I've never been as productive and free as when I was mind-melded with FastTracker2 in the 90's
For a peak couple years I was generally writing 100s of (unrefined) 5-14 min tracks every month. Total unbound freedom to experiment at (close to) the speed of thought.
For anyone who's not had the pleasure, It's like when you first get good at touch typing and find you can suddenly put down thoughts dozens of times faster than ever before - it frees up your self-expression and gets The Censor out of the way.
Renoise is pretty cool, but I never fully glommed with it to the same level - might be time to try again! Recently started playing with a Polyend Tracker - pretty neat to feel those old synapses waking up. There's no way it can ever approach the speed of full keyboard-operated Tracker programs but the chance to revisit that beloved workflow in a solid and portable unit is so far really compelling.
I was an ModEdit -> Scream Tracker 3 -> Impulse Tracker user myself, and that feeling of productivity that sample-based trackers create was astonishing. I almost always considered what I was doing was "sketching" out songs that I might somebody revisit to remaster or clean up with better instruments etc. (I never really did of course).
I found I could crank a song out I was happy with in just a few hours, but it took a long time to pull together a sample library that I was happy with and well organized, and learn enough techniques to make what I wanted. But yeah, there was a period of a few years where tons of music I still listen to today literally came together in a couple of hours.
I started slowing down as I tried to go for much more polish in my productions, writing out by hand effects that are done nowadays with VSTs (pitch stretches, digital multi-tap stuff, and lots of trying to make acoustic instruments sound like they were actually being played with volume and sample offsets).
Then technology and life changed, IT sort of stopped working and I didn't like my other options for a while. Finally forced myself to get into the FastTracker sort of workflow years later with MadTracker2 and now Renoise. It's not something I really have time to dedicate to anymore, but I keep almost getting setup to do it. There's a mental block for me with VST/VSTis that I can't quite get through. Sure they sound "better" but they lack lots of the expressiveness and flexibility working in all samples used to offer.
> There's a mental block for me with VST/VSTis (... snip ...) they lack lots of the expressiveness and flexibility working in all samples used to offer.
It'd be neat to have the best of both worlds, ie. Give me VSTs but let me control time and playback as precisely as I can with sample based
Seems like it'd be technically feasible even with VST but it's just not done (emphasis is on realtime, with VSTs behaving as independent "pedals" rather than part of a whole)
You might have nerd sniped me.
nervous sideways glance at long neglected VST source code folder
Yeah thing which has always irked me about that is you have to maintain the original sequence and setup if you want the freedom to change it later
Something which made that transparent would be ideal. Ableton and a few others have freeze options which make this a bit nicer but it's still a bit disconnected
> was "sketching" out songs that I might somebody revisit to remaster or clean up with better instruments
Haha big time - I didn't really have the kit for such things, but I remember trying to "finish" a few tunes by rendering them out (not as stems) and then adding crap over the top in a non-real-time sample editor
Whole thing of course became a mess of reverb :)
> writing out by hand effects that are done nowadays with VSTs
Yeah, VSTs made it so appealing and flashy
Making manual flanges by copying a track and using sample offset on one was... not super convenient, but boy was it satisfying
"real" effects opened up so many powerful sound design options that it was easy to forget about actually composing things :)
And the amount of times I then wanted tracker level micro control you got with manual approach and just gave up after a bit..
One of the great parts was downloading ft2 songs from your local bbs and instantly see how a jungle or trance song is made, and then get to work sequencing your own amen breaks.
If you havent tried udio yet, get on it. Mindblowing.
Yeah, the "open source" aspect of the old tracker scene is kind of on an entirely different level. Everything, and I mean everything, was there for you to look at, copy, remix, reuse, and repurpose.
Like a certain sample? Copy it into your project.
Wonder how a certain baseline looked? It's right there.
Different musicians had entirely different looks to their musical organization, how they used tracks, what samples they relied on, how they expressed things. And you could see all of it just as they had laid it down.
I'm not sure there are many other production environments where the published "document" has as much internal work product open for inspection as these old files offer.
The other interesting part of it was that it was very much governed by a set of behavioral conventions at the time. No manifesto or political movement, no rules, just concepts of good behavior (give credit to your sample sources, don't plagiarize etc.) Other than that it was just young people doing basically whatever the hell they wanted without anybody to get in their way (for better or worse!)
Totally - the "I like this, how does it work?" Factor is such an amazing learning tool (and a hell of a fringe community builder)
Between mod files and small demoscene programs written in assembler there was so much incentive to improve your skills just in order to _understand_ how a thing worked. Then you're using that new understanding to make new things (rather than copying a set of rote "tricks")
Hope you managed to preserve these, I’d be keep to take a listen if they’re hosted online somewhere. I’ve been using renoise for 15 years on and off and while nowhere near 100s of tracks a month I fondly look back on the first year I used it similarly - that combination of youthful energy and tracker software is really something special. Renoise has come a long way and is a joy to use.
