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salon.com > Technology April 29, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/04/29/mod_trackers Mod love With their ears, their computers and a little code, "mod trackers" build their own worlds of sound. - - - - - - - - - - - - Mister-X will never forget the day he became a mod tracker. It happened shortly after his brother first showed him "Scream Tracker" -- a music-making program created by the legendary Finnish "demo group" Future Crew. "It was love at first sight," says Mister-X, who now operates a major Web site devoted to mod tracking. "I knew that computers could be used to create music, but I had no idea that they could create this level of quality. I had been using computers like the TI 99/4A, and the Tandy 1000EX, and was used to the 'dinkety-dink' type of music that these computers produced." Goodbye to dinkety-dink. After becoming a mod tracker, Mister-X could use his personal computer to create music with sophisticated production values, without having to invest in expensive musical equipment or recording hardware. All he needed was a PC with a sound card and a few shareware or freeware software programs. A tracker is a program that allows would-be composers to create mod files. The word "mod" is short for "module" -- a digital music file constructed out of samples, along with the encoding information that determines how those samples sound (pitch, tone, special effects). The samples can be taken from anything -- from a snare drum to an answering machine message. They can even be "ripped" right from a commercial CD or from an already existing mod, although tracker veterans generally frown on such practices. Unlike the MP3 scene, tracking is focused primarily on creating original music, rather than the distribution of already recorded music. Straddled right across the intersection of the art of music composition and the science of computer programming, mod tracking is hailed by its small but thriving band of practitioners as the digital embodiment of the idea of accessibility. Free to all comers, facilitated by the growth of the Internet, mod tracking offers a gateway into the world of professional-quality music production that anyone can pass through. And even though mod tracking is no magic wand -- it won't automatically transform musical dunces into sublime songwriters -- it does remove key obstacles along the road to self-expression. "The thing that scares many people off from becoming musicians is the economics of being a modern musician," says Dan Nicholson, aka "Maelcum," the founder of the tracker group Kosmic Free Music Foundation: "$1,000 for a keyboard, $5,000 in samplers and synth modules! It's a shame -- who knows, the [next] Beethoven, John Lennon or Orbital might be out there, and we may never get to hear their great music. Tracking breaks down this barrier -- I got started on a hand-me-down PC, and current software runs just fine on a $300-400 non-state of the art PC. It gives anyone the tools they need to make great music, and it's practically free." But the tools aren't just those that remove financial barriers. By allowing composers to "see the music" -- to take apart a module and understand exactly how a particular sound is created -- mod tracking puts the techniques behind creativity into plain view. The age of the hacker musician is at hand. "The ability to see the music, to know how an author succeeded in creating this and that sound," says tracker Jesper Petersen, "is how we learn stuff in the end. There is a great portion of trackers that have no musical background whatsoever and that still do amazing stuff when they're put in charge of a tracker. Of course talent plays a huge role, but it is also very much a simple matter of watching and learning. And being persistent as hell -- no one makes a decent first track; we all suck to start out with." "A typical talented 15-year-old can now explode his imagination into a song, and not waste his time in front of a TV observing an input others have control over," says Michael Lazarev, aka "Kosmos," the founder of the tracking clearinghouse United Trackers. "I heard a track written by a 13-year-old once, and it was a hundred times better then the garbage they play on the radio. The scene is great. No one has to know anyone to be in it. No one needs connections, and no strings need to be pulled. You want to make your music, and have the world hear it? You got it! Need support? You got it! No money? No problem! ... It's all about love for music, and not its commercial aspect." Tracking is an evolutionary outgrowth of the once-thriving Commodore Amiga "demo scene." In the late '80s and very early '90s, the superior sound and graphics production qualities of the Amiga computer encouraged the growth of an underground subculture devoted to the creation of "demos" -- homegrown 3D graphics productions that emphasized clever coding. The Amiga was one of the first computers with digital audio capability, and the first tracking programs allowed Amiga users to sequence samples on the Amiga's four digital audio channels. During the early '90s, most demo scene activity occurred in Europe. But the death of the Amiga, the emergence of more powerful personal computers and, most importantly, the explosion of the Internet spread mod tracking around the world. The Internet, with its native ability to connect like-minded people, has long been a friend to subcultures of all kinds. But when the subculture is one built around digital software, the Net's influence is especially dramatic. Most observers and veterans of the tracker scene say the number of people creating and listening to mods has surged dramatically over the past few years. Future Crew may have disbanded, and Scream Tracker may have given way to newer, more powerful tracking tools -- such as FastTracker II and Impulse Tracker -- but most trackers assert that the scene is still suffused with the same sense of