RDM: love the acronym
yeah I had a big problem with trackers in that I would hear something
but have no means of birthing it, and once the loop was playing I would
be bound to what I was hearing. I have a similar problem with singing
though because I find I am thinking with my mouth and vocal chords. Of
course i've never composed anything of value. check out
muckvoid.googlepages.com for evidence.
Chuckk Hubbard wrote:
I've used very few trackers. I think I was turned off that the
default is for all notes to be the same length, and that changing the
number of beats in any measure seemed kind of involved.
If you've never written music, and you don't own any instruments, and
you open a program for the first time that shows you 8 divisions per
measure with a steady beat, you'll probably make a lot of music before
you discover what other options are available. Multiply this by a
million users, and you've got the makings of a long-term association
with RDM (retarded dance music). Try entering Debussy into a tracker
and see how intuitive it is; and yet the music itself is very easy to
listen to.
I bet people's music would be far more beautiful if they would sing
freely and often and then transcribe what they were singing, instead
of transcribing before the music even exists. Or maybe it's just a
case where the number of people who write good music is less than the
number of people who write bad music in general?
On 2/28/07, Dave Phillips <dlphillips@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Greetings:
I have no idea if anyone's ever used a tracker to create a hit song, but
it is unfortunate that trackers are usually associated with a particular
style of music. I have heard some very cool stuff in module formats,
though I'll agree that most of the music-made-with-trackers that I've
heard tends towards rather uninteresting dance beat music. I don't
believe that trackers necessarily impose any kind of style restriction,
you can bend them into doing non-beat oriented stuff. Kuno's "Substantia
Grisea" is an excellent example.
Developers are often surprised at what users wind up doing with their
tools.
Trackers seem to have come along at a time just before cheap samplers
hit the market, which might have drawn attention away from the
developing tracker communities. Nevertheless, those communities remain
strong, a lot of people like to make music with trackers, and I don't
think they're overly concerned with their lack of popular success. ;)
Best,
dp
