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  • Chip samples — tiny looped waveforms techniqueIn a sample tracker, a "chip" is a very small looped sample — a single waveform cycle or a few hundred bytes of a real instrument — that stands in for a sound-chip voice. A chiptune module is built from nothing else, …
  • Chord arpeggio (the 0 3 7 trick) techniqueChips rarely have enough channels for real chords, so one channel cycles through the chord tones extremely fast. At roughly 25–50 notes per second the ear fuses them into one shimmering chord — the signature chiptune …
  • Detune techniqueIf you can spare a channel, play the lead on two channels a few cents apart (or use a fine-tune setting). The slow beating between them sounds huge — the chip version of a supersaw. Small detune (5–10 cents) = fat; …
  • Fake echo / delay techniqueRepeat each melody note after a fixed time (say 3 or 6 pattern rows) at much lower volume, and again even quieter. On a spare channel it becomes a lush echo; on the same channel, placed in the gaps of the melody, it …
  • Instrument design beats note count techniqueA lot of "chiptune magic" is in the instrument, not the pattern: a fast pitch drop at note start makes a kick out of any voice; a couple of frames of noise before a tone makes a snare or a pluck; a tiny downward pitch …
  • Instrument envelopes (volume, panning, pitch) techniqueIn impulse-tracker (and FT2) an instrument wraps a sample with envelopes — volume, panning and, in IT, pitch — drawn as nodes over ticks, optionally with a sustain loop that holds while the note is on and a normal loop. …
  • Lead articulation (velocity, legato, late vibrato, drop-off) techniqueMaking a sampled or synth lead sound played : per-note volume (velocity), legato slides between notes, vibrato that arrives late, staccato and grace notes, an echo, and the "drop-off" at the end of a big note. A tracked …
  • Levels and headroom techniqueNot "how loud", but how much room is left above the loudest thing playing . Every layer of a chiptune has its own ceiling — a 4-bit register on the chip, a 00–40 or 00–80 scale in the tracker, 0 dBFS in the render — and …
  • MIDI output from trackers (Impulse Tracker macros) techniquePlaying an external synthesizer from the pattern: a MIDI instrument sends NOTE ON/OFF with the note and volume column, and MIDI controllers (volume, modulation, pan, program change, sysex) are written as macros — Zxx …
  • Multisampling and drum-kit instruments techniqueOne sample cannot cover a keyboard: transposed more than a few semitones it sounds artificial — ±7 at the very most, often only ±1 (source: s-tw084-perfect-samples-the-piano ) . Multisampling records several keys and …
  • New Note Actions (NNA) techniqueimpulse-tracker 's answer to channel scarcity: when a new note starts in a channel, the instrument's NNA says what happens to the note still playing — cut , continue , note off (release) or note fade — and the old note …
  • Octave bass techniqueThe oldest trick in dance music and chiptune alike: alternate the bass note with the same note one octave up ( 0 12 0 12… ) in straight 8ths or 16ths. Instant drive, zero extra channels. Variants: octave on the …
  • OPL / AdLib FM instruments in trackers techniqueA second sound chip inside the PC tracker: scream-tracker-3 plays up to 9 FM voices on a Sound Blaster's Yamaha OPL2 next to its digital channels, and the s3m-format stores such instruments alongside samples; openmpt …
  • Pitch slides and tone portamento techniqueGliding into a note (tone portamento) or bending a note's pitch up/down (pitch slide) — the cheapest way to add emotion. Classic uses: slide up into the highest note of a phrase, slide down at the end of a phrase, slow …
  • Randomization and probability (MayBe, RandomiZe) techniqueLetting the tracker decide: notes that play only sometimes, table hops that happen with a probability, and command values with a random offset. Cheap variation for hi-hats, fills and long loops — every pass sounds …
  • Recording samples (sources, cabling, sound cards, rates) techniqueGetting a sound from a synth, CD, tape or microphone into a sample cleanly: the part of sampling that happens before sample-looping and multisampling . Cowboy's 1996 article is the wiki's source on the hardware chain …
  • Retrigger and resync techniqueRe-playing the current note at a fixed tick rate without new note rows: drum rolls, ratchets, stutters, and — with a falling volume — a one-channel echo. "Resync" restarts the sound generator itself at a very high rate, …
  • Reverb and compression (offline, in the sample editor) techniqueA tracker mixes samples dry. Room, depth and punch therefore have to be baked into the samples beforehand in a sample editor (Airon's examples are Cool Edit and Sound Forge), or faked inside the tracker with extra …
  • Sample looping (perfect loops, sustain loops, long loops) techniqueTwo very different things: looping a short cycle so a sampled note sustains forever, and using long loops (drum breaks, guitar riffs) as building blocks that must stay in time with the song. The loop is what separates a …
  • Sample offset tricks techniqueThe sample-offset command ( 9xx in ProTracker/MOD, Oxx in impulse-tracker ) starts a sample partway through — in units of 256 bytes, so 00–FF covers 64 KB (the SAx high-order command extends it in IT). Three classic …
  • Shuffle, swing and FunkTempo techniqueDelaying every second 16th slightly turns a stiff pattern human — shuffle/swing. Trackers do it with groove or speed settings rather than with note positions (source: s-037-lab ) .
