Posted in: Digital Music by D. Travis North on October 16th, 2007 | 0 Comments
An introduction to the lesser known music writing art: Tracking. Tracking is a unique approach that may be favorable to many aspiring artists and hobbyists. This is a brief introduction to the art.
In a previous article, I wrote about making a
MIDI workstation on a budget. MIDI is a great medium to work in, but even the cheapest systems have escalating costs, and the medium and methods of input aren’t for everyone. Fortunately, there is plenty of software available for your PC that will allow you to write music without upgrading your machine. Most of this software is even free. In this article, I intend to expose the reader to an alternative method of music production known as Tracking.
“A Tracker is the generic term for a class of software music sequencers which, in their purest form, allow the user to arrange sound samples stepwise on a timeline across several channels.” (“Tracker”,
Wikipedia)
Unlike the traditional forms of music notation, a tracker appears as a list of notes like the screenshot in figure 1 below. A single list of notes, which is often 64 lines long, is referred to as a pattern. An artist can create a number of patterns and then set the order in which they play with a pattern list.
The speed at which the tempo can be controlled by changing the song speed or a Lines-per-Minute setting – each Tracker has its own method for these types of controls. But the freedom of the tracker comes from your instrument library, and I use that term very lightly. In the tracking world, your instruments are usually an audio recording that we refer to as a sample. Many tracking musicians record their own samples if they have the means. There are also several resources of free samples available online that can be found with a quick web search.
Sometimes, you can get some high quality samples from remix competitions like the Acid Planet competitions – Free registration and I would highly recommend entering some of the contests which are a great learning experiences). Some modern trackers even support Virtual Studio Technology Plugins (Also known as VSTs or VSTi’s).
VSTs can take on many forms from simple effects to virtual synthesizers. It’s a powerful technology that is very common in the MIDI world and it can extend any studio software, even your tracking software. Many VSTs are available free, and even some of the best VSTs on the market are relatively cheap.
Trackers are a unique approach to music writing, and it takes some patience. But there are two reasons why Trackers are popular. First, many people who write music haven’t benefited from a formal music education and the MIDI approach may not seem as logical as the tracking (or the scrolling list) approach. Second, in comparison to most MIDI software, Trackers are very cheap or sometimes even free and it’s simple and cheap to expand with readily available sample libraries and free VST downloads.
Tracking doesn’t come without a loss, however. The sound quality you can achieve with a Tracking program is going to be limited by the samples that are used and the overall mix-down process is not going to be nearly as great as can be achieved with top-shelf software for your MIDI studio. However, many listeners will never be able to tell the difference. Regardless of the medium’s shortcomings, many artists, even professionals, still prefer the tracking medium and will use it regularly in their music.
A screenshot from MadTracker 2, one of the many modern Trackers available. Note that the music notes appear in list form. These are known as patterns, and the pattern list (top left) indicates the order in which each pattern plays.
The first thing that you need to do is to find a software interface that you are comfortable with. Many of the Trackers available are free to download and use. There are some Trackers available in a free version and a registered version where the free version is restricted in some way.
For example, MadTracker 2 limits your export options – greatly limiting your control of the overall sound quality – in the free version. But even the registered versions are relatively cheap and, in many cases, are well worth the price. As there are so many Trackers available, I am only going to lightly touch on some of the more popular Trackers. And I am only going to focus on current software that will work perfectly within Windows XP. This is a list to get you started. I encourage you to explore the web trying to find additional Trackers that may be more appropriate for you.
MadTracker (Version 2 illustrated in Figure 1 above) supports both samples and VST instruments. Its interface is incredibly simple and easy to use and it’s VST support is quite incredible (I’ve found VSTs that work in MadTracker that don’t work in Cubase).
By default, the free version exports to an .OGG format which can easily be converted to the more popular MP3 format, but that does not allow for easy mix-down. The “Pro” version (About $52 USD as of this writing) allows the export to WAV or AIFF formats making easy use for mixing/mastering software such as Cubase or Cakewalk or freely available mixing software.
Back in the day, there was a popular Tracker, Impulse Tracker, which was written for DOS. It didn’t look pretty, but it was incredibly powerful and was widely used by many music writers all over the world. But with the advent of Windows 95 and its successors, DOS software became difficult to run. Impulse Tracker was no more. There have been many clones, but Schism Tracker is the closest to the real thing that you’ll get in Windows. It is freely available for your use without any clauses, but you are restricted to the use of samples only. No VST support. For many beginning tracking musicians, this may not be a restriction, so long as you find some good samples.
Another popular tracker from yesteryear was FastTracker which suffered the same fate as Impulse Tracker. Renoise probably started as a FastTracker clone, but it has grown significantly. It supports VST instruments and effects, it supports ASIO low-latency drivers (with the full version), a full featured Mixing panel and more. It’s pretty much a professional quality tracking software with a lot of features.
There’s a catch: The demo version is restricted. It allows you to determine if you’ll like the interface, but it’s not enough to produce your music well. The good news is that the full version is only about $50 USD (as of this writing).
Psycle is a reinvention of the classic tracking software. There are a number of plugins that are designed specifically for Psycle including noise generators and effects. The power behind Psycle is that you can link these machines together, visually, to create your “instruments”. You can then control these instruments in your pattern editor much like any other tracker, but the actual audio is very dynamic. It has some VST support, but there are some VSTs that won’t work well with Psycle. But those that work (and most do) can typically drop right into your plugin folder and they can coexist with the native plugins.
In all, you have a very powerful software application that makes some of the electronic styles very easy to write once you get the hang of the interface. Many people are discouraged by the interface as it is incredibly machine driven. You will need to tinker quite a bit to get the sounds that you want, and the method for which to control those machines in your pattern editor leaves something to be desired. But it is incredibly powerful and it’s entirely free to use.
As I said, these are some of the more popular trackers available today. There are clones and branches of each of these (for that matter, some of these are clones of older software), so there is some exploration to be had. But they are all very powerful and relatively easy to learn. Download everything you find and experiment with each. You first need to determine if the tracking style of music writing is for you. And if so, you need to next determine which interface fits your style best.
My next recommendation would be to download as much music written for your chosen tracker as possible in its native format. Many of these trackers come with samples already. But the more you have, the easier it will be to learn some of the tricks of the trade. Like the way a song sounds? Get under the hood to see how they did it. Like a particular instrument? See how they made it.
Finally, don’t get discouraged if your first (or your first ten) songs aren’t very good. The interface will take some getting used to, and you’ll need to be comfortable before you can really write some good music. Join the community and ask for advice and help and offer your songs for critique. You may just find a new (cheap) music writing hobby.
