Last week I put up a blog post about info about an old Clavia Nord software disc and coming across a site with possibly the most inaccurate info on trackers possible. I put up some links at the end, but ran out of time to explain how and what it is.
At the heart of it all, a tracker is a piano roll style Digital Audio Workstation DAW. It differs from the whole FL studio style, in that you can only play one note per column. FL style puts much focus on small blocks of notes per track. Trackers still have blocks but these contain all sounds used per column (and it can be multiple sounds per column). you build up your track from multiple of these blocks rather than having a timeline running playing the blocks as it passes.
How it started.
Traditionally it started off on the Amiga computer back in the 80's with the soundtracker / protracker running samples with hex comments at the side to perform rudimentary effects. By the Amigas demise sometime in the mid 90's we had Octamed Soundstudio as the pinnacle of Amiga DAWs. Which I got from Amiga Format as a cover disk.
How it ended.
Fast forward nearly 30 odd years later, and we seem to be overlooked, passing out of memory for the whole sideways DAW style. We still have Renoise and quite a lot of trackers to create sound for old consoles/ computers, and that's it. We don't have to rely on samples now, most modern trackers can run Steinberg's VST instrument standard. But apart from that I would hate for us to go the way of the Dodo.
Anyway you just want to see some tracking in action right? I'll leave you with a version of PPK Resurrection running in Octamed 4 by Guru Meditator.
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