arc-enigma.s3m (arc-enigma.s3m)

 This was my third song. Like my second song, "Calm," this song was intended to be a part of the game my friends and I were planning on creating, entitled "Eighth Enigma." In fact, this was the main theme.

I had no capability of creating my own samples at the time. I had to rely on ripping samples from other songs. I didn't know how to select them a la carte, I really only knew how to take all the samples from a song. In this case, the samples came from Armani Showers: the song that came packaged with Scream Tracker 3 at the time.

Since Armani Showers was a chiptune, by default Enigma was a chiptune as well, given the sample set I had to work with. I think I may have perhaps figured out how to get samples from other songs in the process of doing this, but my memory on that is really hazy. I don't remember exactly how I managed samples before I started using Impulse Tracker (which had a feature that made extracting samples and instruments from other songs trivial).

Our ambitions for Eighth Enigma dwindled not long after this. It never got to be more than a concept.

This song is incomplete. Like Calm before it, I was so enthused about getting songs written that I didn't bother to slow down and verify that they were done and listenable. There's no structure to this song at all. Just a three-note repeated motif using a sinewave, variations on that with a sawtooth wave, minimal percussion, and a badly looped pad that is not integrated with the rest of the song at all. The percussion interlude is out of place and I think I just added because I couldn't think of what to put in. Yes, it's just random notes that I pounded in. I also still didn't know how to cut notes, so some loops keep playing when they shouldn't, and there's no smooth loop back to the beginning.

This is probably my second-worst song. The only one I think it's better than is Cellular Magnetic. Since my attention to detail was non-existent and my desire to say I had a completed a track overcome everything, my work on this one was totally perfunctory. At least it doesn't grate on the ears (which Cellular Magnetic does, and how).

I did get better, of course, and about a year after I completed this song I was definitely competent and putting more care into my music. But this phase of my tracking career was, well...it was rough. I sure felt pretty confident about it at the time, though. - arcturus