!
Thank you so much for making it, it was both very interesting, and visually interesting. Very appealing all round
I need to share this around 👀
3:51 gosh dang that is a C H O O N, as is the others afterwards, and everything in this video
Nice job! Thank you, sir.
2:40 please dont break my heart knowing epic games will never make a new jazz jackrabbit game, i still have hope that one day epic games launch a new of that game in the series after the failed JJ3 release
I feel honored to give you your 200th like
love how begrudging you are about deflemask
awesome, thanks
absolute banger
Side note: Occ-san-geen was done by a guy who called himself Uncle Tom.
I want to give some disclosure here, as this has been pointed out multiple times in the comments. While doing research for this video, i did come across this information while looking up which artists made all the modules used in the video, in order to credit them. I really wanted to use occ-san-geen in the video, as it is a classic module, and really showcases early ProTracker music very well. The module itself is uncredited, so i wasn't aware of the artist who made it. Upon doing some research, i found out that it was made by someone called Uncle Tom... which is a well-known ethnic slur against black people... and guessing from some of his other output, i doubt this is entirely unintentional:
demozoo.org/music/206431/
At this point in the video's production, it felt a bit too late to go and change the song. I also couldn't really think of any early ProTracker modules that are just as iconic as occ-san-geen is in terms of quality and how widespread it is, so that made it a bit harder as well. I also considered crediting the module to Uncle Tom's real name instead of his scene handle, but that also raised the question of whether i even wanted to credit someone named after an ethnic slur in the first place, even under a different name. Since the original module does not list any artist names or handles, i ultimately decided to just credit just the module itself, without any of the additional information tied to it. Hope that explains this!
Very well done!
The reason why i love using trackers is im was specially adapted for command line text things than other composer that using GUI ( and i love monophonic chips! )
Dope content dude
Now i understand how this works. Very nice
thank you so much man
Great video!
tracker music will never die🎧🤟
Well done, thanks.
Really amazing what great tracks have been produced over the years.
IMHO the most "cyberpunk" way of tracking music!
I actually remember playing a Doom II mod with tracker music. Made by it's lead developer btw and they banged!
Plus, you have Renoise and tools like Fruity Loops even integrate a tracker in one of the plugins.
My ADHD led me down a tracker-laden hole after I searched for synths and found the M8 tracker. I had no idea what a tracker was until I watched this video then I realized that my old 30+ year old ass was very familiar with trackers the whole time! Thanks man!
What about buzz modular synth? Why does no one care about that one?!
There is SunVox, a modular synthesizer with a tracker, extending the tracking to the another level.
*2^08 - WOW!!! I love this game!*
Great video.
I love trackers
There also trackers on Pc like "Arkos Tracker" to create music for "Amstrad Cpc" by example. Same for Commodore 64. 8bits scene is still active ;)
Anyone got any info how to do portamento without making the portamento baked in a sample? I'm on OpenMPT using the .IT Impulse Tracker format.
I loved the videos!
I do music as a hobbyist in OpenMPT. And not gonna lie, this software is pretty good, and until easy to use.
If you keep using trackers, soon it will just turn into 2nd nature, and you will realise how practical and easy are the usage of trackers, seriously!
3:16 🎉🎉PURPLE MOTION MENTIONED🎉🎉
NO WAY you're that gay deer i listen to on spotify sometimes hahaha
i can't speak anymore woof bark woof woof bark!
trackers! what are they?
Man can i just find one video on trackers that mentions need for madness? Ik it wasnt massively popular but it's what got me into tracking in the first place
I don't really know a lot about the game or its history, but i hope it makes you feel better that i discovered occ-san-geen through NFM. Without that, it wouldn't have made it into the video's soundtrack! That game and its sequel definitely have some great tunes in them. :)
@@idadeerz that's cool to hear. I've seen occ-san-geen used in a few vids so i just assumed it was really popular and that's why everyone uses it. Still i wish people would at least use more nfm tunes like oberheim power or overscan
0:42 occ san geen is from Uncle tom
Antlers.
oh, my favourite Amiga game track at 2:10
183 subs, why? quality is cool
I mostly use famitracker, openmpt, deflemask and furnace tracker
You forgot mention fasttracker!
But i love the sound of tracker chip music!
There's a series of games that you wouldn't expect to use trackers to this day: Bejeweled.
Especally with Twist and 3, trackers do have the ability to dynamically change the music based on the events in game... something that's only recently possible with traditional audio formats (most popular being Nier: Automata)
I liked tracker music before I even knew what it was~
The Lotus III soundtrack is a perfect example of how much you can achieve with just 4 tracks ( ... if you've got the skillz, that is ;)
Nice video. How long have you used tracker software? I take it you use OpenMPT for the most part right?
Thanks! I have been using OpenMPT since 2008, though i was 9 at the time so for the first years i used the software i mostly messed around with it without creating anything serious.
@@idadeerz Cool. I've been using Schism Tracker which is a like Impulse Tracker on DOS. I've probably been tracking for about a year or so. I'm surprised you didn't bring up Renoise in the video.
someone probably mentioned Renoise, and SunVox already. Crucial omissions! These two are far and away the top two modern tracker softwares! And SunVox is free. Renoise is absurdly low priced.
6:01 occ-san-geen was by Uncle Tom
Oh, the nostalgia! 😊 😁 Back when I had my high school studies, I also made some songs in some trackers, finally I used Fast Tracker 2, on a 386 DX computer. Here's my two favourite songs. Never published (they don't worth a publication, never did), uploaded now just for this comment.
• In Your Eyes: ua-cam.com/video/fDqlKa9a1_0/v-deo.html
• Diary of a Love: ua-cam.com/video/G-cX0xD3vaQ/v-deo.html
Inspired by (a denial) childhood love. Writing these and some other songs was literally my psychotherapy. :D I hope someone enjoys them.
Were the tracks Super Sharp Shooter and Renegade Snares really made on trackers?