  • Sidechain pump techniqueDuck the volume of chords and bass at every beat, then let it swell back before the next one. It creates the breathing, pumping motion of modern dance music — even with no kick drum playing at all (source: s-037-lab ) .
  • Song initialisation and looping techniqueMaking a module start and loop correctly in any player — the "finishing touch" most often forgotten, according to catspaw : default speed, tempo and pan positions in the song header apply only once, so a song whose last …
  • Stereo panning techniquePlacing channels left, right or centre to separate parts and make a mix wider. On the game-boy it is a hard switch per channel (left / right / both / none), audible only through the headphone output; on PC trackers it …
  • Vibrato and delayed vibrato techniqueA periodic pitch wobble on a held note. The important variant is delayed vibrato: the note lands straight, then the vibrato fades in — real singers and lead synths don't wobble immediately. Straight attack + late …
  • Volume slides, fades and effect memory techniqueThe first effect most trackers learn — and, per the Modsquad, "the one effect that makes or breaks the song" (source: s-tw077-chip-off-the-block ) . Understanding it means understanding frames : speed Axx is frames per …
  • Chiptune — what the word means conceptTwo related things share the name:
  • Commercial tracking — selling and producing tracked music conceptCan a module be a product? traxweekly argued it out in October 1997 – January 1998 after Behemoth's "The Scene and the Commercial Market". The useful residue is a list of real cases, a production workflow for …
  • Compos — music competitions in the tracker scene conceptA compo is a competition with a deadline, a rule set and a vote; in the 1990s PC scene they ran on IRC, by e-mail and at parties, and they were the main way a tracker got quick, public feedback. The one this wiki has …
  • Effect command crosswalk (MOD / XM ↔ S3M / IT) conceptThe PC and Amiga trackers use two alphabets for the same jobs: protracker 's numbers 0 – F (kept by fasttracker-2 's xm-format , which adds letters) and scream-tracker-3 's letters A – Z (kept and extended by …
  • Live tracking — performing with a tracker concept"You cannot perform tracking live" (Behemoth, 1997) drew four answers that together describe how sceners actually did it: pattern switching on cue, live instruments over the module, channel muting, and playing a …
  • Realism in tracked music concept"Realism" was the 1990s PC-scene word for modules that try to sound like a recording of real instruments or a commercial production — large, carefully sampled instruments instead of the few-kilobyte waveforms of a …
  • Sample ripping conceptTaking samples out of other people's modules — with a ripper such as GetSamps v2.42 by Zab [Hardcode], or by loading the module in a tracker — and reusing them in your own songs. In the 1990s PC scene it was both …
  • The PC tracker scene 1995–98, as it saw itself conceptWhat traxweekly 's writers said about where tracking came from, how music moved around, who judged it and where it was going. This is the scene's own narrative, mostly written by teenagers in an afternoon; for checked …
  • Tracker conceptA tracker is a music editor where the song is a vertical grid: time runs downward in rows , each pattern is a block of rows for all channels, and an orderlist says which patterns play in which order. A row cell holds a …
  • Tracking workflow — advice from the scene conceptHow experienced trackers of the 1990s said to work — most of it still true for sid-wizard and lsdj .
