Whoa. Hard to believe it's been 20 years already. I remember Impulse Tracker coming to the scene vividly. Almost everyone in our crew (Explizit) on ST3 jumped ship. It was technically superior; you could keep notes playing in a channel for longer, and music improved for the better. We made awesome music in it.
Of course those on FastTracker2 would never use Impulse Tracker. They were two camps, even within our crew, and the two would never meet. At the end both trackers were equally capable if I remember correctly. Of course we're talking about a time when 16 bit samples were the hottest thing around.
In case anyone wants to listen to a bunch of Impulse Tracker songs, check out our archive at http://www.explizit.org. The .IT tracks are at the bottom (or just download the full ZIP).
Impulse Tracker was such a hugely influential part of my younger years. Met some great people in the local scene who’d dial in to a BBS to share IT files and samples, give advice and feedback to each other, etc.
I still use OpenMPT to listen to old IT files or play with some new track ideas every now and then, but nothing like the hours-and-hours-a-day feverish obsession of back then.
Old creator here too. I miss the Fast Tracker days. I went so far as to have two Pentium II computers both running Fast Tracker, using MIDI clock sync between them then deconstructing source music from all those favorite tracker artists, playing partial multiple songs at once. It never got old, always fresh each time.
Then MP3s came out and the whole concept of trading source music for live remixing was lost. Another amazing thing was how compressed they were. I once put my favorite 1700 S3M/XM/IT/etc songs onto a single CDROM! That in itself is wild to think.
Also of interest might be this 1:1 remake of FastTracker 2: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. I’ve only played around briefly but it was exactly as I remember it!
FT2 was pretty much my intro to making music, it came on a PC Format magazine cover CD with a a bunch of XM/MOD files and it blew my mind that I could open up these songs and see how they were made!
I never got particularly good with it but had some fun making tracks with a friend, we later graduated to MadTracker on Windows which added some useful things like filters and effects. Buzz was the last tracker I used, really awesome modular tracker which sadly got mostly abandoned. I am a big fan of Elektron hardware which is pretty tracker inspired though!
I have very fond memories of starting my music journey with trackers back in the 90's, but moving Scream/Impulse Tracker to Fruity Loops (as it was called at the time) was such a massive level up in terms of functionality and usability.
That's awesome. I spent years on fasttracker in the late 90s. Some time ago I uploaded two xm tunes, converted to mp3, to here: https://www.soundcloud.com/derFunk
I used to have a Gravis Ultrasound Soundcard with 4MB of RAM attached. I did over 300 tracks and was a member of a group called Stoned Brain Recordz. If I wouldn't have switched to coding, I would still make music today :)
Whoa this brings back some memories! I was mostly a Fast Tracker user though. I used to love spending hours downloading .xm's at my dad's work so I could rip the samples and use them in my own tracks.
This is nostalgic, I spent countless hours in MPT as a kid. I moved on to sequencers around 10 years ago, but I remember trackers fondly, making music felt a bit like coding.
Good old times, i used FastTracker to play around with music in my BBS days in the 90ies.
We had a really talented guy on the local BBS who made awesome music at the time (and was one of the best Duke3D players in my country), some of it is still up here:
Oh man. Huge flashback to downloading FastTracker 2 back in '93, excitedly hitting "play" on e.g. Chillzone.xm by Norfair (edit, actually that tune wasn't released yet in '93, but there were so many great tunes) and seeing 32 waveforms going at the same time, sending amazing sounds through the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 I had gently installed in my ZEOS 486 DX/2 66 MHz.
Amazing to see it all there in JS today...wow. Thanks for sharing the article.
FastTracker II. Very cool application. IIRC I used it in DOS (before I had Windows 98). I think it was the first application I ever paid for. Didn’t manage to make any good tunes though, I’m better with physical instruments (:
In this era I was a pre-teen and my brother, a few years older, did make a stab at tracking but ultimately focused on other things. I was a bit baffled by the whole thing and we never learned how to rip samples off other sources even though we definitely had the capability for line in and some sample editing tools(Just record off the radio or our CDs! It seems obvious in retrospect).
But it was very exciting to hear other people's work, regardless. Computer music - and it sounded like the stuff I heard in malls and on TV, instead of the synthy chiptune stuff!
Gradually I did start experimenting with composition on trackers and that proved to be another mountain climbed only gradually. Even when I had "the sound," it takes a lot of work to understand how to a bring a song structure beyond a four bar loop, but I would have to say that I learned a fair amount from studying tracker music too. A good success story for source availability.
