TW #115 — Tracking Semantics (Exxon)
Exxon's reply to Behemoth's five reasons (s-tw114-commercial-tracking-debate), from Vienna.
Key claims#
- Trackers are hard to learn but "once you've got the principles, tracking is a much quicker way to express spontaneous musical ideas than professional samplers, where you get mad scrolling through menus with 3 buttons on a 2 line display". The remaining weaknesses: bass "hasn't got exactly that much power from trackers than from synths or samplers", and residual noise ("AWE or EWS manage noise reduction near to perfection"). He is glad tracking "hasn't followed BillieBoy into Win95Land".
- Live: with fasttracker-2 2.08 he can "play samples as well as synth sounds from my daughterboard LIVE using an input keyboard" — a jungle beat running in the tracker while he plays melodies over it.
- Career advice: forget major labels, look for indie labels for your style or found one; enter real-life competitions — he had just won first place in an electronic-music compo in Austria with a ten-track XM (a trip to Las Vegas); send demotapes everywhere for feedback. A TraxRadio internet-radio project was in test broadcasts in Vienna (www.traxradio.org planned for November/December 1997).
Relevance#
Dates FT2 2.08's live MIDI-keyboard playing to 1997 and gives the second live-performance recipe for live-tracking; feeds commercial-tracking and compos.