TW #113–#118 — The Scene and the Commercial Market: the commercial-tracking debate

Behemoth lectured on demos and tracking to 40–50 people at his college's electronics department (most over 30; one asked "how a computer was able to sound 'not like a computer'") and concluded with five reasons tracking "is not and will not be a commercially-viable tool". TraxWeekly ran the replies under "The Scene: Commercially Viable?" for three issues. Exxon's reply is summarised separately (s-tw115-tracking-semantics) and xiagox's in s-tw114-live-tracking.

Key claims#

Behemoth's five reasons (#113): I. tracking "was truly born and meant to be underground" — "we don't track, code, or make gfx for money … we do it for one main reason: it's FUN"; the scene is revolutionary for sharing work "with the BBS, then IRC, then FTP, then WWW"; II. tracking software "is DOS-based and is not very easy to use", and the commercial market "doesn't know what panning is"; III. the public does not believe a computer can make music — he had to open Sound Forge to prove samples were being manipulated; IV. "you cannot perform tracking live" — a tracker on stage would hit "Play Song (or F5 in impulse-tracker)" and wait; V. the industry takes no risks, so small labels "such as maelcum's awesome label, Area 51 Records" carry the load. He asked for rebuttals with examples.

Dilvish (#114): some sceners do want music as a career — "it sure beats McDonald's"; selling a tracker next to Office would not work but "through musical channels might"; sequenced acts (Depeche Mode) perform live — "that's why the mixer was invented"; "who says you have to market a tracker as a tracker? When was the last time you heard a band billed as 'Korg players'?"; labels are not stupid, radio needs mass audiences and indie labels feed acts upward; he was planning an independent electronic label and had a CD single whose radio version industry friends had heard as MP3 — "none of them have any idea that parts of it were tracked"; tracking paid his way out of debt.

Chris Jarvis (#114): wrote the opening and closing music for Purgatory, an 18-minute abstract short film screened in Adelaide and entered in festivals — a channel that needs neither ease of use nor live performance.

Mark Bradley (#115): a Canberra DJ duo signed to "one of Australia's biggest dance labels" (CD and vinyl due) work on an AWE64 Gold with IT; their files are "way too large" for FTP/DCC and would not be released free because "the source samples and sequencing are free for anyone to copy". Nasenbluten (Newcastle, Australia; Bloody Fist Records) make "hard and noisy industrial gabba" with protracker on Amigas and get paid; live, "one guy operating the Amigas, connected to a cross-fading mixer" while DJ Mark N scratched over it — "perhaps no more live than a DJ with a crate full of records, but it still had the crowd rocking". His own gabber gig plan: pre-recorded patterns loaded live, organised samples, "quick use of channel cut outs".

Maz (#115): knows people who sell CDs of tracked tunes "(of course a bit mastered afterwards)"; "what's so bad getting money for something which is fun?"; the scene is no longer revolutionary — his list of what was: Second Reality (1993), fasttracker-2 "with its 16 bit sample support and envelopes" (1995), IT "with its NNAs" (1996), MOD4WIN's native GUS support under NT (1996) — while outside, ReBirth, DirectX time-stretch plug-ins and wavetable cards with sample RAM "make MIDI sequencers act like a tracker"; on live use: "you never saw a performance where dudes hacked their patterns live while playing other patterns? A nice ST3 feature"; tracker authors stop developing after a year or two "because they need money to live"; OctaMED PC and Data Becker's Music Maker are in shops; Gravis "closed their soundcard division".

MarkVM (#118): a friend won a contest and recorded at Wisseloord Studios (Hilversum) by plugging a PC running fasttracker-2 into two of the 48 mixer inputs — the CD kept the "little ticks and noise" of his 8-bit/22 kHz samples, which the studio could not remove. His production recipe: for a commercial song do not target the scene's file sizes; use as many samples per instrument as possible (multisampling), everything 16-bit/44 kHz; if memory runs out, build the high-quality instrument, save it, delete and downsample to make a low-quality twin, sequence with the low-quality instrument, swap the high-quality one back in at the end even if it no longer plays in real time, save as .XM and render to .WAV, then treat the wave in Cool Edit or Sound Forge (reverb, boosts, filters) and go out digitally to a recorder.

Practical takeaways#

• Live: pattern switching and channel muting are the performance controls; a mixer plus live instruments over the module is the accepted format (see live-tracking).
• Production for release outside the scene: sample quality first, hi/lo instrument twins to fit memory during composition, final render and mastering in a wave editor (see commercial-tracking).

Notable quotes#

• "The tools you use to create music don't mean a lot to consumers." — Dilvish.
• "Tracking ruulez, tracking is fun, tracking is therapy. Good tracked songs may be professional, may be 'commercial' and may be sold." — Maz.

Relevance#

The scene's own 1997–98 account of tracking versus the music industry, with named examples, tool-history dates and a workflow for studio-quality renders.

Pages touched#

commercial-tracking, live-tracking, tracker-scene-history, maelcum, impulse-tracker, fasttracker-2, scream-tracker-3, protracker, multisampling.