Alas most died on boxes of floppy discs which succumbed to a flood
I recently discovered some 50 odd floppies which survived, and a couple old 5" hard drives - so I'm hopeful! I assume most of the data will be pretty patchy by now (if not totally gone) but I'm gonna try some forensic recovery
If I manage I'll put the survivors somewhere for sure :)
Anywhere I can check out your renoise stuff? Always keen to find new stuff to boggle at
I had more than a hundred 5.25" floppies from the 1980s and I successfully recovered all but two of them thirty years later. It's definitely worth a try.
Same, I had several hundred 3.5" floppies from the 80s and they were all fine when I ripped them. I think double density might be more reliable than high density.
What sort of memories did you find? (if you don't mind sharing)
Also: any tips for recovery? I'm so far assuming I'll just get them nice and cool, then do multiple raw read passes so I can then choose the individual bits which are the same across most passes
Oh that woulda been a neat bit of time travelling, glad it worked out!
I'm quietly hoping I end up finding a bunch of my old x86 assembler projects in these discs (well - excited and a little scared... perhaps better through the rosy glasses of nostalgia)
Same except I later switched to impulse tracker 2 as it was more keyboad driven. I think there is an open source clone called schismtracker[1]. I should try it.
I made lots of tracks at the time, from the most mainstream to very experimental, those were good times.
I also purchased a renoise license but it didn't click. But maybe that was just me being a dad and having much less free time, patience and possibility to isolate myself in a man cave.
The free time aspect is probably a big one - easy for nostalgia to say it's the tools that changed, but as an adult (or close approximation of one) getting a few hours of free exploration time is downright miraculous - can't possibly compete with a teenager hyperfocusing and losing time while they create for 24hrs solid
The Polyend Tracker is a cool piece of hardware. I’ve made a few decent tracks with it but I do find it tricky to get a nice sounding foundation. I’ve been eyeing of the Tracker +
More recently I have been playing with the Dirtywave M8, but using the open source firmware on an RG351. Holy heck is it fun, and sounds absolutely amazing.
I agree, very cool. I still miss the fast productive workflow of Jeskola Buzz from back in the day. Modular software synth + tracker with pattern sequencing. https://youtu.be/8J8i72a11W4?si=IRic-Z_YMinudnhn
For a fast keyboard-bssed workflow but also the ability to divide time however you like (I'm a big fan of strange swing fractions like 3/5 instead of 2/3), keep audio and midi side by side, and use whatever plugins you like, what's the nearest modern equivalent? Reaper?
What actually switched me over from trackers as the primary tool was this (discontinued) DAW called Orion, it had a piano roll for which you could provide custom tick rates, divisions, and highlighting rules for those divisions (ie. You could specify an arbitrary number of columns, then have bar lines every 11 beats and more subtle lines every 7 beats)
Drukqs is a great album btw, if you're at all interested in music you should give it a listen. It's got everything from tender prepared piano pieces to his signature drill and bass. Syro from 2014 is also an amazing album.
He's got a catalogue of bangers I've always loved, but Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 was so unique when it was released it really took me by surprise. It was hypnotic, sometimes eerie, other times introspective and beautiful.
If you're to believe the account Richard James gave, he claims to have used sleep deprivation and lucid dreaming to compose the album. I used to listen to the entire thing beginning to end on headphones, and I believe it!
SAW2 is maybe one of the most important collections of ambient electronic music ever made. It's an astonishing exploration of the genre.
I've thought it to be compared in some ways to Bach's "The Art of Fugue" which pushed its own genre so hard that its often considered to be pinnacle work on Fugues and sort of forced later musicians to move along to newer forms.
While I personally prefer SAW85-92, I have to recognize the ways in which SAW2 pushes ambient and electronic music, even today, to areas that force it to be defined and to redefine itself. SAW85-92 sounds very much like a product of the time, but SAW2 sounds absolutely contemporary even today. It somewhat closed the book on Ambient electronica and then shoved that book firmly into the avantgarde. The individual pieces range from unsettling to mind-alteringly beautiful.
"...I Care Because You Do" just sort of continues the leap forward. "Start As You Mean to Go On" feels to me like plugging yourself into a power outlet in a hurricane. IMHO, RDJ is at his best when he combines a kind of odd, almost apathetic, idle but tuneful, framework to a song, then ignites it into a frenetic mind blending fire with absolutely bonkers rhythmic lines, or sometimes just leaves it to chill like with "Aberto Balsalm".
