readme:james's blog

I've been seriously busy lately, although I still don't seem to be getting the stuff done that I really need to. My thesis, for example.

I've had very little time for music, too. Luckily, I have hundreds of unfinished tracks lying formant on my hard-drive, so when I've had a spare hour in the evening I've been going back over them. Most of them are just tiny little snippets of things that I kept to use later and forgot about, but some were things that sounded quite promising, but were abandoned when I ran out of ideas.

The Fluff

The Fluff [ogg|mp3] was very nearly a finished track, so I finished it off and polished it up a bit.

Bent

Then I found something I'd played with a while ago and didn't really do much with.

A while ago, I'd been messing around with pitch bending (which led to the strange organ in yetanother and the whistle in howler) and had some weird pitch bent synth sounds doing nothing.

So, I cobbled them together to produce bent [ogg|mp3] - a tribute to trackers, the history of trackers and people who make music with trackers. It uses most of the old tricks, lots of commands, and sounds like Jean Michel Jarre's bad dreams.

Since people keep asking about how I use trackers, here's some info.

One of the ways I create sounds is to take an existing sample, such as a piano or some singing, and chop out one or two cycles of the sound. Looped, this makes a very simple and plain sound. It's very easy to work like this in a tracker.

Sometimes, I don't even go for a zero crossing - I let it make a disgusting noise and filter it when I use it.

On their own, these sounds tend to be very dry and uninteresting. Setting volume and filter envelopes helps, as does a healthy stack of effects. Distortion, reverb, flange, low pass, etc.

Another thing I like about trackers is the effects column. This isn't for effects like reverb, but for altering the playback of the sound currently triggered in that channel.

We have pitch bend - Ehh (down) and Fhh (up) where hh is a two digit hex number between 0 and FF. Offset (Ohh) lets you control where in the sample playback starts. If 255 isn't enough, you can change the offset with SAh.

Although CheeseTracker uses instruments, unlike trackers of old, and can have per-instrument effects, envelopes, decays, etc, it's sometimes handy to be able to just cut the playback. That's what ^^^ does. You can just tell it to start to decay, or exit the sustain loop with ===.

Way back, when you only had 4 channels to work with, you didn't have the luxury of plug-in effects, envelopes or even the ability to play more than one sound at a time in a channel. And yet people made amazing tunes with tiny little samples.

By using vibrato, tremor and arpeggio commands (Hhh, Ihh and Jhh) in the effects column, they managed to turn a very flat sound into something completely different - usually by cranking up the parameters beyond what they were originally intended for.

There's also effects for volume slides, (Dhh) start delay (SDh) and many more, including my favourite: slide to note (Ghh).

I've been tracking for so long now that these commands are burned into my memory.

# posted by Digehode @ 1:40 pm