Trackermusic quality, what was it again?

[Caine123]

i recently listened again and again to tracker music, luuuuv it, somehow i mostly didnt spend much time to a tracker program as it seemed more complicated than a modern Host and i guess i suck in adding all those notes and it seems very fiddly for me
people told me, if i remember correctly, that you normally should just turn down the bitrate and you get the sound of an amiga 500 or tracker music, was it right?

if so what should i add in my mainmixer and how to set?

e.g.

[Tubeman]

You mean turn down bit depth? Amiga can exceed 57 kHz sampling rate and can have 14-bit sample playback. It doesn't really have a sound, it's the samples or how the tracker mangles them. You could rip them from the mod(s) but you're still missing the sample manipulation from the tracker.

[manvanmars]

Yes, the samples are mostly 8 bit(in protracker at least) with low samplerates, FT2 could also load 16 bit samples but people still used 8 bit a lot to keep filesize down, or because they were ripped from an 8 bit song... Just downsample and you're good to go really.

Trackers are not all that hard to understand, you just need to take an afternoon to make sense of it all and you are good to go (at least thats how it was with me somewhere in 1997 i believe:)

If you'd like to get into then i would suggest using renoise (http://www.renoise.com), it's probably the best tracker available right now. I use it all the time, sometimes in combination with reaper for mixing (song overview can sometimes be a bit of a problem because it's pattern based).

[Tubeman]

Yes, the samples are mostly 8 bit(in protracker at least) with low samplerates,

The thing with Amiga is that you can have different sample rates in each sample similar to hardware samplers like AKAI and Kurzweil. You could have 5k for a bass sound and 15k for some other sound for example. I used to do this myself to save memory, 1MB can only go that far.

[Wildfunk]

Put a bitcrusher with 8 bit on the master and work with only 4 channels! 2x left, 2x right.

[liquid wind]

Oldschool trackers were mostly sample based so it's really just up to whatever samples you use. The samples are in the modules too so you can get a tracker like Renoise or Modplug and just take the samples directly from old tracker songs

It's also deceptively complicated IMO, looks intimidating at first glance but I find it easier than working with a piano roll, I think trackers are much more straightforward than modern hosts if anything

[mystran]

For PC trackers (eg Fast Tracker 2, Screamtracker 3, Impulse Tracker), you could simply change your sampler's interpolation to linear. That's pretty much what most of them did back in the day (44.1 wasn't a problem, neither was 16bit; HQ interpolation would have been, because of limited CPU; caveat is I'm not sure what the widely used Gravis Ultrasound did to pitch samples.. that thing was generally preferred over SoundBlasters and other software mixed stuff). For something like Amiga it gets more complicated though: if I'm not mistaken you actually had multi-channel variable rate DACs on that thing, which ment you could play back your 4 (or whatever) channels at the same time, at different samplerates. What that means is that no interpolation or resampling is necessary to pitch the samples, because the hardware actually runs at different rates! That in turn means that in some ways the quality ends up better than what you would get with any naive approach using a fixed-rate DAC.

That means simple bitrate or samplerate reduction just won't do it. If you wanted to reproduce it properly, you'd actually need to properly resample the stuff, but at the same time emulate the deficiencies of the original DAC (eg poor reconstruction filters or whatever). If you're not going to do that, your best bet is to actually play back the samples at the highest quality possible; sure the sample themselves would be low bit-depth, but the artifacts would pitch together with rest of the sample (unlike what happens if you post-process audio by reducing bitdepth or whatever).

[Sendy]

The amiga audio player really has it's own sound. Bitcrushing or downsampling a whole track or channel isn't going to get you close at all. I don't know much about the specifics but it used something akin to a modulated pulse wave which was fed through an analog reconstruction filter. It has a very 'crunchy' sound, similar to early 8-bit samplers.

As for the tracker sound, that's more of an aesthetic and style rather than a sound quality. Making use of minimal yet complex and progressive arrangements, call and response parts (where one voice plays in the gaps of silence of another), vibrato and legato, and other manipulations of pitch and volume (including very extreme ones such as jumping between two picthes very rapidly), lofi stuff, sampled chords, etc, will give your music a "tip of the hat" at least, to tracker music.

[abidoucbar]

Amiga tracker : Paula 4 ever :

http://www.bel.fi/~alankila/modguide/interpolate.txt

[cron]

I only really dabbled with tracking on the Amiga (OctaMed from an Amiga Format coverdisk, the only samples I had were from tracks on the subsequent subscribers' disks) before my family bought a low-end PC when I was about 13 and I discovered the joys of FastTracker 2.

It really is a whole aesthetic of making the most of very little. The main limitation was again that new samples were incredibly difficult to come by as I didn't have the internet. The only samples I had were ripped from friend's tracks or convincing my mates to spend 15 mins downloading a sample pack that would fit on a floppy disk (just checked my old FT2 samples folder - I eventually collected 15 MB worth of samples over all those years of making music ). I recall having the option of working with stereo in 22kHz or mono at 44. I picked mono every time, and I must say that most of the tracks I make today are still monoish just because I never used to think about it when I was getting into making music. Need to sort that out.