It's wild to think we're talking about music older than people who have graduated college and are considered almost mid-career in some fields. And yet he's still making mindblowing stuff https://youtu.be/e_Ue_P7vcRE
Random tidbit: around when the album came out I chucked it on my friend's CDJs (IIRC I skipped straight to Mt St Michael) - by chance the CDJs were set at some lower speed, maybe 50-75%
Highly recommend trying it out - being able to hear how much groove and complexity sits behind those super fast tracks is quite enlightening. We ended up listening to both discs of the album like that, just boggling the whole time
I love most of his work. Drukqs is his weakest (but still good!) album IMO - Avril 14th is a great track. His Analord series is also amazing and Rushup Edge under another alias - The Tuss.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but this take seems absolutely out of pocket to me. Drukqs is Rich’s most well-rounded, polished, and arguably revolutionary project. From a sound design and arrangement perspective it still sounds contemporary, more than 20 years on. It’s also the only one of his albums besides SAW 85-92 of which I like every track (and love most of them).
You do you, but maybe give it another dedicated listen and you might change your mind! :)
Interesting... Drukqs was my introduction to RDJ when it was released and to be honest I have never really gone back to give it a dedicated listen. Perhaps his other works stand out more to me because it was released (or I discovered them) later. Thanks for the comment; I'm going to revisit the album and maybe reconsider!
90s and early 2000s were cemented by works like these. By these I really mean electronica and it’s influence. It had hit mainstream. Warp was full on, having all sorts of artists and releasing their Artificial Intelligence compilation. Darude had just come out with Sandstorm and Digitally Imported radio was taking off with Shoutcast. Elsewhere, Nu-Metal for example was starting to come into its own, lots of new music that we haven’t heard before with all sorts of genre overlaps. Textures that did not exist before. We knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that we were in a musical zeitgeist.
Has anything like this ever happened since? I keep chasing the dragon but I haven’t seen anything of this sort occur. It seems like we’ve mostly stabilized and are back to an equilibrium.
I've a suspicion that what's missing is those early producers drew inspiration from a diverse set of non-genre (or non-electronic) art, and also were driven at least partially by the lack of good experimental electronica in their early years (scarcity breeding experimentation or something?)
Whereas nowadays most people are (justifiably) inspired by a preponderance of music _within the style they're creating_. Pair that with a strong focus on "how to sound like X" style tutorial content and I imagine it's tougher to extricate yourself from Building A Product long enough to invent.
I often feel kinda retroactively jealous of how much amazing tutorial content is at our fingertips these days, "you can learn anything!" but do wonder if the relative isolation and drought in those early days was perhaps more of a benefit to prolific output than this abundance of input is.
Much easier to consume than produce - unless there's nothing to consume :)
I suspect it falls in your early 00’s umbrella but dupstep from 04-08 was a pretty special time that saw literal school children producing a sound that went global with the rise of internet usage at the time.
i think the 2000-2010 period was so magical because of the democratisation of the music creation process. FL studio had just hit a few years before, was famously pirated, and was in wide use in the (imo) heartland of electronic music - the UK -- in the afformentioned genres Dubstep, and previously Grime (UK garage was previous to these two and was very much living in Logic/Cubase with hardware at the forefront).
I think rampant piracy of an easy to use - gamified production environment pushed music forward in a big way. Renoise did similar things for the mid-2000s North American breakcore scene, and its much prettier sibling IDM was more in-love with MAX/MSP, Csound, Pure Data and so on.
After this period - i think Trap kicked everyone aside in conjunction with Soundcloud becoming the defacto standard for music sharing - vinyl was STILL very much en-vogue in 2000-2010 period. Trap was also accompanied by De-constructed club (ala Sophie) as the new hotness. One of the big draws in this period was complete irreverence for tradition, and lineage. The avante garde and pop world very much were co-mingling. This peaked with hyperpop being coined as a genre.
Right now?? I think "global bass" is the new-ness. UK and the USA have been sidelined imo - South Africa (qgom and related) and Nigeria with their local styles - Afrobeats, amapiano and others I cannot remember for the life of me...check out labels like Nyege Nyege, Hakuna Kalula and so on...It's really all about Africa right now. And music consumption via viral tiktok is very very much on-trend (sadly)
And even more recently? most likely BR Funk (Brazilian) is making waves. You know its making waves because - low sound quality has in my opinion always been a marker of something new. Trap was pretty aweful sounding until it got its bearings.
As a side - i think a KEY to these strong musical movements is a strong geographical identity...whenever music styles are exported, something is lost. What made (early) dubstep special was the influences of the kids living in those areas - SE Asian supermarkets, traditional SE Asian musics (as samples), and the UK hardcore continuum together are a beautiful thing :)
Yeah... I definitely share the feeling that we've hit a wall in terms of new sounds. Currently I think some of the work happening in the audio/ML space is the most promising in terms of emerging possibilities but things are still moving much slower than I thought they would. Here's a couple projects we've done developing novel audio interfaces that leverage ML: https://github.com/vroomai - I'm still confident we'll see a breakout use-case in this area soon.
