Six songs made on trackers, and one made with no electronics at all.
- "Cartesian Somersaults", FΛDE
Okay, do you remember the "PC speaker"? The little piezoelectric beeper thing old tower PCs had inside the case, could only play one note at a time? Well this is a full, catchy, multi-instrumental song created entirely for one of those monophonic beepers (apparently the one in the 1980 Commodore PET). It even fakes drums with short chirps. It hurts to listen to and the waveform in the video hurts to look at, and I kind of love it.
- "Call Me Up Again", FΛDE
The same musician from the last track, making something even weirder: have you heard of the "Fairchild Channel F"? Officially the very first removable-cartridge "video game console", from 1976. It had a beeper (which played on a little internal speaker— it took until the second-generation Channel F before they started mixing it in with the TV signal), but the beeper could only play 3 different notes. I don't mean it was triphonic. I mean it could only play one note at a time, and there were only three choices for notes: 120 hz, 500 hz, or 1000 hz. (So 1000 hz will be one octave above the 500 hz, but 120 hz will appear to be one minor third up and two octaves down from 500. A bit ominous?)
This song, recorded on actual Channel F hardware, uses some bizarre modern algorithmic magic to squeeze out "impossible" sounds like arbitrary chords & white noise snares. (I sincerely don't know how this works! FM synthesis by switching notes quickly? AM synthesis by alternating stretches of silence?) The song has a bumping rhythm, and the horrible hacks that were required to make it possible at all give the sounds a deliciously grody organ texture.
- "Chi-Fou-Mi", FΛDE
Okay this is my third song in a row from the same musician but like, how many songs do you know performed on Channel F hardware? Because I only know these two (or I did until I got linked this compilation video in reply to my post about "Call Me Up Again" on Mastodon; I like "Seconde danse d'iver" and "The F Chan Story" from that set).
This is less catchy than the other FΛDE Channel F track, but more technically impressive (and more enjoyably technically disastrous). The video has the cryptic caption "HOW IN THE FUCK DID THE TRIGGERING GET BETTER", which from looking at the comments on other videos I think refers to some kind of problem FΛDE was having running their songs in emulator.
- "It's Universal", Croaker
Somewhere out there in the 90s, before mp3, there must have been an incredibly cool scene of BBS-shared tracker music that I missed out on completely (I had BBSes, but could not figure out how to operate "PlayerPRO"). This is a groovy drum & bass bop made in 1998 in ImpulseTracker for DOS by… a demoscene teenager named Jaakko Iisalo who… later went on to become the creator and lead designer of the Angry Birds series. Huh. That… was not what I was expecting Google to turn up when I went trying to look for the date this song was released.
- "Slub", STU
The Atari home computers probably deserve more cred in music production; they had a working MIDI/DAW ecosystem back before Microsoft got its shit together or Macs were remotely affordable. First version of Cubase was actually for the Atari ST. And they had a tracker scene.
Anyway here's a Atari ST tracker song from the 2017 demoscene I just really like. Chiptune you can just almost believe could have been a synth pop song in the 80s. The hook in the second half slays me— there was seriously a day last week I listened to this song like five times.
⬇️ Click below for homemade acoustic instruments and more STU ⬇️
I have a deep desire for a similar one, a viola de gamba this person made with resonating strings and pickups so it can have further delay and reverb applied to it... God, I love these sounds so much.
