![]() This was another very attractive aspect of the community, being able to learn how to use the software by sharing the track files with each other.” I quickly learned how to make tunes with it just by studying tracks made by ‘veterans’. “There was something about the ease of use and the sampler/instrument view that intrigued me. It was a beautiful fusion of digital art and music, and the best part is that it was all free!” After checking out the various trackers that were popular (there were many), Stewart found himself attracted to Impulse Tracker. I was using IRC at the time to meet people around the world who shared similar interests, and through this I discovered the Demo scene. I didn’t know anyone who listened to, let alone made, electronic music. “At the time, I was living in my home state of North Carolina in a little city called Hickory. “I’ve been making electronic music since I was 13,” recalls Stewart, who now lives in Berlin. ![]() This was definitely part of the appeal to Travis Stewart, who has made the majority of his Machinedrum releases on Impulse Tracker. And because hackers and trackers have worked together symbiotically from the beginning, the software encourages tweaking and open-source code most trackers are made and modded by small crack teams and given away free via message boards and torrents. They read information up and down rather than side-to-side horizontally, ditching the “piano roll” view that became the standard for most sequencers, and the way you work within them – entering hexidecimal values on a grid rather than dragging and dropping – hews closer to computer programming than recording. While most music software is obsessed with becoming ever more intuitive, powerful and better looking, trackers still act very similarly to the way they did in the 80s. While Ableton and Logic have become the popular kids in music production class, trackers remain the punks in the back of the room flipping off the teacher. However, the tracker survived and carved out a niche of its own.” “As computer performance increased, and PC and Mac became the dominant platforms, graphically-oriented sequencers featuring piano roll interfaces more or less took over. “Trackers reached the height of their popularity in the early 90s when the Amiga and the Atari ST were the main computers of choice for electronic music producers,” explains Erik Jalevik, a software developer for Renoise, one of the most powerful and developed tracker programs. It was designed by Karsten Obarski, a German engineer who became a cult hero for the astoundingly evocative soundtracks he composed to Amiga games like Rally Master, Amegas and Crystal Hammer. Tracker software goes back to the early days of computers - the first tracker, Ultimate Soundtracker, was released in 1987 for the Commodore Amiga. As data scrolls up and down the screen, it passes over the numbers you’ve entered, making finely-chopped breaks or haunting 8-bit melodies out of your cursor placements. Commands like sliding the pitch up or cutting don’t live in a menu bar they’re represented by entering the letters U and C, respectively. You enter a numerical value that specifies how far you want to tweak: 7 might be a little, 30 might be a lot. Want to delay a sample? There’s no knob or fader here. If you want to play a C note in the fifth octave, you don’t hit a MIDI keyboard instead you enter “C#5” where you want the note to play in the pattern. They operate far more on key commands than mouse moves, with everything from notes to effects denoted by a hexidecimal value rather than a button or a graphic. In the drag-and-drop era, trackers look especially trippy.
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