ScuzzBlog: Diaries April 2020
Entry 9th April 2020: Post 01: Amiga SoundTracker and NoiseTracker.
Amiga SoundTracker and NoiseTracker.
Imagine a world without mobile phones, social media, the internet
and download facilities with players and video. No YouTube etc.
For those living in the eighties it was no biggy cus we hadn't
got there yet, so the expansion of the disk based computers and
the ease at which data could be copied, modified and circulated
was key to how computer folk communicated with each other. Whilst
video was a little tricky to replicate cus of file sizes etc, the
quality of sound and sampled work just improved significantly in
a short time. And so was born the copying of music.
And so many Amiga users of the late eighties would be dabbling in
music samplers and players of sorts. Many PD houses shipped disks
with a 'Tracker' at the helm in the form of a ST-00 disk and an
accompanying 'ST-01' disk with samples and sounds.
The natural evolution of the sampling was the demo scene and this
brought with it parties and meetings of fellow Amigans each trying
to out do each other. The extent to which the Amiga system was
exploited and 'twisted' to make better and more dynamic demos was
truly incredible.
That said there was often at the base of these works of art a music
sampler or player. In 1987 Karsten Obarski gave the Amiga the first
real tracker in the form of 'The Ultimate Soundtracker'. At first
it was not received very well and had limited capability due to the
restriction of just 15 samples/instruments in a song. Other Amiga
products such as Sonix were more popular. And then came along two
Swedish programmers Pex ' Mahoney' Tufvesson and Anders ' Kaktus '
Berkeman who were to give the Amiga world the NoiseTracker.
The amount of disk based music creations were prolific and there
are few demo disks and compilations of the period that do not sport
various versions of 'NoiseTracker' and 'SoundTracker'.
For me both were somewhat limiting and I only really got into this
using ProTracker which is way better in truth. My own progression
from ProTracker took me to Ejay on the PC which I still use today.
Anyhoo... go grab your ST-00s and ST-01s and bash out a disk of your
own and have a blast. It is still incredibly addictive and for my
part has kept me occupied for days on end. INCREDIBLE.
By the way I am told that neither of the creators of NoiseTracker
made a single penny from their creation and yet it was used by PD
houses to retail endless disks.
The disk box I show here I pretty much grabbed at random just to
show the spread of disks that you could find in someone's computer
music collection. Being able to not only sample stuff but also for
the first time manipulate and modify to create alternate works
was truly remarkable for the period. AND irrespective of any view
to the different the Amiga was the best tool to do this. The
Amiga demo scene and party scene was a hot bed of originality and
that is what made the Amiga experience unique.
Amiga SoundTracker and NoiseTracker.
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