concept
- ADSR envelope conceptAttack · Decay · Sustain · Release: the volume contour of a note. On the sid it is hardware — two registers per voice (attack/decay, sustain/release, one nybble each), started by the gate bit and released when the gate …
- Alternative tunings — chip music outside 12-TET conceptTwelve equal semitones per octave is a choice, not a law, and on most chips it is a choice made by a lookup table in the ROM rather than by the hardware. Change the table and every note in the tracker moves — the …
- Arrangement — think in 4s and 8s conceptAlmost all chiptune and EDM breathes in 4- and 8-bar phrases. Introduce or remove one element every 4 or 8 bars: drop the bass out, bring the drums in, transpose the whole thing up, add a counter-melody. Repetition is …
- Chiptune — what the word means conceptTwo related things share the name:
- Chord inversions and voice leading conceptAny chord tone can be the lowest note. Take minor 0 3 7 , move the bottom note up an octave and re-measure from the new lowest note:
- Chord progressions conceptChords have jobs: degree 1 ( tonic ) is home, degree 5 ( dominant ) pulls back home, degree 4 ( subdominant ) is the scenic route between them. Most songs are clever trips away from home and back. Written as scale …
- 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 …
- Diatonic chords — why it is not always 0 3 7 conceptA triad = root + a third + a fifth, but "a third" comes in two sizes (minor +3, major +4) and the fifth is usually +7, sometimes +6 or +8:
- 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 …
- Harmonic series and overtones conceptEvery pitched sound is a stack of sine waves at whole-number multiples of one frequency. The lowest is the fundamental — the note you hear — and the ones above it are its harmonics (or overtones, or partials). Their …
- Instrument tables (wave / pulse / filter) conceptOn the sid — and on the game-boy in lsdj — an "instrument" is not a sample but a small program: a set of tables that the player steps through frame by frame to change waveform, pitch, pulse width and filter while a note …
- 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 …
- Orderlist (sequence) conceptThe list that tells a tracker which pattern plays next; in C64 trackers each track has its own orderlist, so tracks can loop patterns of different lengths independently. Besides pattern numbers it can carry song-level …
- Player identification (pattern searching) conceptTelling which music routine — which sid-player-routine — a .sid file was made with, by looking for a short sequence of code bytes that only that routine contains. Stefano Tognon set the method out in sidin #3 and #5 …
- 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 …
- Rhythm and groove in 16 rows conceptIn 4/4 with 16 rows per bar, rows 0 and 8 are the strong beats, 4 and 12 medium, everything else weak: 0 > 8 > 4, 12 > the rest . Notes on weak positions — especially just before a strong beat — create syncopation , the …
- 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 …
- Scales and modes — your palette of notes conceptA scale is a subset of the 12 semitones written as offsets from a root. Stay inside the set and almost everything you play fits together. Changing the root of the same scale type is transposing; the pattern of numbers …
- Semitones — the only unit you need conceptOne semitone = one step in a tracker 's note column = one piano key (black and white counted equally). Every interval, chord and scale is a pattern of semitone distances, which is why tracker arps are written as numbers …
- Serial composition — rows, retrograde, inversion conceptSerial (twelve-tone) technique orders the 12 semitones into a row and forbids repeating any note "until he has passed through all the other notes of his 'row'"; it evolved in the 20th century "as the final stage of …
- SID player routine, rastertime and player types conceptOn the commodore-64 the music is played by a small machine-code routine called once per frame from an interrupt. It costs two things a game or demo cares about: memory and rastertime (CPU time per frame, measured in …
- Synchronisation with other gear conceptRunning a chip tracker in lockstep with another Game Boy, a drum machine, a DAW or a modular. Both focus trackers support it natively.
- 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 .
- Writing melodies that work conceptTwo questions decide a melody note: is it in the current chord? and is it on a strong beat? Chord tones on strong beats (rows 0, 4, 8, 12 of a 16-row bar) make the melody sound anchored; non-chord scale notes are …