- How did you discover/get into Tracking?
Had a C64 as a kid, and loved some of the music on it, to the point where I actually taped the music and listened to it in my walkman. Rob Hubbard and Matt Gray were heroes of mine, and I actually met both of them at a retro gaming fair in the city I live in just a couple of years ago.
Anyway, I wanted to try to make music myself, but I never found out how to actually do it. Later I got an Amiga. A friend borrowed me his copy of Sonix, but that didn't really work for me either. But then I got MED 3.00 on an Amiga Computing cover disk, and that was it for me. Kept using MED/OctaMED/SoundStudio as long as I had an Amiga, and moved on to Impulse Tracker when I got a PC.
After getting a tracker the next issue was getting hold of samples. Looking at my old modules, they can mostly be grouped into the following phases:
1) Only using widely available instruments like the ST-01 sample disk and some synthsounds that came with MED.
2) Samples ripped from modules, demos etc. I ripped everything I could get my hands on for a period, and meticulously named and categorized all samples.
3) Getting an actual sampler. I did not own any "real" instruments, but I sampled a lot of stuff from tapes and CDs, TV, and real world objects. Most of my music CDs at the time had a sheet of paper tucked in the cover, where I would write down tracknumber and timestamp whenever I came across a sound I wanted to sample.
4) Getting wider access to professional samples. I subscribed to AM/FM disks, including the sample disks. And eventually sample CDs and internet opened up a whole new world.
- What, to you, is so appealing about music made with tracking software?
Making music at home using nothing but a basic home computer. A lot of great music widely available.
- Has the community played a role in your experience with tracking?
In the beginning, not so much. I had no internet, no modem, and not many friends into what I was doing. But as the world opened up, certainly.
- Are there any composition techniques you've picked up unique to tracking? (e.g., single channel echo, single channel chords, etc.)
- Downsampling drumloops, chords, melodies etc to fit into the four channels that were available on Amiga.
- Playing around with sample offset, using it with sweeping synth sounds, or as a time stretching effect.
