TW #64 — Potted Tracking History (Ganja Man)

A scener's oral history by ganja-man of lok, written in an afternoon; useful as the scene's own account of where trackers and "chip tunes" came from, not as a checked chronology.

Key claims#

• "In the beginning there was the C64, as far as the tracking scene is concerned" (the Z80 machines "came first, but that had shitty sound"). Copy protection made traders into coders, coders into crackers; cracktros with scrolling text "grew … and they got music" — "the demo scene was born".
• The C64 generation moved to Amigas and Atari STs, "both had support for four channels of SAMPLED sound … MODs were born." At first musicians "continued to write tunes very similar to those they had on the C64, what we now know as 'chip' tunes" — the sample channels were "wasted" until composers realised they "could actually have any instrument they wanted".
• A legend: gabber began when a Dutch group's OctaMED file with 909 samples got corrupted on a bad disk and the drums came out distorted — "but they liked the sound".
• On the PC, once its sound "got its act together", future-crew and renaissance wrote demos; the machines "could handle 8 or even 16 channels (remember we're talking pre-GUS infiltration here)" and "the tracking scene moved primarily to the PC".

Relevance#

The scene's own definition of the PC-scene "chip tune" as the C64 idiom carried onto sample hardware — matches the module meaning on chiptune; backbone of tracker-scene-history.

Pages touched#

tracker-scene-history, chiptune, future-crew, renaissance, ganja-man, lok.