My Trax
Tracking n: The art of using a software sequencer1 to arrange notes of varying instruments in a sequence that when played together make a song.
Tracking has died down quite a bit since when I was big into it. There really hasn’t been any good tracker software since Fast Tracker II, which is for DOS and doesn’t work on modern operating systems. There are fair equivalents such as Modplug and Skale had it been finished. But nothing quite compares to the raw power of FT22.
If I had to describe tracking to someone who was entirely clueless, I would say it is like recording a middle C note of an instrument, say 5 seconds worth. You then import that recording into the tracking software. Middle C in the application equates to playing the note as it was recorded. Now if I place say an A# somewhere, the tracker creates an A# by playing the recorded sound faster. Sort of like speeding up an album, the pitch gets higher. So by speeding up and slowing down the original recorded note, you can work up and down the scale as you please.
That is the basic explanation. You can go beyond that and add volume and panning envelopes, speed up and slow down the progression of the entire song, perform slides, looping, etc. Enough of this. On with the goodies.
Just Like You Imagined [3:00]
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This is a version of Just Like You Immagined by Nine Inch Nails I did a while back while playing around with Reason 3.0. It is a mixture of MIDI and tracking.
Hurt [4:17]
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This is another Reason 3.0 product. Same idea as JLYI. This one is Hurt by NIN.
Stay tuned… More to come!
- Examples include Fast Tracker II, Impulse Tracker, Modplug Tracker, Reason, etc. ↩
- Created by Starbreeze Studios, Fast Tracker and Fast Tracker II were by far the leading trackers in the scene. Since the advent of the NT kernel and the lack of DMA sound support beginning with XP and NT, FT2 is no longer usable in most cases. Starbreeze studios continually pushed back updates to FT to pursue video game design. There was talk of releasing the source code to the open source community, unfortunately this never happened. A project called Sk@le was started that was based on the FT code, however it is still in Beta and has not been updated for quite some time. ↩