I also downloaded a few songs too listen to. I am now wondering how the songs develop and change from the first loop. It looks like the same part is looping, but their songs move into different parts and new instruments coming in. Is there something really big I am missing here??
The
Pattern
Order
Table in the top left corner of the screen is quite essential for tracking. The loops or parts as you call them are called patterns, and in order to build a song you need to have quite many of them arranged into a sequence in the POT. When you start a song from scratch, the POT looks like this:
00 | 00
This means your song is one order long and that pattern number 00 (on the right) is assigned to order 00 (on the left). You can add orders by clicking [Ins] for insert. [Del] is for deleting the current order. The + and - buttons between the aforementioned buttons are used to increase and decrease the pattern number assigned to each order. Use these controls to make a sequence that looks like this for example:
00 | 00
01 | 01
02 | 01
03 | 02
Now, when you move around in the POT, you see your notes appear and disappear on the pattern. That's natural because your notes are on pattern 00 while the rest of them are still empty. You can copy sections from pattern 00 to the others and add variation. This is what you have been seeing in finished modules, and that's how you'll make your own.
There are a couple of buttons left to control the POT, although not necessarily needed: The [Seq] button is for inserting the next sequential empty pattern's number in the table and the [Cln] button clones the current pattern to the next empty one. There's nothing mysterious about this, it's what-you-see-is-what-you-get. But with .MODs you should pay attention to unused pattern numbers. Say if you used patterns 00, 01 and 03 in your song but 02 was unreferenced, heck, even empty, it would still take up space when you save your file. There's the song optimizer for automatically removing unused patterns (and more) but using it with the wrong boxes checked you can do a lot of unwanted stripping to your file so always remember to backup first.
Also, since I am trying to make a mod, I saved as mod before closing and it said it was a linear file? Anyway when I opened the file later, the song was totally messed up! It was saved at 160 bpm but now is 120 and the instruments are all wrong....arrgghh all of the work is gone!
We didn't have time to tell you about this because you got to work so fast. MOD files need to use the Amiga frequency table instead of the linear one (Config) but that is forced anyway. MOD files also don't save the BPM selector value, you have to use the Spd/BPM command Fxx to set it in the pattern: The hexadecimal equivalent of 160 is A0, so you can set the BPM to 160 writing FA0 on effect column in the beginning of the song. The instruments are probably all wrong because their relative notes are something else than C-4, see the instrument editor and use the sample editor context menu to resample your samples so that they'll sound right when the relative note is set to C-4.
And example:
You load a sample and in the instrument editor you see that it got assigned the relative note of F-6. That will not work for MOD and if you decide to adjust it to C-4 by using the instrument editor, you'll probably soon find that playing the sample on octaves 3-5, it is played too slowly. That's when you need to resample.
Open the sample editor, right-click on the waveform and select Advanced > Resample. You will see that the relative note value is 29, 29 halftone offset from C-4. You need to change that to 0, and better do it for fine tune too. Then you'll want to change the interpolation method to Precise Sinc for best quality results and then hit [Ok] to see if your instrument now works better for MOD files. If the relative note changed to C-4 and the sample sounds ok when you play it on octaves 3, 4 and 5, consider this success. If something went wrong, you can always click Undo in the sample editor and try again.
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Topic: absolute beginner! (Read 21812 times)