  • 20 Minute Chip Compo (20mc) eventAn IRC competition, held on EFnet channel #ChIpCoMpO from September 1995, in which trackers had twenty minutes to make a chiptune from a shared sample pack; organised by amusic (Sotiris Varotsis, Bass Productions, …
  • Acidfrog (Cam Goodman) personJungle tracker, DJ and radio presenter from British Columbia; co-founder of Radiance with zinc , who named him his main influence. Sources: Zinc's own interview (source: s-tw032-interview-zinc ) and Zinc's interview of …
  • Aim Higher groupA Toronto newcomers' music group founded in 1995 (Atlantic's "Introducing: Aim Higher" ran in TraxWeekly #20, 27 July 1995, per the TOC) by master-of-darkness (Todd Andlar) "like epinicion ", because "there is little …
  • AmusiC (Sotiris Varotsis) personGreek tracker of Bass Productions in Athens and the organiser of the 20-minute-chip-compo from September 1995. His real name and the compo story come from his own column (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo ) ; his …
  • Atlantic (Barry Freeman) personTracker of Neophyte and Aim Higher, a friend of master-of-darkness , and one of the four staff of traxweekly 's "Faces in the Crowd" (FITC) from October 1995 — its tips writer, song reviewer and occasional interviewer; …
  • Balrog (Samuel Cote) personTrance tracker from Quebec, an early Canadian member of kosmic who moved to ultrabeat in 1996; a fasttracker-2 user after Scream Tracker 2, ModEdit and X-Tracker. The main source is his January 1996 traxweekly interview …
  • Basehead (Dan Grandpre) personProminent PC-scene musician of the mid-1990s — "one of the very best techno/trance/ambient trackers" to TraxWeekly's first interviewer — of Imphobia, kosmic /KFMF and iCE, and from March 1995 one of the five-musicians …
  • Beaner (Sean Cummins) personMusician of ACiD's music division and of epinicion (also Infiniti 2001 and CIA); a scream-tracker-3 3.21b user who needs new samples before he can write. The single source for this page is Popcorn's TraxWeekly interview …
  • Behemoth (David Menkes) persontraxweekly staff writer of 1996–97 (David Menkes in the 1997 staff sheet) whose articles started two of the newsletter's debates — "Realism in MODs" and "The Scene and the Commercial Market" — and who interviewed mikmak …
  • Big Jim (James Storer) personBritish musician of Valhalla and of the five-musicians , the band he named ("FM" fits "four AND five"); a school- and college-trained composer who writes on guitar and then tracks (sources: …
  • Blackwolf (Bobby Tamburrino) personAtlanta tracker and pit percussionist, member of epinicion (earlier Defiance and UNiON), interviewed twice by traxweekly — in #6 and, as "the last TW interview for 1995", by psibelius in #40 — and later the author of …
  • Blaze Runner (Christian Desnoyers) personBelgian techno tracker, music coordinator of PURE (formerly TRAXX) with Blue Adonis, and the first traxweekly interviewee to describe registering his tunes with a collecting society and preparing a vinyl release. The …
  • Catspaw (Brandon Bannerman) personSeattle tracker and traxweekly writer (Catspaw / Rat; Rat City BBS; catspaw@eskimo.com) whose two-part "The Finishing Touches" (#58–59, May 1996) is the scene's clearest text on song initialisation and looping, effect …
  • Claim personCoder-musician of defiance and Lithium, an Apple IIgs veteran who took up tracking seriously the week fasttracker-2 was released. The single source for this page is Gator's TraxWeekly interview of June 1995 (source: …
  • Clef (Phil Sweeney) personAustralian pianist, coder and chiptune specialist: twice a 20-minute-chip-compo winner, author of the menu chips on the epinicion disks, winner of the 16k music compo at OZ'96, and an impulse-tracker convert from …
  • Cosmic (Matthias Ksoll) personGerman house/trance tracker of Radical Rhythms (RR) with about 100 released tracks by 1997; the single source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of March 1997 (source: s-tw090-interview-cosmic ) . Spieg, author …
  • Daedalus (Brian Bennetts) personTheatre student and part-time actor from the Los Angeles area who started tracking at 26 with ModEdit and scream-tracker-3 ; a member of Neophyte and epinicion and a Tangerine Dream disciple. The single source is his …
  • Defiance groupA small PC music and demo group of 1994–95, founded around Zer0 and run from spring 1995 by perisoft ; it had a "Defiance Column" in the first issues of traxweekly (TOC: #1, #2, #4, #11), and Zer0 wrote for the …
