33. Tracks from the past

The ERICADE Radio Network is now officially a true tracker music broadcaster and not limited to just Amiga modules. With this change, it's time to look back at what tracker music is and delve into its rich history. From Karsten Obarski and the Ultimate Soundtracker on the Amiga and to today's Fast Tracker multi channel magic – it's been quite a ride. Like Emmet Brown in back to the future, we ask ourselves “My god, has it been this long?”. Yes! Yes it has.… and we've got a really nice set of songs from Swedish artist Slaze as well, so that's the latter half of the show. It's also up on the station now. Both some of his old stuff and a number of much newer tunes. Enjoy! Playlist: 00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro 00:13 DJ Daemon speaks: The tracks of the Amiga goes a long way back in time. It all started in 1987 and as we're expanding our repertoire, it's really the right moment to talk about the tracker revolution. From Sound tracker to Fasttracker and all in between. 00:34 Amigaartist – Retrospective an*s 05:59 DJ Daemon speaks: It's almost 34 years since the tracker music revolution started. It was when Amiga musician Karsten Obarski created his commercial music creator or tracker called “the ultimate Soundtracker”, the whole thing took off. It was not a big success, but great enough to get the geeks of the day to start building their own versions of the software. And soon enough, the music market was open for everyone with an Amiga. This station stands on the shoulder of mr Obarski and celebrates the trackerworlds rich heritage. 06:57 Karsten Obarski – Obarski mega-mix 10:55 DJ Daemon speaks: Obarskis the Ultimate Soundtracker introduced the world to the four channel mod-format that was then slowly improved. Every Amiga user must remember Noise tracker and ProTracker. The modules played samples that were the instruments. The pitch, the volume and also where in the sample the playback should occur could be set. One sample could thus be made into a number of different styles and even instruments. I remember a documentary about the Beatles, where the producer, George Martin showed us how to play cymbals backwards. That was revolutionary back then, but in the late 80s, the Amiga made it simple. But… You only had 4 channels. 11:55 DigiDz – Amethyst Cities 17:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Tracker music was featured in demos, games and presentations and meshed well with the Amigas reputation of being a graphics and multimedia creation device. But the four channels. It was the music chip “Paula” that put that limitation. OctaMed for the Amiga made it possible to play sound in eight channels, but it also cut the output level of the channels, causing a poor signal to noise ratio. This kind of hampered its popularity. 17:56 Slaze – Back to the roots 21:21 DJ Daemon speaks: I remember trying to connect an Amiga tracker-player to my fathers synth and I was shocked when it actually worked. This made the modules possible to use the same way Atari-users already did with the machines. This if you had a midi-interface for the Amiga. My sampler, called AMAS, did. So I was totally in heaven over this. 22:10 Slaze – Groovy beat 25:05 DJ Daemon speaks: All the games and the demos kept flowing, but it was curtains for the Amiga in 1994. The tracker culture did not die. The MIDI-connection kept the Amiga scene going a while on the more professional side. But the aging 8-bit sound and as I mentioned earlier, having only for channels was a bigger problem than ever by this time. 25:45 Slaze – Chase 28:33 DJ Daemon speaks: ScreamTracker 3, FastTracker and Impulse Tracker were built as the artist left the Amiga mostly for PC DOS and later Windows. They removed the limitation of the 4, 8 or even 12 channels the Amiga could muster. More modern soundcards and drivers even made the maximum number of channels more of a problem for the CPU than the sound card. This increased the quality of the productions. Some old modules sounded a bit primitive by comparison. 28:33 Slaze – Darkness 30:34 DJ Daemon speaks. 31:13 Slaze – Electronic waves 32:30 DJ Daemon speaks. 33:26 Slaze – Imagination 35:09 DJ Daemon speaks. 36:20 Slaze – Melting ice 39:02 DJ Daemon speaks. 40:13 Slaze – Recycled flowers 43:16 DJ Daemon speaks. 44:00 Slaze – Shadows 52:15 DJ Daemon speaks. 53:06 Jon Burton – Rob Hubbard 57:10 DJ Daemon speaks. 57:30 Einstein of Warfalcons – Einsteinium-12 59:59 Elusive and Radix – Empty Feeling (qz) Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021