oldschool tracker musicians

I am one of those oldschool home computer music geeks who started making their music with computer in early 90´s. At that time there was so called trackers which were very popular among computer musicians. Most music makers were from UK and Scandinavia. Couple of the well known musicians of that time are Bjorn Lynne (Norway) Purple Motion (Finland)and Skaven (Finland). I was not very good at composition techniques first and did most of the music using samples from ready tracks. The music files are called as MOD files in old tracker software. There was a first ever tracker program which I used was a noisetracker for Atari. The second I've used the most is of course Protracker which I remember was first programmed for Amiga computer.


Sound digitizing

I did also some sampling by using a DIY 8-bit sound digitizer. I bought this device from my friend. It was possible to sample everything from vinyls and tv-series. It was surely fun. Digitizer had a 9 volt battery and serial port connection. Also a very basic program which was not very user friendly. Perhaps because it was also DIY.



First of the decent pc trackers was screamtracker which I met somewhere in 1992-1994.


Other interesting background about tracker software , demoscene and programmers

Actually it is true that Scream Tracker is a first multi-track digital sequencer created by members of Finland's Future Crew. This demoscene group was one of my favorite groups. They may have mangled their name into Mature Furk in late 90's. They had made also a favorite 3d-benchmark program Future Mark. Later on the name was changed into 3D Mark. Their company Futuremark is still in the 3d-engine business.

read the interview
http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/2003/09-20_english.php

One of the (still) best and also one of the best demoscene demo is Second Reality.
It combines the moving 3d-graphics with some of well programmed graphics. There´s also some fine pixel graphics too. The soundtrack is also very catchy and it is synced in realtime with moving animations.