  • DennisC (Dennis Courtney) person"Faces in the Crowd" interviewer of traxweekly from October 1995 to January 1996 and the author of "Chiptunes Aren't Dead!" (#38), the reply to Szalemandre's "The Death of the Chiptune". The sources are his six …
  • Deus Ex (Chill Productions) personFounder of Chill Productions, a Toronto group started in 1995 by a 30-year-old techno/trance/ambient composer who "was getting flack" from other groups for his style, his GUS and his FastTracker; also a member of …
  • DUET toolm64's tracker: " impulse-tracker and sid-wizard on one grid — two real trackers, one clock, one save button." A complete IT engine and a complete SID-Wizard 1.97 engine in one Zig program, plus two synths of its own …
  • Dustbin (Stefano Palmonari) personItalian game composer from Ferrara (31 years old in December 2004) who taught himself the SID at 15 from taped Rob Hubbard and Jeroen Tel tunes, got hired by Simulmondo at 17 on the strength of a first rockmonitor tune …
  • Ender (Andrew Burke) personSole musician of Foundation, a small demo group in Albany, New York (two coders, one musician), interviewed for traxweekly 's Faces in the Crowd series in October 1995 after about nine months of composing. The single …
  • Epinicion groupThe group psibelius founded so that newcomers would not be hazed (source: s-tw003-beginning-the-tracking-experience ) ; the IT manual thanks him as "the nice friendly Epinicion founder" (source: s-it-manual ) . Most of …
  • Esper Division groupA two-man Montreal band — Francois-Jean de Brienne (melodies) and Alexandre Jean-Claude (rhythms) — that performed live with lyrics sung over tracked pieces; "no handle", the band's name is the name. The single source …
  • FastTracker 2 toolThe DOS tracker of triton — Fredrik Huss and Magnus Högdahl — behind the xm-format . Work began in June 1993 "to write a music program that could set a new standard in the confused PC-scene"; the design idea: "Who want …
  • fisherman (Matt Overington) personAustralian tracker living in Bangkok in 1996 and member of MindTap, interviewed by zinc for "Faces in the Crowd" as an unknown — the single source for this page (source: s-tw060-interview-fisherman ) .
  • Five Musicians (FM) groupA five-member "band" formed on IRC in March 1995 by necros , Mellow-D (Jaakko Manninen), big-jim (James Storer), basehead and purple-motion . Necros and Mellow-D wanted "a new music group with just a few people in it"; …
  • Fred (Ink) personTracker from Hampton, Virginia, and musician of iNK, a Kansas artist group that was starting to make demos; interviewed by Dynamic Harmony for traxweekly 's Faces in the Crowd in October 1995, two weeks after his first …
  • Future Crew groupThe Finnish demogroup behind scream-tracker-3 and the s3m-format : sami-tammilehto (Psi) wrote the tracker and its format document; the S3M "old stereo control" command was used only by "the soundtrack from Panic by …
  • Ganja Man (Sam Bashton) personTeenage founder of the UK group lok , a handbag-house and jungle tracker in fasttracker-2 , and the author of traxweekly 's "Potted Tracking History". Sources: his March 1996 interview by zinc (source: …
  • Gravis UltraSound (GUS) platformThe PC sound card of the 1990s tracker scene: a wavetable card with its own sample RAM and hardware voices, which is why tracker changelogs list "GUS" as a feature, why ST3's panning command is a GUS command, and why …
  • Greg Heo personAuthor of the five-part "Introduction to Musical Theory" in traxweekly #74–#86 (October 1996 – January 1997), covering the elements of music, dynamics and texture, musical form and cadences, key signatures and scales, …
  • Hornet groupThe demoscene archive and group behind "Demonews", the newsletter traxweekly was modelled on and spun off from; TraxWeekly was "a HORNET affiliation", distributed from ftp.hornet.org and www.hornet.org (sources: …
  • Impulse Tracker toolThe DOS tracker by jeffrey-lim ("Pulse"), written in 100 % assembler during 1995–96 as "an extension to scream-tracker-3 " that kept ST3's quick interface and added everything fasttracker-2 had — envelopes, 16-bit and …
  • Injekted (Brandon Balliett) personSixteen-year-old raver who conceived and named ultrabeat , a music-only techno group, after an earlier non-tracking stint as Zer0 of defiance . The single source is Cerulean's traxweekly interview with him and subhuman …
  • Island of Reil (Jesse Rothenberg) personepinicion member and TraxWeekly's eyewitness at the NAID 1995 music competition. The single source for this page is psibelius 's opinion interview of April 1995 (source: s-tw006-naid-opinion-interviews ) .
