i worked on a song on sunday within the limitations of the .XM mod format, so one note column per channel, no resonant filters, no effects, no vst plugins or instruments, no eq or compression, and it felt so freeing to simply work with mono samples and loops I had sampled or generated, finding fun ways to sequence them and let the samples be expressed in different ways, constantly moving forward with new ideas. No noodling 🍜

@protman but you do have delay :-) delay is in the end just sample repeater with attenuating volume...

@protman one track that still continues to amaze till this day, albeit with impulse tracker is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ussu5r16Zow

@protman From time to time I'm thinking about to make a tracker song again in FastTracker II. It was a wonderful time back in the 90s!

@ravetracer_22 pick some samples and go for it 😎 there are also tons of modern trackers that can save the hassle of setting up dosbox or other emulation

@jarkko two pattern effects I enjoyed most in #impulsetracker are retrig that allows for tick values that span multiple rows and the same for tremor. I even made a custom DSP for #renoise they emulates IT's Ixy tremolo

@protman My Dosbox is well set up including FT2 ;-).
But there's also FT2 Clone https://16-bits.org/ft2.php. I used it to record my classic tracks I made in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M-xNWs0FMo&list=PLuPo_QWXO9OTFL6LPLcF9Vofp8MNmOlPC

@protman I had a Gravis Ultrasound Extreme back then with 512kb memory. The sound quality between it and a generic Soundblaster was tremendously better. Unfortunately I don't have any hardware left from the past.

@ravetracer_22 cool. i was gus max (also upgraded to 512). Until a few weeks ago, I was using this as my zoom wallpaper for work for a couple years :] it would make for fun ice-breakers with new clients

@protman the last time I did it, what I noticed is that I use my ears a lot more because there aren't as many visual aids and I don't want the mix to be messed up at the end

@chunter cool. For me, I was also using an old .IT method that's sort of like gain staging where I would set all samples to 33% volume. Before starting to use any of them, then there's always the option to make a sound louder or boost its transient

@protman @chunter this method was a real game changer for me when I went back to doing .IT modules some years ago, makes mixing so much easier. And the best thing is that it works on almost every platform to some extent :)