Back in the mid to late 90s tracker stuff was what I considered "how techno was made" (I got an A grade for a presentation in "music" subject at grammar school, mostly because tracker terminology also included "patterns", samples, bpm and such (Future Crew Demos such as Panic and 2nd Reality were my baseline back then).
Boy was it a revelation when I got my hands at a "real" 909, 303+MPC+MIDI setup..
I mean, was it? I always felt like trackers were crappy and “real” producers used real synths and drum machines, but in hindsight we now know that some of the most creative/interesting producers were trackers
It did always feel like the "real" folk had some mysterious room full of hardware
I guess it was true, but so neat that they were sometimes triggering that stuff with trackers or sampling it for use within trackers (or similarly niche software)
Wow this really blows my mind. I used trackers nearly every day when Drukqs was released and somehow I felt that Aphex Twin just had to have access to stuff I didn’t. Obviously that was kinda true, cause he had synths and teenage me couldn't afford those, but still, turns out it all boiled down to plain old tracking, just samples. No special effects, no fancy overpriced sequencer orchestrating a million pieces of gear, just… samples. It really blows me away.
I feel similar! I made tons of tracks, mostly with Impulse Tracker, and I liked listening to it myself but I had this belief that a record company would never accept something that was made in a tracker because it wasn't "professional", so I never even considered trying to release anything.
That is a new explanation of white label I've never heard before.
My experience is white label vinyl records could be bought in very niche record shops, they were music not released on an official label yet and the samples often weren't cleared for release. I owned a few back in the day. This is how DJs had tracks months before official release.
This explanation is the one I’d heard before and it makes a lot more sense to me. My memories of the 90s is that underground DJs were happy to share their music¹ with others and wouldn’t have sullied their vinyl collection by ripping off the labels. Maybe some DJs were territorial but most would be proud to show off the fruits of their record hunting.
¹ So much so, that they were far less willing to share the decks.
Not sure if that dove evolution parody video got me introduced to the flashbulb’s works initially but I sure enjoyed Kirlian Selections/Tape and Our Simulacra and for some reason came across Benn on numerous occasions (mostly HN related) in the past decade (didn’t know about the YT channel until now though)
That was an interesting video! I knew that he used SuperCollider because he was trolling the SC mailing list under the pseudonym "eric hard jams" with some really nasty messages - until he got kicked out eventually. He and James McCartney, the creator of SC, also know each other personally.
Does anyone on this list know Rich? A few years ago I ran into a zip
file of Pure Data patches allegedly from the twisted mind of Rich
James. They were absolutely mental (lookng at a pd patch lets you see
directly into the composers mind) I've always been curious if they
were really his.
That might make sense. tbh they sounded more like Plaid/Black Dog so
maybe Autechre. I'll have a dig but unlikely I'll find them in the
abysmal heap. iirc they were posted via the old puredata forum so
maybe check wayback.
Doing some digging and all I found was some patches doing Autechre like things and the Autechre patches where Max/MSP patches from the EP7 era that came out around 2008 and were supposedly leaked but I remember Autechre releasing some patches within the last decade, not finding anything though, search engines are not what they were and neither is my memory. I forgot all about Plaid and Black Dog, thanks for the reminder.
Can't find a working link to 2008 EP7 era patch. Later I will dig out the old hard drives and see if I have them saved somewhere.
Are you saying they don't use it or do use it just not a great deal? I am fairly certain I first learned about pd back around the turn of the century from an interview with Autechre where they mentioned using it but I have no idea to what extent they used it. It might have been Max/MSP for the patches which often can be easily run in pd with some minor changes and sometimes works just fine without changes.
Sean in his recent, very long “quick AMA” twitch stream said he had played with it a little bit but they didn’t really make anything with it, such is the overlap with Max with which they were already invested.
I've never been as productive and free as when I was mind-melded with FastTracker2 in the 90's
For a peak couple years I was generally writing 100s of (unrefined) 5-14 min tracks every month. Total unbound freedom to experiment at (close to) the speed of thought.
For anyone who's not had the pleasure, It's like when you first get good at touch typing and find you can suddenly put down thoughts dozens of times faster than ever before - it frees up your self-expression and gets The Censor out of the way.
Renoise is pretty cool, but I never fully glommed with it to the same level - might be time to try again! Recently started playing with a Polyend Tracker - pretty neat to feel those old synapses waking up. There's no way it can ever approach the speed of full keyboard-operated Tracker programs but the chance to revisit that beloved workflow in a solid and portable unit is so far really compelling.