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Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

stef.be

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

#81
post #29

Oh man, this is amazing. I'm teary-eyed with nostalgia, too. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the demoscene and tracker music, here are some recommended old-school tunes to spin up to get a feel for the art at the time. (Someone more in touch than me will have to lead you to the new school!) Just keep in mind the technological limitations on some of these songs: 4 channels, maybe 100k all-in for such wonderful music…

Audiomonster's music on Ice by TSL was phenomenal. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JaG1vIkmhk4 the first track was worth removing the disk to be able to listen the whole thing. I believe he now scores movie soundtracks.

Re: Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I agree about the structure (and keyboard shortcuts) being helpful, derping around endless is still how I use trackers.. and after hating it for a long time, I actually now love it to not ever consider anything "finished", and trackers are perfect for that. Instead of a mess of giant files of things bounced from various programs or even hardware, it's just a file... and though with Renoise the VST matter a lot…

> derping around endless is still how I use trackers.. and after hating it for a long time, I actually now love it to not ever consider anything "finished", and trackers are perfect for that. I've definitely had many satisfying evenings twiddling knobs in Reason, but after a while it loses its fun for me if I don't feel I'm eventually getting to something worth sharing with others. > I say that because a friend of mi…

One thing that really helped me is to realize that many of my favorite songs are probably not that special to most people. This is, no joke, still one of my favorite little ditties:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Io5l0YgNko&t=34m20s

I actually sometimes still listen and maybe even dance to the Amiga version of this ^^ And I'm not saying this isn't a great song, musically, but most people wouldn't want to hear this on the radio or in a club, while I would absolutely go apeshit if that ever happened. I know having heard it first as a kid is a part of it, but the end result matters. I love this tune, even though most normal people might not enjoy it, and would at least prefer "normal instruments". (And don't even get me started on L.F.F. by 4mat :D)

So I try to shift my standard from "is this really good, does this make me look awesome", to "is this too embarrassing, or really just a pointless amusical waste of time", and try to raise the bar for what embarrasses me... because even something I might not like that much, might be the jam for someone else, who knows. What would I tell that imaginary person, that they never got to hear their jam, because I was afraid of what other people might think of it? I also know songs where I like the demo or some dirty live version much more than the perfectly produced studio version, so I try to tell myself, the more the merrier.

I think what really helped in my case is that it all became coupled with lyrics that are either very personal or very political, and it took me so much.. wrestling, not being able to sleep well doing it, but also not being able to let it go for good... and also the world (and rap music) becoming a lot more crazy, and probably me getting older, to become less inhibited -- and being embarrassed about too simple music was completely overshadowed by that. It used to be a concern but it got lost along the trek :) And I also discovered that as far as "beats" go, less really is more, at least, very little is more than enough. The same goes for chip style melodies, and those two are all I need to be happy musically, basically forever.

Well, that and compos with small sample packs becoming more of a thing again. Nothing more fun than that IMO :)

Re: Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

#84
Not only has the author collected a great library of classic mod files to play back, they compiled a fantastic starter library of mod samples for composing new work. These have such a delightfully retro sound to them, I'd love to use them in other software as well, such as the sampler in my primary DAW – anyone know how to extract a WAV file from these vintage Amiga DMS archives?

Re: Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

#86
post #29

Oh man, this is amazing. I'm teary-eyed with nostalgia, too. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the demoscene and tracker music, here are some recommended old-school tunes to spin up to get a feel for the art at the time. (Someone more in touch than me will have to lead you to the new school!) Just keep in mind the technological limitations on some of these songs: 4 channels, maybe 100k all-in for such wonderful music…

One of my all-time favourite chiptunes from 1996:

Funky Stars aka Hybrid Song

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Re: Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

#87

I've been trying to get into trackers for sequencing for a while, but the learning curve is very steep. Has anyone got resources to learn how to sequence one of these beasts with a keyboard? They seem to be the key to making lots and lots of intricate breakbeats.

Not sure if you're already aware, but tracker keyboard shortcuts for note entry typically mimic a piano keyboard:

  2 3   5 6 7 
 q w e r t y u, etc.
I thought this was pretty slick when I first encountered it.

Re: Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript

#88
Writing a .mod player is a fun recreational programming project. I kind of want to get an Amiga so I can hear the sound of the Paula chip doing resampling by changing the audio clock rate instead of my PC doing digital resampling to 48kHz.
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