How to Score

 The last couple of days I've been looking at tracking software, the kind that allows you to programme music using samples. Back in the day a friend introduced me to Screamtracker, a fairly nifty little program that let you make cheesy music. I enjoyed using it, and even 'composed' a couple of pieces of music that I quite liked.

I'm not sure that it copes well with Windows, as it was a DOS based program. I have a copy of it, but have yet to install it. There are loads of cool instruments around for it, each one pretty tiny to download. Much fun.

Screamtracker was superceded by the superior Fasttracker, which had exciting possibilities like stereo. I seem to recall that the 486 that Adam had at the time struggled with the awesome computing power required for Fasttracker, or maybe it was just too big to fit onto a 3 and a quarter floppy. Whatever the case, I never played with Fasttracker much.

Now I'm looking at learning how to use Skaletracker, which appears to be the Third Generation of Screamtracker. It lets you load up instruments/sounds into a loop of 64 beats, maybe up to 99 instruments at a time? That would be bass drum, hihat, cymbal, tom... each one as a separate instrument. So a basic drumbeat would be maybe 5 or 6 columns?

Part of why I'm interested in all this is that it would allow me to make music, potentially to use in short films like the 48 hour film. Over the next year I plan to make some music using tracking software, and then maybe ask the music teacher about the expensive and complicated looking set-up here at school. Both options would be good - Skaltracker as a portable and quick tool, and the school set-up for higher quality.