joyful creativity that the early demo scenesters exhibited as their calling card. Fueling that creativity is the potent merging of two sensibilities: the desire to become a musician and the passion to fiddle with something that looks a lot like code. In one sense, a mod is the code for a musical composition, as well as the composition itself. It's as if a pop song you might hear on the radio came in a package that included its sheet music and guitar tablature. "[A tracked] piece is not a recording," says Gene Hsi Wie, an an undergraduate computer science student at the University of California at Irvine, and a longtime chronicler of the tracker scene in the now extinct zine TraxWeekly. "Rather it is like the 'code' for a piece that is interpreted by a player for output. When listening to a tracked piece, many players have a display that shows the parsing of the piece line by line, vertically by track, showing the progression of the piece as the line-by-line reader translates the numbers and effects into notes and music." Some trackers argue that the coding analogy is overdone. Andrew Sega, a now-retired tracking star (under the nom de tracker plume of "Necros"), says it's not as if trackers need to know how to hack C++. "In a tracker you manipulate the sequenced data in a very basic form -- you specify exactly when notes will trigger, what 'effects' will be applied, etc.," says Sega. "It is however a bit of a myth that tracking is like 'coding' per se. Most current trackers force you to work in the raw data format of the .MOD. You'll enter a sequence of data such as this: 'C-4 05 040 D0F,' which sounds very complicated and technical until you know what it actually is: Play a middle C, with instrument number 5, at full volume, and ramp the volume down quickly after it's played. It's more a problem of most trackers not having good user interfaces. However for the little 'hacker musician' kids, it's perfect." Sega provides a perfect example of how tracking technology can help bootstrap a tracker up onto bigger and better things. He describes himself as someone who "didn't have the big professional tools and opportunity to express themselves musically. [But] if used correctly, you can coax a tracker into producing some very professional-sounding output, comparable to stuff that you would hear on CD." After making a name for himself in the tracking world, Sega started producing music for computer games, most recently as part of the team that created the music for Unreal, the first-person shooter computer game. "Tracking, at least at least for a while, was a very attractive way to get high-quality music into computer games," says Sega, who now works as a 3D-graphics programmer for Digital Anvil. "It used far less memory than the typical CD-audio soundtrack, sounded better than MIDI, and allowed simple interactivity -- by changing patterns around. This may no longer be the case, now that fast MP3 decoders exist, but it did serve to link the tracking and computer game worlds." Whether or not tracking requires programming chops, some trackers still see an affinity between the "seeing the music" aspect of tracking and the code accessibility of open-source software. Says Steve Gilmore, a tracker and the most recent maintainer of the alt.binaries.sounds.mods frequently asked questions file: "When I look around today it absolutely defies the imagination how big it's grown, while still maintaining a lot of the original ethos -- i.e., free music, free software, free advice. I think it's a close cousin of the Linux scene. The parallels are striking." "The 'open source' analogy is pretty much on the money," says Sega. "You get to see exactly how the song was put together: what samples were used, how they were played, what instruments worked together to create certain sections. One would think that this would lead to a rash of 'imitation' music -- where people change out a few notes or samples here and there, and redistribute it as their own -- but that really hasn't happened. The scene very much frowns on rippers, copycats and the like. I've learned a lot about how certain styles of music work by looking at other people's tracked work." Is Sega the musician of tomorrow? Dan Nicholson says that the emergence of what he calls "zero equipment musicians" -- people who do all their musical composition on the computer -- is a sign that the electronic music business now has a level playing field. "There are people at the top of the industry doing almost everything in the PC or Mac," says Nicholson. "The radical thing is that unlike the garage band vs. 'big producer in a loaded studio' concept, these people all have access to virtually the same tools when it's all software." In that sense, the growth of the PC into a truly powerful audio platform is
having the same effect on music production that it has already had on the
graphics business -- it's eliminating the advantage held by people who have
access to top- "Newer software has made it a lot easier to get a better-sounding result," says Jeffrey Lim, the author of the popular Impulse Tracker program. "But in the end, it is the composer that will make the difference." "This is not the market for people who own a toy such as a Roland MC-303 Groovebox," says Lazarev. "Nothing is pre-programmed for you. You can't select a stored arpeggio and simply sit there and tweak the knobs, thinking that you're producing music. This is actual composing. And everything has to come from within you." But if you've got it, tracking allows you to flaunt it, more easily than ever before. "One of the greatest things about tracking is that it gives people with
little or no music training the ability to output decent- Does every one of us have an incredible symphony, all our own, reverberating inside our heads? Perhaps -- perhaps not. But for anyone who does, and wants to bring that music forth into the world, the tools are out there.
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