4 ms·

I think you are confusing trackers with the more general capabilities that appeared in PC sound cards of the 90s. Although there were sound cards that supporte

I think you are confusing trackers with the more general capabilities that appeared in PC sound cards of the 90s. Although there were sound cards that supported connecting external MIDI instruments, and there were sound cards that implemented the so-called General MIDI set of instrument sounds on the card itself, tracker software did not use any of this functionality. Trackers loaded samples into memory and mixed the audio in software. This is how Scream Tracker (for example) could output directly to the PC speaker and did not require any particular sound card. Because everything was mixed in software, the complexity of a composition was limited by the CPU and memory of the computer itself. It didn't matter what sound card you had. On under-powered PCs, loading very large samples or going above 4 or 8 channels of polyphony was not a viable option. This meant that tracker musicians operated under similar restrictions to the chip musicians of the 8-bit era. In fact, quite a few tracker musicians got their start in the 8-bit era, which is why a lot of demoscene music sounds similar to it. (Edit to add: in case it's not clear, later trackers did use hardware mixing and effects if they were available, but I'm trying to explain more about the culture of the scene and how it influenced the type of music that came out of it.)

neuralRiot 6y ago
I used to make music on modtracker on a celeron, i could load more than 8 tracks but not very long or not playing them simultaneously, so i resourced to downmixing some parts and re-loading them as one single sample, then combining that with hardware synths on a multitrack (portastudio actually).
- alisonatwork 6y ago
  That's cool! I remember seeing those sorts of tricks in Amiga mods especially. I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds. File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range. The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.

neuralRiot 6y ago

I used to make music on modtracker on a celeron, i could load more than 8 tracks but not very long or not playing them simultaneously, so i resourced to downmixing some parts and re-loading them as one single sample, then combining that with hardware synths on a multitrack (portastudio actually).

alisonatwork 6y ago
That's cool! I remember seeing those sorts of tricks in Amiga mods especially. I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds. File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range. The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.