  • IT module format (.it) formatThe module format of impulse-tracker , documented by its author in ITTECH.TXT (in raw/impulse-tracker/ ; summary s-ittech ). Everything an .it contains beyond an S3M — instruments with envelopes, NNAs and duplicate …
  • Jan Harries (Rambones) personDanish demo-scener, C64 music ripper and composer (born 1969-01-12 in Nyborg): a founder of the demo group The Supply Team (1985–89), author of the Ripped-Off (C64, 1987–88) and Ripp Off (PlaySID, 1991–95) rip series, …
  • Jase (Jason Chong) personAustralian tracker of the demo groups Oxygen and Enigma who won Music Contest 3 in 1995 with an XM, beating necros ; the main source is clef 's TraxWeekly interview of August 1995 (source: s-tw022-interview-jase ; …
  • Jeffrey Lim (Pulse) personAuthor of impulse-tracker . In TraxWeekly he appears as "Pulse": Zinc credits "the neat extras Pulse has put in Impulse Tracker" (panning/volume swing, panning default; source: s-tw075-it-percussion-tips ), and in issue …
  • Jugi (Jukka Kaartinen) personMusician of the Finnish demogroup Complex (founded 1989; PC division since The Party 1993) and composer of Dope , the winning demo of The Gathering 1995. The single source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of …
  • Kal Zakath (John Townsend) person"Aspiring musician" of Inferno Productions ('jtown' on #trax) who created and ran traxweekly 's "Faces in the Crowd" (FITC) column from issue #26 (14 September 1995): interviews with unknown composers so that they are …
  • Khyron (Paul Schultz) personkosmic musician from Cincinnati who by 1997 built synthesizers at the revived Moog Music and had moved from tracking to MIDI sequencing. The main source is Jeremy Rice's interview in TraxWeekly #111 (source: …
  • Kosmic (KFMF) groupA major PC music group of the 1990s, founded by maelcum and one other person in the fall of 1992 as the "Kosmic Loader Foundation" (KLF), a VGA-loader/ANSI group in the ACiD mould that became a music group with the …
  • Leinad (Daniel Falk) personSwedish composer of the Amiga era (from 1989, most active 1990–91) who by 1995 tracked on a PC for the games of MAGE, the small development outfit he ran with friends, and wrote multimedia for a living. The single …
  • Leviathan personMusician of Renaissance and kosmic who wrote traxweekly 's first article, "Modal and Chord Theory" (#1, 12 March 1995) — a modal chart and degree-based chord formulas for the self-taught (source: …
  • Liam the Lemming (Liam Hesse) personLiverpool tracker of S!P and Mach One, known for catchy piano-led tunes and the disk AutoEmotive ; the single source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of August 1996 (source: s-tw066-interview-liam-the-lemming ) …
  • LoK groupA UK music group set up by ganja-man because "there weren't really any demo/music groups" in Britain that he knew of, with a second aim of educating #trax about jungle. The expansion of the name is not printed in the …
  • Loki (Charles Odom) personSeventeen-year-old tracker from Albany, Oregon, a member of SPiCE (dj_moses's group with Happy Fetus Records) and, from November 1995, of zinc 's Radiance; interviewed by Trifixion in traxweekly #35. The single source …
  • Lord Pegasus (Zack Smith) personkosmic and ACiD (pHluid) tracker from Georgia, USA, self-taught by ear and schooled by basehead ; the single substantial source is his TraxWeekly interview of July 1995 (source: s-tw018-interview-lord-pegasus ) . His …
  • Luv Kohli personCo-founder, with his brother Manu, of the two-member Virginia group Empyrean; interviewed by DennisC for traxweekly 's Faces in the Crowd in October 1995 after about a year of releases. The sources for this page are …
  • Maelcum personFounder of the kosmic Free Music Foundation, coordinator of the musicdisk label Exceedingly Great Grooves (EGG), and member of epinicion and Underground Gabber Source; k8to credits him with "a thousand mods or so" …
  • Master of Darkness (Todd Andlar) personFounder of AIM Higher, a newcomers' group "like epinicion ", the first "Faces in the Crowd" interviewee (September 1995) and within two weeks one of the column's interviewers; the sources are his own FITC interview and …
  • Mellow-D (Jaakko Manninen) personFinnish tracker who co-founded the five-musicians with necros in March 1995 — the "virtual band" was his idea — and who tracks entirely by ear. He has no interview of his own in the traxweekly archive; the sources are …
  • Mental Floss (Andrew McCallum) personToronto techno musician of kosmic (from about 1994) who played tracked music live at raves and put out the album Grey Matter ; the single source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of February 1998 (source: …
  • Mesonyx (Jon Dal Kristbjornsson) personFifteen-year-old composer from Reykjavik, Iceland, who wrote the music for the game Xixit in one day; member of Infinity Productions, Rage Technologies and The Green Grapes. The single source is his "Faces in the Crowd" …
  • Mick Rippon personComposition student from Newcastle, Australia, with three years of Amiga ProTracker and, from mid-1995, ST3 and FT2 on the PC; interviewed by DennisC for traxweekly 's Faces in the Crowd in January 1996, after FITC's …
  • Mikmak (Jean-Paul Mikkers) personDutch programmer, author of the MikMod and MikIT module players; the single source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of June 1997 (source: s-tw103-interview-mikmak ) .
