Games - Tracker

	Games - Tracker

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 monophonic channels. A tracker's interface is primarily numeric; notes are entered via the keyboard, while parameters, effects and so forth are entered in hexadecimal. A complete song consists of several small multi-channel patterns chained together via a master list.

How it works

There are several elements common to any tracker program: samples, notes, effects, tracks (or channels), patterns, and orders.

A sample is a small digital sound file of an instrument, voice, or other sound effect. Most trackers allow a part of the sample to be looped, simulating a sustain of a note.

A note designates the frequency at which the sample is played back. By increasing or decreasing the playback speed of a digital sample, the pitch is raised or lowered, simulating instrumental notes (e.g. C, C#, D, etc.).

An effect is a special function applied to a particular note. These effects are then applied during playback through either hardware or software. Common tracker effects include volume, portamento, vibrato, retrigger, and arpeggio.

A track (or channel) is a space where one sample is played back at a time. Whereas the original Amiga trackers only provided four tracks, the hardware limit, modern trackers can mix a virtually unlimited number of channels into one sound stream through software mixing. Tracks have a fixed number of "rows" on which notes and effects can be placed (most trackers lay out tracks in a vertical fashion). Tracks typically contain 64 rows and 16 beats, although the beats and tempo can be increased or decreased to the composer's taste.

A basic drum set could thus be arranged by putting a bass drum at rows 0, 4, 8, 12 etc. of one track and putting some hihat at rows 2, 6, 10, 14 etc. of a second track. Of course bass and hats could be interleaved on the same track, if the samples are short enough. If the they overlap, the previous sample is stopped when the next one begins.

A pattern is a group of simultaneously played tracks that represents a full section of the song. A pattern is intended to represent an even number of measures of music composition.

An order is part of a sequence of patterns which defines the layout of a song. Patterns can be repeated across multiple orders to save tracking time and file space.

History

The term tracker derives from Ultimate Soundtracker
, the first of its type, written by Karsten Obarski and released in 1987 for the Commodore Amiga, although the general concept of step-sequencing samples numerically can be traced back to the Fairlight CMI sampling workstation of the late 1970s, and it is interesting to compare the work of The Art of Noise or the Pet Shop Boys with early tracker music. The first computer game to feature tracker music was Amegas (1987), an Arkanoid clone for Amiga. Its music, composed by Obarski, is these days very well known by fans of "old school" computer music.

Since wavetable sound cards were very expensive in the early 90s and the expressive capabilities of the cheaper FM-synthesizer were rather limited, a new generation of sound standards were needed. The MIDI standard, like you would use with the Roland MT-32 or the Sound Canvas synthesizers, consists of instructions on what note to play with what instrument. In other words, it is like a text file containing simple instructions on how to produce the sound; somewhat like a piano roll. The problem with this was that you needed an expensive piece of hardware in order to produce realistic instrument sounds, and in the earliest days there was much competition between files arranged for the MT-32, and those aimed at the new General MIDI standard. FM synthesis could be used in combination with MIDI, but sounded an order of magnitude worse than wavetable synthesis, or the MT-32.

The tracker format on the other hand, deals with sound differently. This format stores the notes and the instruments digitally in the file instead of relying on a sound card to reproduce the instruments. A tracker song, when saved to disk, typically incorporates all the sequencing data plus samples, and thus during the format's heyday it became almost a sport to create long, complex .mod (or .sng) files which were nonetheless smaller than 880 kB, the size of an Amiga floppy disk. Typically the composer would incorporate his or her assumed name into the list of samples.

Curiously, most early tracker musicians appeared to be from the UK and the Nordic nations, probably because the tracker was heavily related to the demoscene, which grew rapidly in Scandinavian countries. For example, one of the most influential PC trackers, ScreamTracker, was originally developed by Future Crew for use in their own demos.

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Games - Tracker

How it works

History

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