TW #12 — Advanced Tracking Tips (Necros)

necros's first tips column, "for people who already have mastered the basics", written in scream-tracker-3 notation with a conversion chart for ProTracker/FastTracker: Axx/Txx → Fxx, Gxx → 3xx, Hxx → 4xx, Dxx → Axx, Oxx → 9xx (effect-command-crosswalk).

Key claims#

• Tip 1 — "Surround stereo, sorta": play the same chord sample at the same note on a left and a right channel, one of them with a sample offset (C-4 01 .. O01 against C-4 01 .. ...). The slight time offset reads as a reflection off a distant wall — "very surround-sound-ish", especially on headphones. The channels must be panned well apart: hard left/right, or a medium spread such as S82/S8D.
• Tip 2 — Workable leads: tracked leads sound dead because the sample is static and every note is played alike; add what a soloist does. (a) Volume: no two notes at the same level — ramp runs up to a held peak (40 40 50 60 64), come back down after a hold, use multiples of 10 for speed; high notes sound louder than low notes at equal volume, so keep high notes down except on accents and accent low notes that must stand out; use the volume column rather than D20 so the effect column stays free. (b) Tone portamento without restarting the sample: GF0 is "practically instant" — use it for jumps of more than three semitones, smaller values (G20, G06) for short moves, and follow a slow slide with a GF0 "since some players tend to play Gxx/3xx effects too slowly". (c) Vibrato that fades in on held notes — HA1 then HA2 — never wild except in hard, up-tempo tunes; drop it back to zero or fade the note, "nothing sounds worse than a heavily oscillating note which just refuses to die". (d) Echo track: copy the track, ALT-J its volume down to at least a third (22), and offset it two or three rows at speed 6, four or six at speed 3, so the delay sits on the beat. (e) The Drop-Off "made infamous by Purple Motion": slide up into the big note (G05, GF0), bring in and deepen vibrato (HA1, HA2, H00, HA1), then fall away with an accelerating down-slide and falling volume — 50 E04, 30 E06, 10 E10, 00.
• Tip 3 — Effective panning: most trackers don't pan at all, and doubling a track on both sides is worse (it wastes channels and muddies non-GUS mixes). Channel panning beats instrument panning except for drums. ST3's S8x is a 16-step GUS hardware pan (S80 left, S88 middle, S8F right) played correctly only by 3.2+ on a GUS — SBPro owners entered it blind and checked in a player; Xxx is a 128-step software pan for DMP/IPlay (X00 left, X40 middle, X80 right; XA4 = DMP's SBPro surround emulation, which reaches a Dolby receiver's surround channel) that ST3 saves but does not play. Placement: kick and snare at S87, hi-hats and tambourines at S8A, crashes centre; the lead at S86–S8A with its echo the same distance on the other side (S86 → S8A/S8B) or hard on the lead's own side (S81); layered chords spread, a single chord centred, multi-channel chords one pan per note; S8x on every row makes a hi-hat travel.
• Tip 4 — Swing: "floating tempo", the Amiga funk method, alternates speeds row by row (A08/A05) so odd rows last longer — the overall speed is 1 ÷ ((1/8 + 1/5) ÷ 2), "a bit slower than A06" — but it is coarse. Better: alternate fine tempos Txx in pairs such as T60/T90 or T70/T9A, the first about two thirds of the second for a medium swing; his "Realization 2" uses it.

Practical takeaways#

Two channels + O01 = stereo width from one sample; leads need velocity, GF0 legato, late vibrato and a one-third-volume echo 2–3 rows down; pan drums near centre and mirror the lead's echo; swing with Txx pairs at 2:3.

Notable quotes#

• "The moral of this story is LEARN HOW TO PAN! :>"
• "Nothing sounds worse than a heavily oscillating note which just refuses to die."

Relevance#

The most concrete lead-articulation recipe in the archive, and the scene's ST3-era panning values; feeds lead-articulation, stereo-panning, fake-echo, shuffle-funktempo, pitch-slide-and-portamento, vibrato, volume-slides and sample-offset.

Pages touched#

lead-articulation, stereo-panning, fake-echo, shuffle-funktempo, pitch-slide-and-portamento, vibrato, volume-slides, sample-offset, effect-command-crosswalk, scream-tracker-3, necros, levels-and-headroom.