TW #99 — Why Tracking Is The Perfect Artform (anonymous)
An enthusiast's "top reasons for tracking like crazy", with one concrete story about how compo feedback improved a song.
Key claims#
- Anytime: a riff thought of at dinner goes straight into "IT or FT2 … load the instrument that's in our head and bash the thing out"; multi-tracking a hummed orchestral idea "will sound like aural vomit".
- Any style, any speed, unplayable included: Zappa's Jazz From Hell (Synclavier) as the precedent; "if it's in your head, then you can track it".
- Experimentation: the tracker lets you double a bassoon with piccolos at double speed, replace a bass drum with a car horn, "play violins OUT OF RANGE", invert a piano envelope (see instrument-envelopes) — his sketch notation
B---S---B-B-S---for a kick/snare row is the usual tracker shorthand. - Co-operation = feedback: "where else can you write a tune … and get a critique of your song within a few minutes?" — the local board, #trax, e-mail; musicdisks as multi-artist albums; compos where "we vote … and constructively criticise". His own case: 12th place in "tt#25", a comment that "the leads were too loud, and the chords were dissonant" — he checked, the leads were too loud and the chord bass notes were so low the chords sounded out of tune, so he remixed it and released it.
- Liberation: songs come straight from the composer; the tracker scene is like the pub-band scene (hard work, hostile to newbies — "You dunno how to go to triplets from eighth notes in FT2?!") except that "most of our music is heard by other musicians, and I think it's this that stops the scene growing".
Notable quotes#
- "We write them, we mix them, we produce them, we re-mix them(!), we publish them, we distribute them and then of course we delete them."
Relevance#
A sourced statement of the feedback loop behind compos and the release advice on tracking-workflow (mix check: lead level, chord bass register).