Everything about this makes me giddy with excitement, from the cursor to the faded out numbers in the digital display. I "miss" these times, yet I was born too late to enjoy it in real time. I hope the demoscene lives on forever and we keep seeing it pop up in future tech.
When I opened it I swear I got teary eyed. Things were so much harder that when you finally got something decent it just made you feel like you were king of the nerd hill.
I was bummed when I clicked on "Space song" thinking "Cool, they have the demo tune by the Silents!" and got something else instead. Luckily, it took just a few clicks to get to the real thing by Jesper Kyd (who later scored Hitman and Assassin's Creed):
> Things were so much harder that when you finally got something decent it just made you feel like you were king of the nerd hill.
I first started making music using a tracker (PlayerPRO on the Mac) before later moving to Pro Tools and Reason, and I actually found it much easier to finish songs using a tracker. The quality wasn't as good, but the limitations and structure helped me get a song done. With Reason, I find myself just twiddling knobs for hours and at the end of the day all I have is a few bars of something.
Though I agree about the structure (and keyboard shortcuts) being helpful, derping around endless is still how I use trackers.. and after hating it for a long time, I actually now love it to not ever consider anything "finished", and trackers are perfect for that.
Instead of a mess of giant files of things bounced from various programs or even hardware, it's just a file... and though with Renoise the VST matter a lot, since I still have those I still can load up and work on things I made over a decade ago. I can try to touch it up some, or steal parts I like to make something new, with filesizes ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to a few dozen megabytes at most. That's my bliss. I know the listener doesn't and shouldn't care about that, but it's a trade-off I make gladly. I think my music became much simpler, too, maybe "worse", but more fun for me, because instead of layering instruments that play the same melody in another octave and a lot of effects, I now remove things with equal glee as I add them with. The less I use to achieve something I can shake my butt to, the more I like it... having a rich sound is nice, but seeing all columns on one screen is awesome, as is rendering a 5 minute song in 20 seconds instead of 3 minutes. I like the agility of this one-person studio that starts up in like 1 second too much, and even if I had the ability to master well, I wouldn't want to render tracks from Renoise to then master them in another program. Other than denoising samples, I do it all in Renoise. Considering what other people are doing with it and the legacy of tracking in general, I don't feel like a king of the nerd hill though, but I do feel like the captain of my bathtub.
I recommend it to everybody, and I recommend sticking through years of feeling completely useless at it. It's what I did, and I think if you like music enough to enjoy it, and if you are making it to entertain yourself, practice might not make you perfect, but it will gift you some things you wouldn't have thought you have in you. As far as hobbies go, this is like owning a dog, it does everybody good (should they have any affinity for it at all, that is). I say that because a friend of mine thinks making music is somehow translating the music we can compose in our heads into reality, and at least for me, that's not the case. I can sing in the shower, or "think music", but when I sit down with a tracker, I'm still surprised by the results, like, I didn't come up with this, I just found it. I think the key is to not be shy... if in doubt, just don't show it to anyone (yet), but do make music regardless. It's one of the most wonderful things you can do with a computer, IMO.
> derping around endless is still how I use trackers.. and after hating it for a long time, I actually now love it to not ever consider anything "finished", and trackers are perfect for that.
I've definitely had many satisfying evenings twiddling knobs in Reason, but after a while it loses its fun for me if I don't feel I'm eventually getting to something worth sharing with others.
> I say that because a friend of mine thinks making music is somehow translating the music we can compose in our heads into reality, and at least for me, that's not the case. I can sing in the shower, or "think music", but when I sit down with a tracker, I'm still surprised by the results, like, I didn't come up with this, I just found it.
Yes, I absolutely agree that the instrument affects the music in profound ways. Music is such a physical act that what you'd compose with a keyboard (piano or typewriter) is different than what you'd compose with a guitar in your hands instead.
One thing that really helped me is to realize that many of my favorite songs are probably not that special to most people. This is, no joke, still one of my favorite little ditties:
I actually sometimes still listen and maybe even dance to the Amiga version of this ^^ And I'm not saying this isn't a great song, musically, but most people wouldn't want to hear this on the radio or in a club, while I would absolutely go apeshit if that ever happened. I know having heard it first as a kid is a part of it, but the end result matters. I love this tune, even though most normal people might not enjoy it, and would at least prefer "normal instruments". (And don't even get me started on L.F.F. by 4mat :D)
So I try to shift my standard from "is this really good, does this make me look awesome", to "is this too embarrassing, or really just a pointless amusical waste of time", and try to raise the bar for what embarrasses me... because even something I might not like that much, might be the jam for someone else, who knows. What would I tell that imaginary person, that they never got to hear their jam, because I was afraid of what other people might think of it? I also know songs where I like the demo or some dirty live version much more than the perfectly produced studio version, so I try to tell myself, the more the merrier.
I think what really helped in my case is that it all became coupled with lyrics that are either very personal or very political, and it took me so much.. wrestling, not being able to sleep well doing it, but also not being able to let it go for good... and also the world (and rap music) becoming a lot more crazy, and probably me getting older, to become less inhibited -- and being embarrassed about too simple music was completely overshadowed by that. It used to be a concern but it got lost along the trek :) And I also discovered that as far as "beats" go, less really is more, at least, very little is more than enough. The same goes for chip style melodies, and those two are all I need to be happy musically, basically forever.
Well, that and compos with small sample packs becoming more of a thing again. Nothing more fun than that IMO :)
Everything about this makes me giddy with excitement, from the cursor to the faded out numbers in the digital display. I "miss" these times, yet I was born too late to enjoy it in real time. I hope the demoscene lives on forever and we keep seeing it pop up in future tech.