OK, nostalgia over...

One hint I have for you is to read the FastTracker 2 manual. I've just Googled it up and can't believe there is one. I'd have killed for this as a young lad! Get it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6655297/Fast-Tracker-2-Manual

Pay particular attention to the effects section. Effects in trackers aren't effects as we know them today, they merely alter how the loaded sample is played back (kind of like MIDI effects, but applied to samples). Things like note retrigger (for machine gun effects faster than the resolution of the tracker's sequencer - a side effect of this is that your machinegunning isn't meaningfully linked to tempo), pitch bends, and the almighty sample offset command (which changed the location in the sample from which playback started). The sample offset command was (and still is) great for chopping breaks, but another thing I used it for was to emulate filter sweeps. You could do this by loading a sample of a longish synth note with the filter slowly opening, then repeatedly trigger the note as quickly as possible with different sample offset values to 'sweep' through the file for crude filter effects. If you can get your head around some of these effects, you can emulate them in your sequencer.

People have mentioned bitcrushing, which is well worth experimenting with. FastTracker 2 had a 16 bit mixing engine, but I always used 8-bit samples as they were all I could get. You could get more authentic results by bitcrushing each individual channel to 8 bit and leaving your master untouched, rather than bitcrushing the master. Won't sound the quite the same though for reasons other posters have mentioned.

Don't stop there. 'Bitcrush' your control data too! If I wanted a volume fade that lasted one beat, there were only 4 control steps (16th notes) per beat, so volume fades were more 'stepped' the shorter they were. You could double the speed of the sequencer for 32nd note resolution (I gather most people did), but I got too used to a 16th grid. I've also just learned (from that manual above... grrr...) that there were indeed elegant ways of getting smooth volume fades.

Lastly, get naive and have fun! I don't think many of us understood the basic principles of digital audio when we were messing around back then. I used to increase the volume of my kicks in the sample editor til they were nearly square waves and let the master channel distort cos I thought it sounded wicked. I had no idea what 0dB meant or that there was some sort of limit you had to keep below.

One more thing. The Renoise demo was super-generous last time I looked. The only thing you can't do (as far as I'm aware) is export to wav, but then you couldn't even do that in FT2 until the final revision came out . Get that tape player dusted off and record through the headphone-out like in the old days . I also think ASIO might be disabled in the Renoise demo, but you won't need that anyway if you're kicking it old school.

Although writing this has made me really nostalgic about my tracker days, I found the transition to a 'proper' sequencer so difficult that I essentially stopped making music for about 6 years. Despite my fondness of the things, not sure I want to go back after that.

[aciddose]

paula has 4 independent DACs each with it's own sample rate.

in order to change the pitch of a sample, the sample rate is changed.

zero aliasing.

the filters also have an effect. the a-500 has a 6db lowpass at 15k and the LED filter is a 12db sallen-key butterworth at 9k or something like that.

this has a major effect especially on hihats or any samples with lots of harmonic content like saw waves or so on. it also has a huge effect when you play any sample at a reduced rate because the aliases will typically fill the notches in between mirror images. a huge amount of clarity is gained by proper anti-aliasing.

the implementation in the document mentioned is extremely poor. i've provided a better one for the latest version of protracker.

you can use such a filter by loading waves in xhip and playing them. don't use the filters or anything like that, just play using a single waveform.

sample rate doesn't matter.

http://soundcloud.com/aciddose/xhip-canal-green-flute

opps - this example i forgot to set the amp envelope to gate. so it has the clicking from the volume adsr being enabled which doesn't sound right. i also used the lfo to modulate amplitude as in the canal_green module. there it's done with volume slide+vibrato effects.

close enough. you get the impression of the audio quality.

sample exported directly from the module using open modplug tracker.



this sounds as if it's not rendered using proper emulation, but that might be due to the youtube compression. download bubsy's tracker to really hear it accurately.

here's a more exciting output from bubsy's protracker:
http://soundcloud.com/aciddose/elysium

xhip has higher quality, slightly more expensive filters. you also get all the extra synthesizer features. to really emulate the modules correctly you'd need to do an awful lot of work setting up four monophonic instances and using program change messages to switch samples on each channel/track... easier just to use protracker. maybe i'll turn bubsy's work into a vst plugin

[Tubeman]

Then there's also some that used synthesis+samples to get an unique combo, kinda like C-64 arpeggios and filters. Like the game Hybris:

I think this beats most "lead synths" of these days.

[Caine123]

thanks for all the tips, i thought when i downsample a prole project that it would sound like it came out of an amiga 500, theoretically thats how i understood it

Then there's also some that used synthesis+samples to get an unique combo, kinda like C-64 arpeggios and filters. Like the game Hybris:

I think this beats most "lead synths" of these days.

be careful, otherwise Timbaland will sample it ;D.

need to learn how to make those nice arps.

[thecontrolcentre]

need to learn how to make those nice arps.

NanoX2

[Caine123]

need to learn how to make those nice arps.

NanoX2

i just loaded it up but i dont get any sound out?