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[Incarnate]

Greetings fellow trackers and community.

Being quite new to using trackers to create music, I'm curious to know if there are any guides in relation to creating music and using the various effects, including the various tricks that can be done to create various types of effects that aren't necessarily obvious.

Also, as a sidequestion I'm curious if there any open active tracker communites, to find other people who're interested in tracking and making chiptunes, well besides here that is?

Thanks in advance.

//Incarnate.

[Saga Musix]

There's a seminar by h0ffman describing some ProTracker tricks, maybe it's worth watching for you although some of the techniques are maybe a bit more advanced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdbgeFAus0k

Generally it's a good idea to look at modules that you like and see how things are done there. You can learn a lot from other artists thanks to the "open-source" nature of modules.

Also, as a sidequestion I'm curious if there any open active tracker communites, to find other people who're interested in tracking and making chiptunes, well besides here that is?

There's also the OpenMPT forums but they are more focussed on OpenMPT itself. ModArchive also has an IRC channel but it's less focussed on making tracked music.

[Incarnate]

Very nice with the h0ffman ProTracker tricks video, definitely going to be wathcing that one

What you've just described is currently what I'm trying to do, and yet it's like missing something to understand what is going on or how to pull it off myself.

As a follow up question, are there any list of tracks that one as aspiring tracker should know about and having listened to? ..or maybe just a list of the "best" tracks of all time

[Saga Musix]

What you've just described is currently what I'm trying to do, and yet it's like missing something to understand what is going on or how to pull it off myself.

Out of curiosity, how long have you been trying? This will naturally take time, for anyone really. It can take months, if not years to refine those skills. It can take a while until it "clicks". This kinda leads to your next question of course - try to find the best modules, often you can learn a lot from them.

As a follow up question, are there any list of tracks that one as aspiring tracker should know about and having listened to?

There is definitely no objective answer to this, but you can check out the charts on the main page for the most favourited and most downloaded modules. There's definitely some good stuff among those (but mostly older tracks). There are also some older forum threads about this which you may be able to find, but those will also not feature any recent modules.

[Incarnate]

It's been on/off for years, mostly just because I was curious, and at the time I actually didn't use any resources or guides for reference, just what I could learn by tinkering with the program and tracks - doing it the oldschool way if you will. Currently it's been close to a weeks times since I stumpled upon a video series (Brandon Walsh/Daniel Dressle) that explained various things in better detail about the tracker and track creation, which obviously sparked renewed interest in tracking, because now I actually have a much better grasp at what is actually going on. Unfortunately, the video series just suddenly stopped, even though more were planned....which is why I want to find more material... in fact I just like 20 minutes ago found a rather comprehensive guide to tracking (in MilkyTracker), however the referenced samplepack is not linked, and nor can it be found on the site which I found the guide on.
The guide in question is this one: https://mycourses.aalto.fi/pluginfile.php/1243498/mod_resource/content/1/Making%20music%20with%20MilkyTracker.pdf.

That exactly one the reasons I was asking if there were such a list, as that would enable me be able to find those epic tracks to learn from, and of course listen to So such a list would be very helpful, or even just a few recommendations would do, anything that points me the right direction - which of course is kind of subjective.

Also, being a musician, I do have various musical knowledge I can apply, although I'm self-taught, never taken a single music lesson, apart from what I little I got from the equivalent to high school. Which of course also was something that confused me, because when I was entering notes back when I started tinkering with it, I understood the notation, but when it was off-key I didn't get why, which of course now makes sense when it's sample-based music and the fact that there might be a need to fine-tune the tone relative to the note.

[Stupe]

When I come back to a given tracker, I usually open up the user manual and copy down some hotkeys and commands I might want to use a lot. In Milkytracker at least, hot keys have a huge effect on workflow, especially when you consider that there are multiple editing schemes, some redundant/not extremely useful navigation keys, etc. Using the mouse for much more than the editors slows things down a lot. I also have found that analyzing modules gets a lot easier once you have some familiarity with commands yourself.