In this video, I explore composition theory to find out how and why trackers just work for folks who don’t consider themselves traditional musicians. And why, if you’re more of a writer, you might be at home on a tracker.
Do you use a tracker? Do you find the workflow more fluid for you than traditional DAW or recording-based approaches?
To be perfectly honest I do not. It feels like walking in wet socks. Is there a chance that your video will explain why I hate it so much or does it mostly explore the other side of the coin?
By the way if you have an interest in posting your video in the topic, you can cut and paste the share link from youtube directly into the original post and the player will automatically populate. Your choice on that one though!
It just might be that you’re more of a performance musician than a writer 
The cognitive mode of performing music and recording it, even with devices like samplers and Elektron boxes, is inherently different than inscribing music with a tracker. I do explore it a little bit at the end why trackers might not be for everyone.
I’m not a performance musician at all, but working within the constraints and fragmented chaos of trackers, where I can exercise the same analytical recursion as when I’m writing makes total sense to my brain.
For me there is no linear construction to be found because everything is partitioned to the degree that I lose sight of the bigger picture.
Everything is reduced into ms excel format and somehow it doesn’t click the same way as an elektron or other device. I do have some performance background but I would say that I’m pretty comfortable with the inscription paradigm if it’s designed in such a way that the mnemonic investment is equal to the accessibility of the actual composition.
I feel like trackers are more like a geocaching expedition or something, where if you are not always in sync mentally with the grid, that you lose your bearings very quickly.
Maybe that’s common for people who have played live music or been performance oriented. I feel like if I went into it with a pre-existing composition, that it works fine as a notation or inscription system because you have a roadmap in hand, but composition on a tracker is where I have trouble I suppose.
Anyways, I’ll check out the video but I think I’m hoping someone can talk me into it because I have not had a lot of fruitful ventures into tracking and frankly, every time I watch something where someone is explaining how to use a tracker I get the impression that they only know enough to almost explain it, or that the rest are people who have no skill in explaining but perhaps excel in their understanding.
For me, I just want the end result to match the effort invested and with trackers I always end up feeling like I am in arrears after doing something simple.
Thanks for posting! I’ll take a look.
I see what you did there!
Thanks for the suggestion on the post revision, I copy and pasted that link.
Yay there it goes! Cheers
Nice 
If you’ve used an elektron machine there’s no reason why you can’t use a tracker, it’s pretty much the same except the playhead is always moving along and tracks/instruments aren’t locked to a single pattern, both of which make it way easier to break out of loopitis and arrange a full track. It’s also less visually opaque - at a glance you can see all the note, velocity and ‘plock’ values for the current phrase. I feel like lots of people get freaked out by the hex thing and give up before giving it a proper chance.
I’ve always wanted to understand the appeal of trackers. I don’t even understand quite what they are tbh. The music I make relies heavily on improvisation and happy accidents. It sounds like a tracker may not be for me, though I’m also a writer.
I agree with you and I’ll add that someone might likely have an even easier time with trackers if they get on with the Elektron workflow. They’re already used to thinking analytically recursive with step sequencing
There’s no need to fear the hex
I would agree with this thesis. I see them as something that’s more like a tool for quickly transcribing sheet music into MIDI data. I’m very much of a performing musician and write parts by playing them myself in different ways to see what sounds/feels right and it feels impossible for me to noodle around and improv until I settle into a cool melody or harmony with a tracker. Even on elektrons I do a lot of real-time playing with keyboard mode that way, so trackers feel more like writing from the brain instead of the heart and then you end up with very direct theory-informed composition instead of just playing what sounds cool. Like if I just knew in advance that all I wanted to do was run specific scale intervals with known harmonies trackers are fast and direct but if I want to mess around until I find some really interesting counterpoint outside of the scale that isn’t so easy unless you know specifically “I wish to enter ___ mode now” or whatever, also not something that a ‘non-musician’ would really think about doing.
The first track I finished with a tracker was a “generative ambient” one that was basically only five steps after locking the Project’s scale:
That was it and I loved the happy accidents that came out of it.
