I have covered the musical history of trackers and 16 bit music before on the podcast, but this is a great in-depth historical look at the ‘sound of software piracy’ – although I’d argue that the early Amiga demos like the 1988 classic Wild Copper were more coding brags and weirdly computer shop adverts (?) than from the Amiga warez scene. That came later….
Trackers were and still are music creation programs, a more code based version of the modern DAW with numbers and vertical scrolling piano roll rather than the horizontal ‘bars’ (and pipes) you see today. They are quite retro and I know artists like Pete Cannon still use Atari and Amigas in their music today, as well as the likes of Shut Up And Dance, Aphrodite, Urban Shakedown, Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares and many more back in the day (I do think the Calvin Harris one is false).
A lot of the early tracking scene was swapping tracks via public domain disks in MODS and MED modules, although great to see that the first sample disk ST-01 makes an appearance – that Korg bass and pizzi noise was on EVERYTHING for a long time since many people didn’t have samplers and used to do what I did early on and nick samples from games and other MODs. It leant a very ‘samey’ sound early on, along with chiptunes.
The video also covers the start of music in the Amiga and early software like Soundtracker, ProTracker (which I used to use back in 1990), MED and OctaMED (ditto but kept with that throughout the 90’s) and the PC scene with FastTracker and others, and trackers today. I still occasionally use Renoise, and happy to say that MilkyTracker is also on Macs.
Only one bit I’d correct – the early software actually had chiptune synth instrument capability built in, you could draw 8-bit waveforms and make in-built noises inside the program, I definitely know MED or OctaMED had that facility, and I think ProTracker had it too.
(Video via Ian Fondue)
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