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[OhDaeSu]

Hello, friends.
How do you, guys, create effects (reverb, delay, filter, etc) in trackers (Shism tracker, Milky tracker)?
As far as I know DSP effects are not available in those old school trackers.
Can't find any tutorials regarding the subject.
Could you share any links that might help?
Thank you.

[Steffest]

Hey!

On old-school trackers there are no build-in effects for reverb, delay and low/high pass filters.

You can mimic them a bit by playing the same note on another track, one or 2 steps down with a lower volume (like in this module https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=65222 ) but obviously it's not quite the same.

The amiga had a hardware lowpass filter that you could activate/deactivate using the E00 and E01 commands, but most non-amiga trackers ignore that.
If I'm not mistaken the Coma Rebels demo used that to great effect ( https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=59623 )

you could say it's one of the charms of old-school tracking: just raw sample manipulation and not much fancy effects like reverb or VST plugins.

[Saga Musix]

The IT format has a resonant lowpass filter, so that is already possible in IT/Schism (with some trickery you can turn it into a highpass filter too).
Note that the Amiga filter Steffest talks about has no parameters, i.e. it is either on or off, but you cannot configure the cutoff frequency (since that's not what it was meant to be used for).

A delay can be achieved by pasting the same channel data into another channel but with a slight... delay. This is easiest in IT format where you can set the channel volume for this echo channel to e.g. 30% and hence do not have to adjust all volume commands manually.

For creating reverbs and other DSP effects, I would recommand loading a reverb plugin into a modern tracker like OpenMPT (or any other DAW) and "bake" the reverb into the sample data. Back in the days, people would have used early software reverbs or the well-established hardware reverb processing units for this.

[Ceekayed]

You can emulate reverb with a volume envelope that has a very low volume sustain on note-off, add in slight vibrato and pan envelope to give it a bit of variety.

Taking a look at any of my one hour compo songs in tMA (files titled as ohck-*.it) should demonstrate a lot of the echo/reverb trickery that you can pull off in oldschool trackers. There are tons of ways to give your songs the depth echo/reverb can add, most of it comes down to clever use of the stereo picture and a lot of copy-pasting of channels and instruments.

[Saga Musix]

To add to Ceekayed's trick, I sometimes do a similar cheap fake reverb in IT format by cloning the instrument and then fading the volume envelope from 0 to 100% in about 0.5 - 1 second, and fading the pitch envelope from minimum to center in one or two ticks. This way, you can simply duplicate the pattern channel for that instrument and replace the instrument numbers on the second channel, and put the second channel in surround mode.

[OhDaeSu]

Thank you, guys, so much!

[Rave669]

A delay can be achieved by pasting the same channel data into another channel but with a slight... delay. This is easiest in IT format where you can set the channel volume for this echo channel to e.g. 30% and hence do not have to adjust all volume commands manually.

Old topic I know. I just wanted to add my two cents:

I'm very familiar with the "ping-pong" technique by copy/pasting channels for delay. I've done it in the past using as many as four channels. while it does have limitations, it does work well. Believe it or not, the Carpenters invented this trick using vocals to create depth and harmony and called it Ping-ponging (which is why I use that term).

The most important trick however has to do with actual sample creation. Prior to plugins, you applied effects to your samples prior to importing them into a project. In many cases, they couldn't be looped, so you would opt to record a long sample, as long or short as the instrument would need to be sustained in a given song or track.

While the audio editing software back in the day was quite limited, even in the days where .VOC files dominated the .WAV format, many audio editors allowed you to apply effects to samples. When I didn't have that option for a particular effect, there was another option... My brother is a guitarist, and he has (and had in the past) a LOT of effect pedals. I would sometimes borrow them to chain for effects when recording a sample off a line source or a microphone. Delay, reverbs, distortion, echo, wah wah, flangers, ring mods, you name it.

Nowadays, a lot of audio editors and DAW's support VST or MAX plugins so it's becoming a lost art, but pedals are always an option, still to this day!

I think I actually used a desk fan in front of a microphone a couple of times when making samples. Nothing is off limits when actually making the samples you use in a project and it helps a lot when using old school trackers that don't support pliugins.

[zzo38]

I think Amiga .MOD format has a filter command, but this format is hardly implemented on any non-Amiga computers, and the only setting for the filter is on/off for all channels at once, not the amount of filter.

[MisthaLu]

Since this thread was already here, I thought it was silly to create a new one.

I've been compiling a list of how to do various effects in oldskool trackers.

https://indiegamemusic.com/tutorial-modern-effects-in-trackers.php

Feedback is most welcome!

More to add? Gimme!

[a_tiny_pony]

@MisthaLu
That's some really interesting links. But, with the hi/low pass filter technique, if you're already having to open stuff up in external wave editing programs though, what's the advantage of layering a second sample that's been inverted and high-passed via wave editor to create a low pass filter, instead of just using a sample with the low pass 'baked' in? Does it allow some modulation this way?

@Rave669
I love the desk fan - 'analogue signal processing'! I have some walkmans and a crappy old mobile phone I keep around to record things onto and resample - especially something like a basic synth line, gives them a lot of texture!

I often start in a tracker bc the technical limitations kind of unlock my brain from choice paralysis, and then once I've got some cool patterns or a basic track, i'll export individual channels out to whatever DAW or similar toy i'm playing with, and do effects and 'producing' things there.