Drum Solo (arc-drumsolo.s3m)

 Composed in late summer or early fall 1996.

Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise! As the title implies, I just wanted to make a percussion-only track. But my idea of how to make a drum solo song was fundamentally flawed: I would just come up with a sequence on a single channel, then move to the next channel in the next pattern and add another sequence. Then another, and another, and so on until every channel was playing something. No variety at all - just layering channels of noise upon each other. And then, I went in reverse order and started quieting them down...and then put them back in again! This song should have been half as long.

The result: probably the noisiest track I ever produced. And it’s not good noise, it’s quite grating. This belongs among my worst tracks, and I don’t think I produced a track as bad as this one ever again.

I think I set a record for how many unique samples I used at this point (which I’m sure I would later break when I started using Impulse Tracker, given the way instruments are used). At the very end I must have realized I needed to end the song, but I also needed to use a large number of samples I hadn’t used yet. So, I just mashed them all together in a wild sequence covering two channels at the very end. I briefly used a beat loop near the beginning, which doesn’t match the timing, but I didn’t really care enough to fix it (I’m not sure I knew how to mute/unmute channels during playback at the time, I probably learned how to do that in Impulse Tracker).

This was probably the last track I produced during the Nucleus era. I would soon move on to Quasar, which was still a part of Nucleus, but focused exclusively on music.
- arcturus