Thanks for sharing this video.
I am pretty sure it will remind me some good old time...

 

great watch, highly recommended

 

Remember making tons of music in FastTracker - happy times :-D

 

Love this one. Got so much nostalgia vibes from the tunes in this one. Actually I am hard pressed to think of a video by Ahoy that I didn't love. They're all fantastic.

Trackers are an essential part of (especially European) techno scene, there's still music pressed on vinyl that's made with these bad boys. And all of the tunes already made, man.

Get some tunes at Modarchive, and give Kohina stream a listen for tracker/chiptune music.

I do recommend everybody to give a tracker a go, just for the perspective if nothing more.

Try these:

Fasttracker 2 Clone, mentioned in the video and still as fun as a barrel of monkeys.

OpenMPT, a modern take with VST and MIDI support.

 

Absolutely. I'm pretty sure i still have some of my xm-tracks somewhere.

 

I got my start in PC music prior to trackers even, but I definitely remember using trackers. Impulse Tracker was my fave for that. Great times! I will have to check this video out.. thanks for posting. I remember back in late 80s/early 90s these teams releasing "demos"... which were basically coded in Assembler, and just had some 3D graphics that were cutting edge at the time (soooo not the case now), and .MOD, tracker-based music.

Edit: omg, nostalgia boner... @14:00 they mention the demo scene stuff I was talking about. haha Oh and Scream Tracker.. I used that one a lot.. I thought it was Impulse Tracker, but maybe they are the same thing, just rebranding or something. Also used FastTracker. Oh, I see they show Impulse Tracker later. I used both of these.. I couldn't remember if they were different apps or not though, or just a new version. The video answers that though, IT was a different developer borrowing ST's style.

Edit 2: Omg, Second Reality @ 31:00.. hearing that brought back memories.. I remember that song and remember the demo. Was very cool, in it's day. This video brings back great memories! I remember Future Crew being a big leader in these demos at the time (and Purple Motion's music was pretty amazing, in that time).

 

Last edited: Dec 2, 2021

players still play xm, as always problems with channel mutes, but to check out a tune fine!

 

I got my late start on trackers this year. Always wanted to try them but just looked too intimidating... really wish I would have started on them sooner.

Some stuff I made on the Polyend Tracker:

 

yea, thats a great documentary

 

Second Reality was a game changer really. I couldn't understand at the time how far FC pushed the hardware at the time. For people not in the know they did this on a 486 + Soundblaster, so no hardware acceleration to be had. Yet they showed the future with things like Gouraud shading, Voxels, and realtime raytracing all computing live.

For me, someone who could code x86 assembly at the time was a pivotal moment. After that it wasn't enough to code but it was needed to code big time.

*edit:* So all of it is less than 2 megs. After the code and the graphics it leaves no room for the music, which makes it more impressive. so 200kB for the soundtrack or so.

 

Oh man. I watched their demos in awe. There was another almost as good (Panic?). That's how I discovered the trackers.
Like many I used Fastracker II. That group's musician used Impulse Tracker 3. I even recorded "2nd reality" sound in a cassette (or CD) and played it with my friends back in the day. They were very impressed despite being mostly metalheads already. Even tried to explain them what was a mod... answer "shutup Xupito, just enjoy music and get drunk like the rest of us!"

The funny thing (haven't watched the doc yet) is I'm pretty sure trackers began with the Commodore Amiga computers. I had an Amiga 500 for years, what a masterpiece of a computer. With an staggering number of 4 voices audio chip.

 

Last edited: Dec 2, 2021

Yeah, Panic by FC was ridiculously good:

The BBS scene exploded every release for fucks sake. And yeah, we used to get drunk to demos as well!

Well, Soundtracker was Amiga, the first of it's kind (touched by the doc here, watch it). Screamtracker and Fasttracker were the PC brethren, something I moved to after my Amiga was no more.

By the devs of Fasttracker, here's Crystal Dreams 2:

This was the first time I learnt what "linear algerbra" was so that set my path towards mathematics. Of course these things done here are not simple matrix transformations.

 

Many many people produce great music in trackers even today me included(i use Renoise).Thanks for the video it was good to see the history of trackers

 

The video does make note of that, but yup... and I remember at the time a classmate owning an Amiga, and I was so jealous at the time that the games he played had tracker based music in it... and then down the road, I got to mess around with them myself. Loads of fun.

And yes.. Panic.. good call... I remember that one as well. Thank you @phumb-reh for posting the vids!! I wonder what Future Crew are up to these days.... lol

"Unreal" was another one of the good demos of theirs from that era I remember fairly well:

Thanks @ArticStorm for this thread, as this has been a great trip down memory lane!

 

Last edited: Dec 3, 2021

For 21 years ago in my First Studio

 

Absolutely love AKAI's iconic color scheme with its red logo.

 

Nothing quite like an old CRT monitor and a box of CD-R's to kick nostalgia into overdrive