I disagree with the premise of your video. I do write in my head and play and improvise and record a performance but I also sometimes compose with the piano roll. And that process is exactly like how you describe using a tracker. You can move back and forth and revise.
Trackers imo were pretty clearly designed by programmers who didn’t have any musical experience and it makes sense that for people with no prior musical point of reference it’s a perfectly usable paradigm.
But musical scores go from left to right and pitches are arranged vertically from low to high. The piano roll logically follows this convention. The daw timeline runs from left to right, tape machines run from left to right, most step sequencers go left to right, video editing programs have left to right timelines, all of this probably because many of us read left to right.
Alright, I watched the video and I think you did a fine job of explaining the tracker paradigm, but I think that you may misunderstand part of how musicians compose music, those who have studied instruments or those who focus on an elektron or even piano roll workflow.
I think it explains a lot about why I don’t get along with trackers though and I would say that if you don’t go into your songwriting mode without some idea of what you want to hear, then it’s no different than the infinite monkey theorem where eventually if enough monkeys type for long enough one of them will write Shakespeare.
You can create music that way, but if you get a little more practice in doing it I think you’ll find a lot of people who use trackers (not me) see it in more than just line by line composition because like a book idea, it starts with an idea and is then reasoned out through creative process.
I don’t know anyone who writes a sentence letter by letter as if it were cryptography.
I wouldn’t necessarily infer that trackers were written by non-musicians and for programmers. Comparing trackers with modern DAWs isn’t fair either because trackers existed way before modern DAWs did.
Hexadecimal numbers have been used in trackers for saving screen-space because they keep things visually dense. You can stuff numbers ranging from 0-255 or -127 to 128 into a single byte in hex-representation, which only takes up a total number of two characters per byte (00-FF) rather than three or more digits in decimal notation (e.g. decimal 255 equals FF in hexadecimal notation, so three vs. only two characters).
For the same reason, a tracker’s sequencer visually “runs” from top to bottom rather than from left to right: in order to be able to fit as much information as possible onto the back-then 4:3 dimensioned low-res screens (more space on the X axis/horizontally than on the Y axis/vertically). And that information was comprised of four (and later eight or more) channels/tracks including their parameters at once.
The hexadecimal number system was used to be able to cram as much info as possible onto the screen, and once the hexadecimal number system clicks with you, it’ll become obvious that trackers have been a very well designed sequencer system and also that the Elektron sequencer is nothing but a very approachable tactile abstraction of a tracker’s.
disclaimer: I haven’t watched the OP’s video yet
I looked it up before I posted because I didn’t actually know the origin of trackers and found this interview with the originator who laments when non-programmers started being able to make computer music. But I admit it’s not fair to assume he had no experience with musical notation and the format of his program might have just been practical at the time. But the point is that trackers feel unnatural to anyone who sees music as inherently running from left to right. Which makes sense that people with traditional music experience might not take to them and people without any previous prejudice in that direction might be fine with them.
I may be wrong but I’m pretty sure the Fairlight had a left to right timeline type of screen long before trackers existed.
And the Elektron sequencer’s heritage imo is the TR sequencer which also existed long before trackers.
Paradox plays live with Octamed on an Amiga and programs patterns live. Basically jamming just like Egyptian Lover would on a TR-808.
That depends on what the individual has been conditioned into There’s no absolutism that accounts for everyone. I personally grew up on trackers and had serious troubles adapting to left-to-right sequencers in the beginning.
Of course, that’s why I caveated that with “anyone who sees music as running from left to right”. Which would be most people who grew up playing music and reading notation. Time goes left to right, pitch goes up and down. You can visualize shapes and movements and patterns on a score or a piano roll in a way that a tracker can’t.
And I say this as someone who is no lover of notation and never uses it but, it’s kind of objectively more logical. edit: at least from a western eurocentric pov. Just looked at the wiki of the history of notation and there are some systems that look a lot like tracker grids!