Always wondered if you could ever know with Midi what the original music creators ever intended since it varied wildly based on hardware.
Historic retrospective:
Ahoy - "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
How about DAW project files?
Listening to these on a 386SX/25Mhz machine with Soundblaster 2.0 (or Pro, not sure) I think, with those soapbox speakers that required batteries in a dark cellar room has embedded itself in my memory permanently, just entering a new world through the music and being awestruck as a pre-teen learning computers.
Space Debris still a favorite of mine from those days, another one that really stuck with me was Starshine by Purple Motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bvhGqCVHzA
Later I got the GUS, with it's signature warm and clean sound that no other soundcard really managed to replicate, mods sounding awesome on it.
In practice, the loop ‘click’ (as referenced in the article) was much more prominent. One of the first GUS mod players, MikMod, had to implement its own volume ramping to work around this. Tracked files with MikMod sounded great, despite the inaccuracies in reproducing the idiosyncratic differences between all the different tracked audio formats.
When the SB AWE32 and Pentium processors showed up, the advantage diminished greatly.
AWE32 and later cards were more perfect in technical and quality sense when playing back tracker music, but what was lost was the specific kind of tonal quality that GUS had when playing back.
I've been listening to that track for almost 30 years and I came here to mention it ...
I had it as a mod from an Amiga 500 then I converted it to mp3 at some point along the way and it's in my music collection.
I think another song I love "Chiba City Blues" was also originally a mod file ...
From a technical perspective, the level of musicality that some artists could derive within the limitations is truly crazy. 100k or so, 8-bit samples, four channels, and composed (basically) from a Norton Commander-style interface. Not to mention a majority of these songs were composed when the musicians were teenagers!
Would be happy to set up a playlist for those who would like an introduction to the scene!
I stayed within the Amiga scene, which means a lot of the picks are demo soundtracks that have that Italo/synthpop kind of style. But there's lots of classics in there, from Jester/Sanity (Germany) to Firefox & Mantronix/Phenomena (Sweden) to Dr. Awesome/Crusaders (Norway) and on. Captain, is of course, Finnish.
Let the Eurovision-ish arguments commence ;)
Onward by Jugi is easily my all time favourite mod (extended format with huge channel count!)
Also: nice info page, nice YouTube videos, but how about providing the MOD files (or whatever format it actually used - sounds like more than 4 channels to me, but maybe that's just because of the remaster) for download?
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...
And yes, it is really "only" a "classic" 4-channel MOD file! Cool...
So, ModArchive is great, but the search function has some room for improvement :)
I noticed the video in the page is a remaster. To my ears, it sounds like it's being played with non-Amiga interpolation with less spectral imaging/replication (often mistakenly called aliasing), altered panning (the Amiga has an infamously rigid hard-panning setup), and possibly eq/reverb mastering on top of that. Compared to a video with aliasing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnXzUFJnfQ, no clue if the Amiga low-pass filtering is accurate), I like how the remaster has less high-pitched whine, but I feel it's missing out on the spectral replicas which influence the original's sound.
> I could try “hiding” the loop point by adding fades in the beginning and end of the sample, and then overlapping the fade areas.
I've heard people saying that crossfading is effective at looping, but in my experience it's difficult to pick good crossfade regions which don't result in altered timbre or audible discontinuities. Good crossfades are still slightly visible in a spectrogram, and bad crossfades are visibly and audibly discontinuous.
I'm probably 30 years too late, but I implemented a more sophisticated (but more situational) algorithm which analyzes a sample as a spectrum, then resynthesizes it using a variation of the existing padsynth algorithm. This produces a perfectly looped sound with no discontinuities at the loop point (unlike crossfading), with built-in chorusing (not suitable for solo instruments), no attack phase (not suitable for staccatos or plucked/percussive instruments), unfortunately with a bit of metallic artifacting. A year ago I implemented a prototype at https://github.com/nyanpasu64/padsynth which could shorten choirs and create chorded samples, but I never fleshed it out into a user-friendly product.
Another idea I had was to resynthesize the "loop end" of a sample, altering the amplitudes and phases of the harmonics to line up with the neighborhood of the "loop begin" (I'm undecided on exactly how to tweak the pitch and amplitude, whether to use phasors on a plane without pitch shifting, or shift pitch, or what), or crossfade while preserving the amplitudes of each harmonic, etc. This would preserve the majority of the original sample, making it useful for soloed instruments (though more difficult to use for chording samples). Sadly I haven't actually implemented this.
> A common trick to emulate a rhythmic delay effect was to use a short staccato instrument, play a melody with it, then manually go through every empty row on the same channel, copy & paste the note from a few rows above with a reduced volume, and repeat this until all rows were used.
0CC-FamiTracker and forks partly automate this process using an echo buffer command, which acts like a note with the same pitch as 1-4 notes above.