  • MOD module format (.mod) format"The first file format for tracked music on the Commodore Amiga": introduced in a basic form by Karsten Obarski's Ultimate SoundTracker, extended by NoiseTracker and protracker with more effects, longer samples and more …
  • Mosaic (Renaissance) personMusician of renaissance who placed 4th in the NAID 1995 music competition with Tears . The main source is his short opinion interview in TraxWeekly #6 (source: s-tw006-naid-opinion-interviews ) ; no real name is printed.
  • Necros (Andy Sega) personThe most-cited PC-scene musician in traxweekly : Andy Sega, 19 in March 1995, a computer-science major with a philosophy minor, co-founder of the five-musicians with Mellow-D after leaving kosmic ("it is kinda silly to …
  • Nemesis (Andrew Wise) personMusician of renaissance , kosmic and iCE, known in 1995 for "realistic and catchy" songs and, by his own account, aiming at a "professional" MIDI-like production rather than realism. The main source is his TraxWeekly …
  • NOISE (New Objectives In Sound Exploration) groupA small Quebec music group headed by shawnm , founded about early 1995, that ranged from techno and ambient to industrial, hard rock and "classical" and had a group column in traxweekly (#42, #50 in the TOC). Sources: …
  • Olivier Lapicque personAuthor of ModPlugin, "originally developed in the mid-90s … as a plugin for Internet browsers to listen to tracked music files", and from it ModPlug Player and ModPlug Tracker — "the first Windows-based tracker" — which …
  • OpenMPT tool"A third-generation tracker" for Windows (runs in Wine on macOS and Linux): the open-source continuation of olivier-lapicque 's ModPlug Tracker, which grew out of his mid-1990s ModPlugin browser plugin and went open …
  • Paganus personPiano-centred tracker of epinicion and Aim Higher, from the Toronto BBS scene, interviewed by Atlantic for traxweekly 's Faces in the Crowd in October 1995. No real name is printed; the contact address given is …
  • Pariah (Edwin de la Vega) personToronto dance-music tracker of the group V.S.L, with ten years of instruments behind him and a creed that there is no bad music, "only music that some people aren't too FOND about". The single source is his traxweekly …
  • Perisoft (David Wiernicki) personPresident of defiance from spring 1995, epinicion member, scream-tracker-3 user, and the author of the traxweekly #8 article "Samples And Rippers, Rippers And Samples" that accused basehead 's NAID entry of being "35 % …
  • Phoenix (Andrew Voss) personkosmic musician from Troy, NY (vossa@rpi.edu). Joined the Kosmic Loader Foundation in April 1994 via an application seen on The Sound Barrier BBS after a solo musicdisk, Pyrology ; by March 1995 he had about 20 …
  • Pinion (Ryan Hunt) personMusician of ACiD, pHluid and Lucid (pinion@netcom.com, www.acid.org/phluid) and author of the "Impulse Tracker Tip of the Week" column in traxweekly #81–#89 (December 1996 – February 1997): reverb from looped tails and …
  • Popcorn (Chris Campbell) personCanadian high-school tracker who edited traxweekly through most of 1995 — between its founder populus , who handed him the job, and psibelius , who succeeded him — conducted six of its early interviews, and was a member …
  • Populus (Nicolas Roberge) personCo-founder of traxweekly and its first interviewer; member of epinicion and defiance ; computer-science student. The main source for this page is his farewell interview of June 1995 (source: s-tw016-interview-populus ) .
