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[Fyre and Eyce]

To flesh this out a bit more, I mean what kind of practice can I do, say musical practices, or whatever can I do to improve my tracking ability, mainly I'm curious just because I'm still relatively new to the scene and am looking to improve, and I was wondering if some of you can impart some wisdom on what to do as far as tracking practice (s).

Anyways, thanks in advance. 

[Ceekayed]

That is the toughest question of all time since there are no right answers. Some people learn a lot by studying music theory, others by just trying new things out and figuring it out themselves, others really like to watch tutorials, others find it more helpful to get personal feedback.

So the only advice I can give is to spend a lot of hours on making music. It's the only way.

Personally I learned all my technical and audio production side by doing hundreds of one hour competitions since they forced me to find creative ways to make good sounding songs out of bad samples quickly.

[Argh!]

Do you play a real instrument? If not, then learning a bit of basic guitar or piano is a great thing to do as it's really handy to play about with chord progressions. Also when you download other peoples tunes, don't just listen to them in a player, use a tracker and when you hear a bit that's really cool and you want to know how they did it you can usually press a shortcut key (such as 'g' in impulse/schism tracker) to jump to that point of the pattern. Step through the pattern line by line, see and listen to how they're using effects, offsets, etc, to make the most of their instruments. See how they use percussion not just to add a beat, but to bring variety to a song (this is usually a great failing of mine, I often copy and paste percussion pattern to pattern which is lazy and not very interesting). Also spend time playing with instrument settings, pitch shifts, sustains, fades, filters, etc. A good understanding of how these settings effect how a sample sounds will put you in a good position when entering compo's online with set sample packs. Tracking is no different to playing an instrument- spend 10 minutes a week and you'll hardly improve, spend an hour a day and you'll be tracking like a pro in no time! Have fun!