So let me give you a bit of that thing called context, which sounds like a document full of lies but isn't.
CONTEXT! YEAAAAH BOY!
Back before the internet was "a thing" and before Bieber was even a sperm I started writing music on the Commodore Amiga using trackers like SoundTracker and later Protracker. Over the course of the over 400 tunes I wrote, the display that originally looked like a bunch of incoherent binary information became second nature and editing music became etched into my muscle memory. To paraphrase the matrix, "I don't even see the code any more, I just see Ab minor 7".
But time and tide waits for no software and by the mid 90s, a 4 track low quality sampler wasn't cutting the mustard any more and like most people I started moving towards the more "professional" music packages with piano roll editors and horizontal song displays and stuff.
Time moved on and I hadn't really thought about trackers for a while. I owned a license for Renoise it was more out of deference for history than to use as an actual DAW. Then there was a discovery....
A friend of mine found on an old hard drive, and on that hard drive were around a quarter of the 400 tracker tunes I wrote back in the day. It was like finding a hoard of treasure! Treasure that, sure, for the most part was actually gold painted horse turds, but if you were willing to brave brown hands there were indeed some gold coins to be found.
But in order to listen to them I needed to reinstall renoise, which I grudgingly did. I opened it up, and instantly understood the information in front of me, I knew which keys were which notes and how to enter patterns efficiently by bashing the enter key along with the notes for the correct timing, all the muscle memory was still there. It was weird, as if no time had passed.
I found the folder with the old mods in, opened them up and listened to them. Some were abysmal. Properly clown music offensive. Totally not worth saving, but some were nearly good, and some were pretty much already good. I was pleasantly surprised. The question was... What to do with them? The sound quality wasn't up to scratch, some of the composition was a bit iffy... Hmmm...
Thing on a Spring!
And thus, "Thing on a Spring" was born. I decided to take something old (Amiga Mods) and make them sound older (like C64 music). I dusted off my old copy of QuadraSID (a synth sadly no longer sold by the company that developed it, as they've become obsessed with instead making boring sample packs and adding to their EDM rompler for "instant EDM hits". Yeah, nice one lads, I'm not bitter about that at all.) and got to replacing the sounds and tweaking up the tunes to make them better.
I learned a lot about my old self.
I learned how musically naive he was and how the concept of "groove" seemed to be completely beyond him. But I also learned how that naivety would sometimes cause him to make structural decisions or note choices that I wouldn't have made now. How, through time, with all I'd gained I'd also lost something.
So I started to wonder... Was it because of the method I was using to write? Were all those piano roll editors and complex interfaces actually getting in the way and making me make safe choices?
So, to test my theory I started writing a tune for Thing on a Spring from scratch and it turned out that... yeah.. It was. My writing was a lot more dangerous on a tracker.
Trackers have changed a lot!
I absolutely have Renoise to thank for this. the newer features like the grid editor meant I could get into the nitty gritty of each individual column and unlike the old Amiga trackers which encouraged repetition, the way Renoise handles it's structure almost dares you to change with the wind and be more detailed with your songwriting rather than with your automation which is where traditional DAWs feel like they push you.
One of the best things is being able to see harmonically exactly where you are on one screen. So you can easily avoid (or cause) note clashes. You can instantly see where you can modulate to a different key because of the surrounding notes and create a more interesting musical structure. You don't have to painfully switch between 10 different midi streams to check all the notes, all of which makes you less inclined to bother. No, it's all in front of your face. It's just.... There!
Also, you want to do one bar of 25/16? Sure! Just make that pattern 25 lines long. Done. You don't have to piddle about with the DAW and make an individual midi stream for each instrument and then make sure you change the global time signature in both positions otherwise lining up where you are with bars will be a pain in the long run... ugh. Instead of fighting AGAINST you being creative with structure, it works WITH you. All of a sudden it totally makes sense why VSnares uses a tracker. How could he possibly use anything else? His stuff is too harmonically and structurally complex for him to consider using a "traditional" DAW.
Even things I thought wouldn't be possible in a tracker such as repeating contrarhythms are easy using renoises phrase tool. 5/4 over 7/8 over 6/4? Yep. Phrase editor will sort you out, at the cost of you not seeing the notes any more (but given you didn't see them in other DAWs it's not much of a tradeoff)
In short I suddenly feel like I have the tool that works the way my creativity works and, weirdly enough in a cyclic fashion, it's really close to the tool I started with.
But Renoise isn't perfect. The way it handles midi pitchbend is frankly rubbish and even with the workarounds there's no "perfect middle", so the closest to the middle of the pitchbend range you can get is either very slightly sharp or very slightly flat and without using some form of custom device to create inertia there'll be no smooth MIDI pitchbend for you anyway!
Also the way it records audio is pants if you want to use it like a traditional audio tracking machine to, say, record a guitar part over the whole track. It's so bad at that kind of thing it's not worth bothering.
However, those tradeoffs are totally worth it. If I want to make an electronic track that's harmonically complex and structurally interesting there's no better tool in my box (ooer).
So here I sit, in 2017, using a tracker for music, just like I did in 1990. I'm looking forward to seeing what it brings. But as a start, the Thing on a Spring album, "6581 Commodore Boulevard" which inspired this journey will be released by Component Recordings in February.
That's right.... *cough*
*breathes*
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