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(Click here if this is your first visit) Making music with tracking software Date posted: May 20 1999
By Arvid Gregersen
Travesti is is an electronic duo currently working on soundtrack music to the forthcoming game Messiah, being created by Shiny entertainment.
The two guys behind the music, Arvid Gregersen (KINetic) and Jakob Hvitnov (Signal), use tracking software and, in this piece reproduced from their website, they offer an overview for people who have just started with or are keen on exploring tracking software.
1. The gathering of information
The first thing to do is to get loads and loads of "raw-material" of which the
song should be composed. We usually do this by sampling any real, musical or
synthesized sound that gives us a good feeling, and that's not only good as in
strange or intriguing but also in the more technical sense. The sounds should
be of as good a quality as possible (as always Exceptions to this rule may
occur).
2. The tearing down
When we feel we have enough basic sounds to go around, we start
manipulating these using the various possibilities of Cool Edit Pro and other
wave-editing tools. This process will ultimately end in most of the samples
sounding different from, or not at all like the original samplings. We usually
don't tamper much with the synthesized sounds, as we do the synthesis
ourselves, so these are already our "own" sounds.
3. The building up
The creation of the track itself us mostly done in Fast tracker 2.08 , which is
neat little program used to assemble and sequence the sounds we've made to
turn them into music. This is of course the most time consuming part of the
process, and we often end up editing and equalizing the sounds even further to
make them fit in the track. On sampling, tracking and editing see "Zen and the
art of professional tracking" and other articles on United trackers´ resources
page.
4. The entry of other agents
Usually we end up using a lot of unaltered sounds, such as speak and drums,
which we always have in handy for this. For instance we have an extensive
library of all kinds of Vintage drum and synth sounds, sampled over the years,
to choose from. You can get a let of this kind of stuff from
www.maz-sound.com and united trackers host a webring of sample resource
sites.
5. The finishing touch
After the making of the song itself, it is time for a very important phase:
Mastering! We usually make .wav samples of all the channels of the tracker
composing, for instance, the drums And bring them into Cool-edit pro for
whatever equalizing, dynamics- and effects processing is needed to make
them live out their potential! Ending up with the entire tracker song in stereo
.wav format and optimized, put out on a number of multi track cool-edit
tracks, ready for mixing.
6. The completion
The completion of the process is reached by mixing these tracks down to a
single stereo .wav track, which is then optimized in dynamics, Eq and signal
volume, and saved. That track is then actually the finished song, ready to be
produced in larger quantities of whatever audio-format is desired!
You can get more details about tracking, as well as the forthcoming Messiah game, by heading to The Travesti Homepage.
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