I believe trackers need more innovation, better commands (duration-target pitch/volume slides, graphical editing), better ways of managing state (eg. effects ringing on for longer than you want, or the wrong effects being active when a song loops), and better support for non-grid-aligned notes. I don't have all the answers yet, sadly. I've been working on https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp but it's stuck in development hell.
> A simple and restricted composing environment like a four channel tracker with a limited amount of samples guarantees you can’t spend half a day tuning a kick drum sound.
I think that partly separates sample-based trackers and General MIDI formats (primarily based around prerecorded sounds, MIDI has practically no customization at all) from chiptune trackers (full-on synthesis, and FM chips can have nearly as many parameters as a modern VST, but less flexibility and harder to achieve a sound you want).
https://www.fileformat.info/info/emoji/crown/index.htm
If this is 30 years too late then so am I – Belated thanks. Your work is certainly appreciated.
Indeed I came to check if someone had mentioned this already – and if not, post exactly that video of the properly crunchy Amiga-sounding recording. I love the kind of “etched” sound of that time. Spectral treasure.
Earlier in the 21st century us kids were using Propellerheads’ Reason a bit. Then I felt increasingly dissatisfied with the sound. There seemed to be this particular sou d to Reason’s virtual instruments. Plasticky? Since then I’ve come across mentions of aliasing; I wonder if that’s… part of the reason? (heeeh :sweat_smile:)
- In "Compared to a video with aliasing", I meant "compared to a video with spectral replication".
- I'm surprised that this song's "synth female choir" sounds practically identical to the choir samples I've heard in SNES games. Though it makes sense, considering SNES music comes from the same era and had similar size restrictions, requiring cutting down samples and reusing them across wide pitch ranges.
And a question to the composer: When I downloaded the .mod, looped the sample 3 times in Audacity (joining the seams), and switched the track to spectrogram mode, I saw spectral discontinuities (more energy than expected in between harmonics, at multiple frequencies, both low and high) at ~19084 samples (the loop point) and ~14501 samples. Is this second discontinuity the point you began the crossfade?
(When I opened the .mod in OpenMPT, it said the loop point was at sample 2. I tried looping the sample from Sample 2 in Audacity, but this resulted in a far more prominent spectral discontinuity and an audible click upon looping. Oddly OpenMPT wouldn't let me set the loop start to any position below 58.)
> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL070C2821EF87B676
IIRC the designers liked mods and recruited a bunch of demoscene musicians through a contest to write songs based on loose descriptions of the various species and situations.
Also makes me wonder how different the world would be if the dominant PC sound card in the 90's were something like the GUS rather than Adlib/Soundblaster.
Before I even played the video, I suddenly remembered the opening chord. I think I haven't listened to that track in 25 years.
Memory is weird.
It was part of my favorites in the mid-90s, but I've lost track of mods towards the late 90s as MP3s took hold. I've long wished to have modern reworks of many of those tracks, so very happy to have this one.
Perhaps Karsten Koch will be inspired to remake Blue Valley ;)
Edit: actually I listened to Space Debris much later! It just so happened that many of my favorites overlapped with Introversion Software's taste and were included in the soundtrack for the excellent hacker-game Uplink.
How do you old guys cope with these memories ? Personally I miss that a lot, mostly the freedom aspect of it. How do you go with your life in a way that nostalgia is not that bad ?
Does "remastered" mean the channels were rebalanced? I remember poking around the demoscene archives a few years back, and a lot of the golden oldies have that distinct instrument-per-channel thing going on. Especially pronounced with headphones.
Back in the pre-internet day it was hard to find out more about the artists, as they were just aliases embedded in mods or at the end of demoscene releases. I always wondered who they were, and turns out they were most often teens from somewhere around Finland or Scandinavia, who went on to game companies as composers working on things like Eve Online.
It really was a time of endless experimentation, everyone had the same basic hardware so anyone who managed to push the limits was regarded with awe.
You can hear my one surviving MOD here[0] if you want to know what the average 16yo on the street could do with a stock Amiga and mediocre grades in school cert music. It really is on the other end of the spectrum from Space Debris in terms of quality.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.htm...
By the way, it's still possible to listen to plenty of mods online on https://modarchive.org/
Since the Amiga has four channels, two hard left and two hard right, assuming you use one channel each for drums, bass, chords and lead, you "have" to drop the drum and bass for a few measures to get that spacey panning effect (of course there are ways around it, but it's a very natural thing to do, and it sounds good too).
Next: I'm off to read your post and reminisce about that too much fun era in computing and music.
I first listened to Koto not long ago, and my first reaction was that it sounded like demoscene music. Interesting to hear that there was a direct influence. I think people who like demoscene music will probably also like Italo Disco, and more specifically the mostly instrumental "Spacesynth" subgenre.
https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=demomods%2Fhoffman_...
It wouldn't be the first time. I think quite a few of my favorite video game tracks from that era were similarly pilfered from the Amiga MOD scene.
It's great that he learned everything on his own, but also tells about the quite unambitious state of music education in most Finnish schools.
