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

[jamcat]

Believe it or not, in the '90s people just played normal instruments and recorded them on Portastudio cassette recorders. Some musicians even had a 16-track reel-to-reel and a Mackie mixer at home. People doing synth pop and industrial used MIDI sequencers, usually on Macs, but increasingly on Windows in the second half of the '90s.

Trackers were the exclusive domain of high school computer club geeks who were rightly shunned from society, and occasionally shoved into lockers.

[BONES]

I'd suggest most people using computers at all in the 90s fell into the same category as people using trackers. After all, you could only do it on stage with gigantic CRT monitors, hardly the stuff of rock legends.

At home I always recorded direct to stereo on cassette. Everything on this was done that way -

https://deathlyquiet1.bandcamp.com/albu ... hebigslope

I mastered it before I put it up on BandCamp but when it went onto my first CD release as a "Bonus EP", there was no mastering involved.

I didn't start using computers for music until about 2001 and it was probably another couple of years before we made the switchover for good. I always had hardware synths, some form of hardware sequencer and a mixer. I didn't really have any outboard effects until I bought a DP/4 but, even then, that was exclusively for my ASR-10.

Any serious recording I did before 2003 - a single and two albums - was done in a studio, at considerable expense.

[phreaque]

I used to have MT400 4-track recorder. It was fun to bounce the summed 4 tracks into 1 to have extra tracks.
The terms of quality was very different back then

[BONES]

I had a Fostex 4 track for a while but even for 1985, the quality was very ordinary. Once I got a decent mixer, it always sounded better if I recorded straight out to stereo.

[NAD]

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... -sandstorm

Turns out Darude began writing Sandstorm in FastTracker in the mid to late 90s and later transferred it into Cubase. Ultimately though it was handed off to a producer with a proper fancy studio set-up.

[Guenon]

One important difference, apart from the actual music making technology available at the time, is that people weren't nearly as connected back then (online like this) in the late 80s / early 90s, and there were pretty huge regional differences in how different tools were seen; somewhere there were tracker heads who indeed were churning out club tunes, and somewhere else that was completely absent. Backtracking the history, trackers do pop up in a wide variety of places. So yeah, it's a lot about the vibe of the area, and how "using computers" was seen as a whole there. Also, naturally, if you wanted game music gigs at that time, knowing how to push out a decent tracker tune was a boon, haha, but that's a bit aside the main subject anyway. Then there was the demoscene that really pushed the envlope on this stuff through the years, and it had plenty of crossover where ever that sort of youth culture had a foothold.

About the mixing/postprocessing thing: the "mix as you go" approach was mentioned already, and that's what the overwhelming majority used, intuitively. Crafting a tracker tune, you just balanced the levels as you went, right there as you were editing away, and usually the intended final sound of the track took shape like that.

One of those "this is usually mentioned" classics is this one by Urban Shakedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36m5sobhOE

Starts pretty slow and basic, even by tracker standards (and especially considering how intricate the stuff can be) but especially the second half, or somewhere around the three minute mark forwards, is just... "the 90s just started, babyy" magic to me, haha

[legendCNCD]

Trackers were the exclusive domain of high school computer club geeks who were rightly shunned from society, and occasionally shoved into lockers.

Yeah no.

[Unaspected]

Trackers were the exclusive domain of high school computer club geeks who were rightly shunned from society, and occasionally shoved into lockers.

Early and often.

[Unaspected]

One of those "this is usually mentioned" classics is this one by Urban Shakedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36m5sobhOE

Absolute classic.

I'm pretty sure I had this on a floppy disk for the Amiga in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAvHjoLxxh8

[legendCNCD]

One of those "this is usually mentioned" classics is this one by Urban Shakedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36m5sobhOE

Absolute classic.

I'm pretty sure I had this on a floppy disk for the Amiga in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAvHjoLxxh8

I think it might just have been "a remix" of it. There were few circulating. One much FSOL sampling was in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysdJvWvvK3s

[Unaspected]

One of those "this is usually mentioned" classics is this one by Urban Shakedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36m5sobhOE

Absolute classic.

I'm pretty sure I had this on a floppy disk for the Amiga in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAvHjoLxxh8

I think it might just have been "a remix" of it. There were few circulating. One much FSOL sampling was in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysdJvWvvK3s

Quite possibly. I wouldn't be surprised if the original was produced on an Atari though - they seemed to be more geared towards music production than Amigas - though I know a few acts were running Amiga based studios at the time.

[Ah_Dziz]

Many did. Others had some budget to master their stuff in a mastering house. Lots of the cool stuff from back then was fully self produced, mixed and mastered.

[legendCNCD]

One of those "this is usually mentioned" classics is this one by Urban Shakedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36m5sobhOE

Absolute classic.

I'm pretty sure I had this on a floppy disk for the Amiga in the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAvHjoLxxh8

I think it might just have been "a remix" of it. There were few circulating. One much FSOL sampling was in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysdJvWvvK3s

Quite possibly. I wouldn't be surprised if the original was produced on an Atari though - they seemed to be more geared towards music production than Amigas - though I know a few acts were running Amiga based studios at the time.

Yeah Atari had ONE advantage: midi by default in the machine

[legendCNCD]

Many did. Others had some budget to master their stuff in a mastering house. Lots of the cool stuff from back then was fully self produced, mixed and mastered.

Yeah but the thing is I dont think many of them were mastered at home at all, it was just how it was outputted, especially if you were working only inside Amiga with 8/22 (or later 14/22) quality.
We actually did not release anything on vinyl, but ...



thats us (OOBE) live in 1997 - A4000, A1200, Yamaha AN1X, Boss DR-220, Boss mixer and couple of fx's..

[jamcat]

Yeah Atari had ONE advantage: midi by default in the machine

But I believe Macs started overtaking Atari in 1990 when MOTU came out with the MIDI Time Piece.