  • Psibelius (Gene Wie) personEditor and publisher of traxweekly (the 1997 staff sheet lists "Editor: Psibelius (Gene Wie)"; issue #50's introduction is signed Gene Wie, TraxWeekly Publishing — sources: s-tw106-a-little-panning , …
  • Purple Motion personMusician of future-crew and the scene's reference point for "demo music": Zapper is "affected by Purple Motion (like every other tracker)" (source: s-tw027-interview-zapper ) , Phoenix names his Turbulence as the …
  • Quantam Porcupine (Joshua Shagam) personPianist, coder and scream-tracker-3 tracker from New Mexico who started on Music Construction Set on the commodore-64 , and who prefers songs "optimized for as few channels as possible". Spelled "Quantam" in traxweekly …
  • Quarex (Drew Hunt) personSixteen-year-old member of kosmic , epinicion and his own one-man group TFX, known for PORK.MOD ; the single source for this page is maelcum 's unedited IRC-log interview of July 1995 (source: s-tw019-interview-quarex ) …
  • Rage (Harri Blom) personFinnish tracker of Jade and Night55, 2nd in the Assembly '95 multichannel music competition with "Guild of Sounds". The main source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of May 1996 (source: s-tw060-interview-rage ) …
  • Renaissance groupAn early PC demo group, reached through The Sound Barrier BBS in New York, whose demos — above all Amnesia (seen by khyron "sometime in 93", before future-crew 's Second Reality ) — and whose tracker, MultiTracker, …
  • Ryan Cramer personMusician of renaissance and, from 1995, Iguana; a self-taught tracker whose model for demo music was the film score. The single source for this page is Popcorn 's TraxWeekly interview of April 1995 (source: …
  • Ryan Sprott (Grey) personFounder of the music group Grey and a #trax regular, interviewed by Kleitus in July 1996 — the single source for this page (source: s-tw063-interview-ryan-sprott ) . Not to be confused with Ryan Cramer (TraxWeekly #7) …
  • S3M module format (.s3m) formatscream-tracker-3 's format (1994), documented by sami-tammilehto in TECH.DOC (summary: s-st3-tech-doc ). Compared with mod-format it added per-sample tuning (C4Spd, the frequency of middle C), up to 32 channels (16 …
  • Sami Tammilehto (Psi) personAuthor of Scream Tracker: 2.21 (1990-09-03), 2.24 (1991), the ST Music Interface Kit (1991–92) and scream-tracker-3 3.01–3.21 (1994), a member of future-crew (source: s-tracker-history-notes ) . He wrote the S3M format …
  • Saxy (Courtney Risch) personSaxophonist and member of XX, the all-female music group of 1996, interviewed by Kal Zakath after Symphony in her Mind , the first tune she ever tracked. The single source is that traxweekly interview (source: …
  • Schism Tracker tool"A free and open-source reimplementation of impulse-tracker " for Linux, macOS, Windows and anything SDL runs on, keeping IT's keyboard-driven interface and "finger feel" on top of "a highly modified version of the …
  • Scirocco (Ian Lyman) personGroupless fasttracker-2 tracker and NYU film student who learned alone by "picking apart other tracker's work", claimed the only five-star XM on ftp.cdrom.com, and advised newcomers to upload only what they are proud …
  • Scream Tracker 3 toolThe DOS tracker by sami-tammilehto ("Psi") of future-crew , freeware, behind the s3m-format : 3.01 beta on 1994-04-18 ("S3M format, 16 channels, GUS, Adlib"), 3.20 on 1994-12-06 and 3.21 on 1994-12-25, descended from …
  • shawnm (Shawn, NOISE) personHead of the Quebec group New Objectives In Sound Exploration ( noise-group ), an orchestral-percussion student at McGill who tracked in scream-tracker-3 and preached ear over theory and "do what you hear" over the …
  • Skaven personMusician of future-crew , one of the two names (with purple-motion ) that the 1995–97 PC scene treats as its founding influences: Phoenix was inspired by "Maelcum, Skaven, and Deus" (source: s-tw001-interview-phoenix ) …
  • Smeghead (David Oranchak) personTechno tracker of the Virginia group Terraformer, a scream-tracker-3 user who composes by "stream of consciousness"; the main source is master-of-darkness 's "Faces in the Crowd" interview of October 1995 (source: …
  • Stalker (Ariel Gross) personMusician of the demo group OTM and, from April 1995, of defiance ; a scream-tracker-3 user since its release who started on Composer 669 in December 1993. The main source is Zer0's TraxWeekly interview of April 1995 …
