Trackers...

rcaz

Anybody here use trackers?

I'm an Ableton guy mostly, and I love how Live works and I'm getting really into it lately, but I just played around with a demo of Renoise (heard Venetian Snares uses it...), and while totally different, seems a lot of fun.

Wondering what the advantages and disadvantages of trackers vs. more conventional DAWs are compared to each other? The biggest thing seems to be just forcing a different way of thinking about the way you put your music together?

I wonder how much use to me a tracker would be as a standalone thing... I like to use Pure Data in conjunction with Live and a bit of GarageBand when it's needed... Always looking for something to make me think about music differently

oootini

i use renoise pretty much exclusively. horses for courses. there's benefits and drawbacks to everything.

it is useful for that kind of hyper edit snares stuff alright, but i make mostly ambient music with it. go figure.

also, the latest version of renoise has had it's api exposed allowing peeps to write custom tools for it. kinda like maxforlive.

see here for a list of tools:

http://tools.renoise.com/browse

krd

El Pr0n wrote: »

The biggest thing seems to be just forcing a different way of thinking about the way you put your music together?

I think that is the thing.

You programming them differently. You maybe able to visualise things differently. It might break a lot of bad habits you have - open up new ways of doing things.

You may also be able to do some manipulations that are not so easy in a DAW.

I think Aphex twin used to use trackers for creating a lot of his stuff. There's weird midi signal stuff you can do.

Anima

I'm sure everyone who was using software to make electronic music in the 80s/90s was using trackers though. Even FLStudio started as a tracker afaik.

I think it's easier to make certain types of music with them and therefore you might gravitate towards that because its the path of least resistance but whether thats a good thing or not I don't know, probably not.

It's kind of seen as an old school and therefore hip thing to use as well. I'd say thats probably why Venetian Snares specifically had the tracker scrolling down for that youtube video he has. It's impressive but probably not practical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

I would think its best to keep with something more powerful like todays DAW's and plugins or MaxMsp all said and done.

oootini

Anima wrote: »

I would think its best to keep with something more powerful like todays DAW's and plugins or MaxMsp all said and done.

yer talking through yer hole. look up renoise 2.7 and the tools page i posted earlier and tell me that xyz DAW is not roughly identical in capabilities.

krd

I've been playing around with it over the last few days.

To be honest, I think it's a pain in the arse.

I'm not finding the interface all that easy to use.

oootini

Each to their own. It's not for everyone and if your used to ableton it'll be a head****. I find it lightening fast though. Once you have the basic keyboard shortcuts off you fly around it with minimal mouse interaction. It's mad fast for building up loops. The timeline isn't great for getting the big picture though but it s developed by a small team that do great work and listen closely to users. The tools functionality is also mad powerful. It's also pretty much uncrashable.

krd wrote: »

I've been playing around with it over the last few days.

To be honest, I think it's a pain in the arse.

I'm not finding the interface all that easy to use.

krd

oootini wrote: »

Each to their own. It's not for everyone and if your used to ableton it'll be a head****. I find it lightening fast though. Once you have the basic keyboard shortcuts off you fly around it with minimal mouse interaction. It's mad fast for building up loops. The timeline isn't great for getting the big picture though but it s developed by a small team that do great work and listen closely to users. The tools functionality is also mad powerful. It's also pretty much uncrashable.

I've persisted with it, and now I'm really beginning to get something out of it. Though I haven't learned all the shortcut keys, etc. It's a great break from using Ableton. It makes you think about stuff differently.

dasdog

I used Fast Tracker II years ago and loved it but managed to orphan my songs directory on a hdd somewhere. It's a completely different way of doing things but once you get past the initial learning curve it gets interesting. They were great for people without the cash to buy external hardware, an old SB16 and a 486 would do.

krd

I remember - now I was never able to get one of these things to work, as I was clueless - I remember these command line driven trackers for DOS. You had to create a text file with all your musical notation, in a format the tracker could take, and then run it through the tracker. If you were a real wizard with it, I suppose you could get very sophisticated results. But it was like computer programming - a single error in your code and the whole thing was fff'd.



Erasure, did all their stuff using a tracker on a BBC micro