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For well over a decade my choice of digital recording on my Macs has been Propellerhead Reason (versions 3 or 4) - yes, there have been the occasional Logic, Reaper and Garageband moments but as far as I'm concerned Reason is king for it's colossal armory of onboard synths, drums and samplers all coded into a DAW that will even run on a G3 PowerPC.
However, during all these years of recording, I've also listened to and marveled at the technique and sounds of tracker modules but other than some rudimentary experiments, never committed to writing any of my own.
Tracker modules of course were perhaps the earliest popular format of digital music made on computers (excepting MIDI which is musical data sent to hardware audio devices.)
Atari, Amiga and later on, PCs all contributed to this format of low resolution audio samples, manipulated and played in sequence - four tracks of audio, steadily rising as computing power increased until the format was superseded by the DAW methods which are now more familiar.
So, I decided my next project would be an attempt to produce a clutch of tracker modules and for this task chose a modern reproduction of the classic Amiga software, Protracker.
As the software is fairly undemanding, it worked great on my underclocked 12" Powerbook G4 and as Protracker (like most trackers) can be played via a Qwerty keyboard, it makes for a very nifty, self contained workstation!
But approaching music the Protracking way is not easy - especially for someone more comfortable with linear, portastudio style recording - Protracker is very much a sample step sequencer - mixed with a firm understanding of sample manipulation. Another thing I was mindful of was making modules that could be actually played back on old Amiga hardware too (or at least emulators) so I made sure the sampling formats were backwards compatible (very low resolution.)
Luckily, at least I had some idea of what I wanted to produce - for a long while I'd had a shopping list of movie and music samples that I hoped to mash together at some point or inject into standard tracks - that would be a good starting point.
Once I got stuck in it became immediately clear that some of the luxuries one gets used to in modern DAWs are (by design) just not there - most importantly pitch/tempo adjustment.
Well you could change both but not to the degree needed ie change the tempo but keep the pitch - when Protracker was devised, that ability was years away.
Luckily, the freeware audio editor Audacity can be used in this capacity and was essential in building tracks with Protracker and saw plenty of bouncing back and forth getting samples to sit just right.
After a pretty steep learning curve, I'd carved out an album's worth of tracks and managed to cobble together some mashup ideas that had been rattling around my head for years - I was particularly proud of fusing Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds into John Barry's score from Zulu by way of Hot Chocolate and Rainbow!
The low fidelity fizz of crunchy, Amiga compatible samples added to the energy too and it was wonderful to be able make tracks that can be played even on a home computer from 1987 - plus all the tracks will fit onto a handful of floppy disks!
All the tracks are up on my Bandcamp:
https://8088.bandcamp.com/album/protracker-ep
https://8088.bandcamp.com/album/for-ghouls-and-monasteries