Back in the late 80s, computer music was written in 4 channel trackers (Amiga, I'm thinking of you), and you had to try and cram as much "music" into just 4 channels as possible. Now the sky's the limit. I'm curious which you like better. The old days, where hardware limitations were always in your face and you had to use clever tricks and a lot of thought to work around them and keep it all in a few kilobytes of space, or the way things are now, where you have an unlimited number of tracks and instruments available and you just blow out static audio tracks (aka mp3)?
The Beatles (a.k.a. the white album) was recorded on 4 tracks. The Dark Side of the Moon and Tubular Bells were recorded on 16 tracks. Pro Tools gives you a few hundred tracks, and it's fair to say that modern musicians don't do proportionally more with what they have. You get pretty much the same "amount" of music/production (less, sometimes; as Arnold Schoenberg famously pointed out, a rest is never a wrong note), but you get it faster and cheaper.
But a distinction must be made here: Protracker and friends may have had "tracks" that work more or less like a professional studio, but the thing is, the *other* limits of the format meant that making music with a module tracker was a WHOLE different beast than doing it with a recording studio.
With module files/trackers, you could play exactly one sound sample at a time on each track - which is why many of us preferred to call them channels rather than tracks.
I wrote my fair share of MODs back in the day; I'm familiar with all the tricks. Writing MODs was a different kind of fun than modern systems, but it was still fun.
The question was which one you like better. My personal opinion is that not being forced into technical limitations is easier, but it doesn't necessarily make you more creative to have more options.
The olden days (Score:3)
Back in the late 80s, computer music was written in 4 channel trackers (Amiga, I'm thinking of you), and you had to try and cram as much "music" into just 4 channels as possible. Now the sky's the limit. I'm curious which you like better. The old days, where hardware limitations were always in your face and you had to use clever tricks and a lot of thought to work around them and keep it all in a few kilobytes of space, or the way things are now, where you have an unlimited number of tracks and instruments available and you just blow out static audio tracks (aka mp3)?
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Mac or PC?
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4 tracks? Sampled sound? Luxury! [youtube.com] Extravagance! [youtube.com] Decadence! [stairwaytohell.com]
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I suspect this isn't just true of games.
The Beatles (a.k.a. the white album) was recorded on 4 tracks. The Dark Side of the Moon and Tubular Bells were recorded on 16 tracks. Pro Tools gives you a few hundred tracks, and it's fair to say that modern musicians don't do proportionally more with what they have. You get pretty much the same "amount" of music/production (less, sometimes; as Arnold Schoenberg famously pointed out, a rest is never a wrong note), but you get it faster and cheaper.
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But a distinction must be made here: Protracker and friends may have had "tracks" that work more or less like a professional studio, but the thing is, the *other* limits of the format meant that making music with a module tracker was a WHOLE different beast than doing it with a recording studio.
With module files/trackers, you could play exactly one sound sample at a time on each track - which is why many of us preferred to call them channels rather than tracks.
Each sound might be a single key on a piano, a
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I wrote my fair share of MODs back in the day; I'm familiar with all the tricks. Writing MODs was a different kind of fun than modern systems, but it was still fun.
The question was which one you like better. My personal opinion is that not being forced into technical limitations is easier, but it doesn't necessarily make you more creative to have more options.
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I may have misread my source. DSOTM was mixed with a single 16-track mixer, but I'm certain there was a lot of two-generation mastering going on.