Did home producers mix and master tracks created on trackers in the 90s?

[hinson]

I try to feel like in the early or mid 90's where making music at home was much more difficult than at least after 2000.
From what I learned, those who wanted to start making music most often reached for trackers because it was the cheapest solution.
Considering the limited possibilities of modern computers, a lot of good-sounding songs have been created, which may not be professional but have the power and feel the atmosphere of the 90's.
I am curious if those who created these tracks tried to do a basic mix and mastering in some way?

I downloaded a Fast Tracker 2 clone but due to the lack of appropriate tools it is impossible to do.
Of course I can convert my track to wav and throw it into a modern DAW but it won't be the same as in the 90's.

I mean only people who created music at home and did not have the opportunity and connections to be able to use a professional music studio.

[kritikon]

Might have been some still using trackers, but I didn't know anyone using them in the 90s. Cubase or Logic (or whatever it was called then) on an Atari in the early 90s. Everyone I knew had synths put through mixers, sequenced by midi. If you had money or studio time you mastered to tape, very soon replaced by digital media - DAT tape came in early 90s from my limited memory...not sure what year. There will have been some that used cassette tape 4 or 6 track, but generally that wasn't mastering worthy. We used 4 track cassette to put together demos for a wee while in the 90s, but everyone aimed at better mixing desks and DAT was king until DAWs took over.
Trackers...more of an 80s thing, and not for proper mastering or even demos from what I remember. Cubase 1 was around 90 or 91 IIRC, might even have been around in 89. And there was midi sequencing before that.

[unkow]

Back in the 90's I remember one would download tracker files, and would play them on a tracker. The tracker files were much smaller than than the equivalent WAV, which made them more convenient if you were connecting to the 'net via modem. This was shortly before MP3 and Napster showed up. And even then, downloading an MP3 via modem would take forever.

I remember getting a tracker program for my PC, and then playing "Amiga MOD's" that I would download from some FTP sites devoted to the artform. No mixing or mastering involved, just raw talent.

[BertKoor]

Trackers were the tool of "The Demo Scene": mostly Scandinavian guys that aimed at squeezing as much amazing stuff as possible onto a 1.4 Mb 3.5" floppy disk. No mastering involved.

Those who wanted to make music just put a band together and played live. And ofcourse there was affordable 4-track cassette tape devices by Fostex. You could do "ping-pong" overdubs in mono with 1/4" reel tape on a Revox deck. Very course mixing, no mastering.

No one at that time called themselves a (home) producer. A producer was someone close to the top of the music business food chain. Musicians could not tell apart a producer from a A&R manager. Do you even know what mastering is?

[legendCNCD]

Yeah - being one from/on the Demoscene since '89 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene ) ...
There were a lot of tracker music done on Amigas and PC's but I dont think anyone mastered using trackers

For MIDI one would use OCTAMED - It allowed playing 16bit samples in 14bits on Amiga plus MIDI on the rest of the channels. A lot of people used it with MIDI gear and you'd get a sample playback in 14bits (not on A500 though if I remember right, needs 68020 CPU) !

Jungle/D'n'B was really really made a lot on Amiga, for example https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/ ... vin-harris and quite recent release https://parallaxrecordings.bandcamp.com ... n=download

The "module" format of trackers is about single hit samples (some with loops, loops could be defined freely) stored in a package (not packed usually though) for easy transport of the tune.

"Of course I can convert my track to wav and throw it into a modern DAW but it won't be the same as in the 90's."
- Well, if needed to do fex. juno2 midi data conversion to .IFF or .RAW (note there was no WAV format on amiga, those are about the same - not going into details) waveform - we would sample those sounds from the synths first, then rearrange on Protracker/Octamed(/FT2 on PC).

[andymcbain]

Considering the limited possibilities of modern computers, a lot of good-sounding songs have been created, which may not be professional but have the power and feel the atmosphere of the 90's.
I am curious if those who created these tracks tried to do a basic mix and mastering in some way?

They sounded good because they knew how to work with the limitations of their equipment. You had no option but to choose the right sounds and to arrange them in a way that worked. Something that's a bit of a lost art today

[Unaspected]

[legendCNCD]

Considering the limited possibilities of modern computers, a lot of good-sounding songs have been created, which may not be professional but have the power and feel the atmosphere of the 90's.
I am curious if those who created these tracks tried to do a basic mix and mastering in some way?

They sounded good because they knew how to work with the limitations of their equipment. You had no option but to choose the right sounds and to arrange them in a way that worked. Something that's a bit of a lost art today

We still do that as both of us are from that era. Basically we select the sound thats most perfect for its place without EQ or other things first. If it works there and sounds what we're after, then we'll go forward with EQ etc.