I did that for years, too :) On the Amiga, that's all I did music wise, rip modules (I still miss that) and listen to / look at them, first in trackers and then with EaglePlayer and DeliTracker and their visualizations. Then on the PC, I made painfully short stubs, like 10-30 seconds, for a long time, with FastTracker (painful because I just didn't know how to make them longer, they were little rhythmic or melodic figures I guess). Then I got into Renoise, and I guess for the most part sampled and looped things I liked, and added speech samples to that. If I count from the first moment I fell in love with Protracker at age 11 or so, and me making something I would call a song in my 20s, it took me over a decade to even begin sucking at music, before that it wasn't even music. And I feel I owe so much to the Amiga, and the people who made music for it, and cared about playing back music for it.
Trackers came before modern DAWs, a tracker used to be a sort of different way to compose music on computers, a sort of different kind of DAW, using a sort of notation, with time scrolling down, instead of to the right. It was popular for making music for early video games, especially when size was a big factor in creating music for computer games. But with the layout and and function you could do unique tricks that are very familiar with early VGM and Demoscene music
Love trackers! A lot of my friends got their start in music in the mod scene - was a magical time of free original music making and sharing on BBSs/early internet. It’s amazing what people created with 4 channels and 8 bit samples on amigas (and a couple of years later with more channels and 16bits on PCs and cheap sound cards)
That's cool! I remember seeing those sorts of tricks in Amiga mods especially.
I jumped from the 8-bit (3 channel) world straight to a 486sx, so getting 16 channels seemed incredible at the time. I soon found out that going above 8 was ill-advised :) The sample size was limited to 64k too, so even if you did bounce tracks together you might only be able to load a few seconds.
File size in general felt like a big deal back then. Going over 100k for the whole mod was considered pretty excessive. I think Fast Tracker 2 ushered in the era of larger samples. I suppose it coincided with modems getting faster too, so people were less reluctant to download songs that got up into the megabyte range.
The demoscene stuff always seemed especially clever to me, because they didn't have the benefit of dedicating the entire computer just to mixing and playback - they needed to display graphics too! I think you can often tell when composers came out of the demoscene by listening for stuff like "J37" arpeggios and the sort of breakdown like in 64-Mania where you play the same sequence in two channels with slightly different settings to create a phasing or chorus effect.
There was a short window where games needed lots of music, but had enough other art assets that CDs wouldn't have worked. Low quality digital samples of the music sounded terrible, and the alternatives like FM-Synth (ad-lib) weren't good enough and MP3s were still too computationally intensive to decode while rendering a game.
It turns out that this type of music technology, first invented to work in the low memory environment of the original Amiga, and then advanced considerably since then, offered a great alternative. Digital samples of individual instruments were played back at different rates to simulate different notes and the note data itself was incredibly small.
While almost all Amiga (and a large number of Atari ST games) used a 4-channel version of this technique, notable games that used this kind of technology in the PC era include the original Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit, Hitman, Deus Ex, Pinball Dreams, etc.
I can't say if Impulse Tracker was used in the production of all of these. There were custom trackers, and other popular tracking software at the time, but the basic technique was very popular during this time. It's likely that Impulse Tracker was less used than people think though as for a long time accurate playback of some of the advanced effects (filters, NNAs) outside of Impulse Tracker was pretty rare.
Quite a few video game music designers got their start writing music in this kind of environment because it was incredibly cheap to get up and running and producing music. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Brandon
Back then most trackers were free, or like Impulse Tracker, basically free except for 1 or 2 major features and you could simply rip the samples out of other songs to reuse in your own music. Since you could also "read" other people's music files, you could also learn a lot about how to construct music. Different techniques, music theory, rhythm and percussion, etc. It's kind of like open source music in a sense.
The original was “Ultimate Soundtracker,” and it was so influential that derivatives often named themselves ___tracker (noisetracker, screamtracker, impulsetracker)
I'm old enough to remember playing games with chiptunes, but young enough to not have known what a tracker was. This YouTube video (from the amazing Ahoy channel) is an incredible, in-depth overview of trackers, their sound and history:
Of course those on FastTracker2 would never use Impulse Tracker. They were two camps, even within our crew, and the two would never meet. At the end both trackers were equally capable if I remember correctly. Of course we're talking about a time when 16 bit samples were the hottest thing around.
In case anyone wants to listen to a bunch of Impulse Tracker songs, check out our archive at http://www.explizit.org. The .IT tracks are at the bottom (or just download the full ZIP).
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