  • Storlek personOriginal developer of schism-tracker with Mrs. Brisby, from 0.031a (2003-06-16) through the dated builds of 2009–2012 (source: s-tracker-history-notes ) ; the old schismtracker.org wiki — the FAQ with "Tell the Milky …
  • Subhuman (Seth Miller) personSeventeen-year-old goa and trance fan from Oregon who co-founded ultrabeat with injekted and made his first release on the group's Lucid . The single source is Cerulean's traxweekly interview (source: …
  • The Grey Note (Necros) songnecros 's saxophone piece from the musicdisk Progression ( greynote.s3m ) — the PC scene's standard example of a realistic solo instrument inside a module, and its standard example of a sample that must not be ripped …
  • The Modsquad groupBongo Jongo, Spessartini and Neon Hunter (modsquad@juno.com), authors of the four-part satirical chiptune "seminar" in traxweekly #77–#81 (November–December 1996) and of a musicdisk "Potato Chips" with "like 500k of …
  • The Zapper (Marc Girard, Force Ten) personMusician of Force Ten (zapper@autoroute.net), a group of friends from the Montreal suburbs that is also a real band (Zapper on bass and synths), and of the demo group The Apollo Project. Wrote "Loops and Extended …
  • TheHacker (Krisjanis Gale) personkosmic (KFMF) musician who released eleven songs in one batch in spring 1995 and tracked ambient and rave on a 386-25 with MultiTracker. The single source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of April 1995 (source: …
  • TraxWeekly publicationA text-only newsletter of the PC tracker scene, published semi-weekly from 12 March 1995 to 1998 for 119 issues, modelled after hornet 's "Demonews" and "a HORNET affiliation": distributed from ftp.hornet.org / …
  • Triton (Fredrik Huss and Magnus Högdahl) groupThe Swedish group whose programmers Fredrik Huss and Magnus Högdahl wrote fasttracker-2 : Huss's FastTracker 1.01 (1993-01-23, 8 channels) and the two authors' 2.00 (November 1994) through 2.06 (1996); the 2.08 build of …
  • Trixter (Jim Leonard) personOf hornet (trixter@mcs.com). In traxweekly he wrote the two sharpest corrections in this wiki's set: that "a chord isn't a 'thing', it's any combination of notes" and every piece of music has them (#40, source: …
  • U4IA / F8 (James Young) personBristol-based Amiga-generation composer of underground dance modules — over 150 released by 1996 — who quit as U4IA in 1994 and returned under the name F8; the single source for this page is his e-mail interview in …
  • Ultrabeat groupA music-only techno "tribe" founded about March 1996 by injekted and subhuman — "no coding, no graphics… just the music" — for ravers and "foreign techno heads", with a proposed five-member cap and the five-musicians as …
  • VadimVS (Vadim Shustov) personRussian scream-tracker-3 user from Simbirsk who joined N.O.I.S.E. in February 1996 and tracked heavy, pop and disco tunes on borrowed hardware with samples ripped from other modules. The single source is his short …
  • Vegas (T.J. Lerner) personMusician of the group Mystique in 1996, an impulse-tracker user who saved as S3M, and one of the scene's pro-theory voices. The main source for this page is his TraxWeekly interview of June 1996 (source: …
  • Vicious (VSL) personFounder of V.S.L. ("Variety's the Spice of Life"), a 14-member Toronto dance-music group started around April 1995, and a member of Aim Higher; interviewed by Master of Darkness for traxweekly 's Faces in the Crowd in …
  • XM module format (.xm) formatfasttracker-2 's format (November 1994): the mod-format effect alphabet plus a few letters of its own, and — the point of it — instruments : volume and panning envelopes over samples, several samples per instrument, …
  • Zalt (Tobias Garder) personSixteen-year-old Stockholm tracker ("zalt of groove.phenomena.mistery"), 2nd in the Icing'95 multichannel music compo, who came from Atari NoiseTracker to FastTracker 2 ; interviewed by psibelius in traxweekly #40 …
  • Zinc (Justin Ray) personTracker from British Columbia and the most prolific interviewer and columnist of later traxweekly (listed as staff in the 1997 sheet; source: s-tw106-a-little-panning ). Wrote "IT Percussion Tips" (#75, 25 October 1996) …