TW #59 — Tracking Hints (Vivid)

Technical tricks "using Protracker commands" from Vivid of kosmic.

Key claims#

• Flange/chorus: two channels play the same sample, the second slightly delayed via sample offset (9xx) or note delay (EDx); a fine pitch slide (E1x/E2x) on one of them controls the "flanged" sound. Great on brass leads and crashes.
• Timestretching (the jungle vocal effect): speed the pattern up (at least F05), then retrigger the sample on every row with increasing 9xx offsets (901, 902, … 9FF); keep the sample under 128 KB so the full 00–FF offset range covers it; a transposed copy on another channel plus "a smooth echo" thickens it.
• Reverb: apply it offline in Cool Edit (perception 0, length ~2048, attack 5 ms, high-frequency absorption for dark vs bright), then in the tracker place the echoes at different pan positions.
• Filtering samples: an essential pre-compo step (cites Majic Fred's article in Imphobia #11) — "why should a bassdrum have high frequencies?"; convert to 16-bit and ≥22 kHz before processing.

Relevance#

Source for sample-offset (timestretch, offset chorus), detune/chorus, fake-echo (panned echoes) and sample preparation in instrument-design.

Pages touched#

sample-offset, fake-echo, instrument-design, protracker, kosmic.