Back then I had from ST-01 to ST-A* something (hexadecimals) - disks full of 8bit/22Khz or such samples. Searching them was awful - swap the disk to see innards or remember where that particular good sound was. These days we have much more sounds in Omnisphere and Diva - thank god there is search

[Chamar]

I am curious if those who created these tracks tried to do a basic mix and mastering in some way?

Usually not. Only in the post-process. And for the whole mix, not channels.

I did it in 91-93 this way:

Amiga Output -> (hardware) Amplifier with EQ Output -> DAT
later:
Amiga Output -> (hardware) Amplifier with EQ Output -> (hardware) Behringer compressor -> DAT

Some guys gave all their samples to the label and somebody there recreated the song with MIDI etc. and mixed it.

But as mentioned before here: usually you picked up the "right" sounds which fit together and done.

I'm sure if i had eq/effects on every channel i would not have finished so many tracks but get lost at all...

[iHartBeats]

Making music was way harder when vsts & disk recording didnt exist and 100% midi was required. But,at the same time, there was way less competition so you production quality was way lower.

I had some techno & house records out back then... there was no concept of mastering for my stuff other than some adjustments the vinyl press would make (usually reducing bass if too much). I had all my keyboards going to a mixer then to a DAT tape.

As far as sequencers most people used Cubase, not a tracker.

[RikkShow]

An Atari ST with built in midi interface running Emagic Notator sequencer with a SMPTE box for tape sync, then an 8 or 16 ch tspe machine was the real setup.

[cron]

I think there might be something of a generational split here. As an early 80s baby, absolutely everyone I knew who made music in the 90s (including me) used either FT2 or Impulse Tracker. It was the only free option (assuming you already had a family computer) so it won out by default. We were essentially trying to make music with zero knowledge of what 'proper' music production looked like. Even if I had rich parents who could buy me a compressor, that wouldn't have happened because I didn't know what a compressor was. Ditto mixing and mastering.

Naturally I'd stumble across 'mixing adjacent' tricks and there'd be something of what I now know to be the 'mix as you go' workflow going on. Duplicating and shifting channels to create a 1-tap echo is something I did a lot. Destructively editing samples to turn them down if they were too loud, or (probably more often) clipping them to add some beef and grit. I'd often clip my samples then turn them down. Naturally I didn't know what clipping was either - I just knew it made my very small library of kicks hit harder and it extended the tonal variety I could get from that small folder of samples a little. Destructively editing your samples was the most practical option when all your volume control was in hex too. The equivalent of one fader tweak in a DAW would necessitate manually editing the volume hex through the entire track in FT2, and it becomes infinitely more laborious when you consider that ALL volume manipulation was hex. If you've worked out the values to get smooth volume fades from 00 to 40 throughout your track, the last thing you want to do is work them all out again but sliding from 00 to 3B this time.

The thing is, despite all this, my tunes did sound pretty decent by the end. I tried to make my tunes sound as slick as I could, and I was pushing FT2 pretty hard by the end. I was just doing it in a self-taught, alien way that didn't bear much relationship to 'real' music production practice, and if there's a take-away from this thread so far, it's perhaps that the tracking world and the 'real' music production world didn't have much overlap. Seems there weren't all that many people here doing both.

[legendCNCD]

I think there might be something of a generational split here. As an early 80s baby, absolutely everyone I knew who made music in the 90s (including me) used either FT2 or Impulse Tracker.

Or even before, Soundtracker, Noisetracker, Protracker and Octamed (Pro) Music-X, Bars & Pipes etc.

[CinningBao]

I used Octamed for a number of years 92-96, then used Buzz for a few years 'cause I couldn't shake the tracker mindset.

We had a MIDI device we could hook into crappy old samplers and Boss drum machines, and I'm sure Octamed had this clever way of interleaving 2 tracks into one. So we had 8 tracks of Amiga audio leaving through 2 RCA cables, a crappy old drum machine (2 instrument panned hard left and right) and the mono sampler was 5 channels in to an 12 channel mixer. With a couple of sends to effect racks and pedals, we had almost 8 channels! We did the old-method of riding the faders, making notes of what needed to happen when, trying to follow those notes, allocating responsibilities... but ultimately the output was recorded to a 4-track cassette running at double-speed.

It was good practice for knowing how to make tasteful choices even if the end result was written to cassette.

Probably not the answer you were looking for.

[rubengonc]

Thanks, need to check this out!