Whiteline: Transmission

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Whiteline: Transmission / whiteline CD Series - Transmission.iso / musix / tracker / protrack / doc / guide.txt next >

Wrap

Text File | 1995-06-07 | 24.7 KB | 599 lines

ProTracker ST The Music Program Written & designed by: Hans Arild Runde Karl Anders ▓ygard Programming: Karl Anders ▓ygard Manual: Hans Arild Runde --- 1. INTRODUCTION =============== 1.1 FOREWORD ------------ ProTracker ST is the result of close to two years of more or less hard work. It represents a peak in soundtracking on the Atari ST. Work on ProTracker ST started when the pretty well known ST News editorial staff, Stefan Posthuma and Richard Karsmakers, visited us back in the Christmas of '90. Torbjorn "HackBear" Ose had just been hacking happily away on the Cuddly Demos, and was proud to present me with a fully resourced version of the digisound demo contained in the Cuddly Demos. I had a quick look at this source, and was intrigued and astonished by the techniques used for replaying samples. Two days later I had a prototype of a soundtracker replay routine ready. As far as I can remember, this little debut in soundtracking was not particularily well received, and Stefan and Richard saw to that the not particularily pleasing noises terminated rather quickly. Still, I was not quite that easily stopped, so half a year later I could present the world with a 100% compatible, totally rewritten, more than twice as fast and a lot less noisy sound- tracker replay routine. This is where Hans-Arild enters. At this point he challenged me to write a small soundtracker around the replay routine. I rather regret accepting the challenge. Now, one and a half year later, the ProTracker ST is ready, better than even its Amiga cousin, ProTracker Amiga. 1.2 HISTORICAL FLASHBACK ------------------------ Trackers have been a favoured way of making music on the Amiga ever since Karsten Obarski introduced this novel approach to create soundtracks. Although there were more powerful programs around when the first Soundtracker appeared, the ease of use made the Soundtracker a winner amongst the many amateur musicians. However, trackers have changed a lot since then. Numerous demo groups have had their best programmers improving the capabilities under guidance of some of the best composers on the Amiga. ProTracker 2.0 represents a peak in the development, with more effects at the hands of the composer, more tools to ease his work, for instance built-in sampling software and MIDI-support, and flexibility to meet _your_ requirements. The trackers previously released on the ST have been of varying quality, but all are inferior to the Amiga ProTracker. Till now. The ProTracker ST for the Atari ST and STE is based on the Amiga ProTracker's philosophy. It supports almost every feature of its predecessors, and in some areas it goes even further, notably better editing, offering more possibilities, easy recording and an easier and more powerful sample editor. It also makes full use of the STE's stereo sound introducing bass and treble control. Both on the ST and STE, the digitized sound is of a quality superior to anything else, yet leaves far more time for other tasks to run simultaneously. Furthermore, replay routines comes together with the ProTracker ST, making it easy to implement soundtracks in demos and games. 1.3 WHAT IS A TRACKER? ---------------------- To get the computer to sound like real instruments, digitized sounds are used, i.e. samples. A sample is a sequence of bytes which describes the waveform of the sound. Each byte represents one point on the waveform. Depending on the wave, it will sound like a piano, a guitar or even a cow bell or a drum. If you think this sounds difficult, don't despair. It's fully possible to make wonderful music without knowing anything about digitized sound. The duration of the sound depends on the length of the sequence and the pitch of the note. High pitches give short notes, and low pitches give long notes. Usually, the bytes are run through only once when a note is played, but the sample can be repeated partially or wholly to create longer notes. The ProTracker ST allows you to use a maximum of 31 different instruments/samples in a song, memory permitting. A song consists of up to 127 positions, each referring to a sequence of notes, called a pattern. The same pattern can be used several times in the position table, which contains the informa- tion about what pattern should be played at what position. Each pattern has four tracks, which means that the tracker can play four notes simultaneously. The patterns can be from 1 to 64 steps long, usually depending on the time signature of the song. It is the patterns that actually contain the music. When the song is played, it starts at position 0 and goes through the table until the last position (as defined by the length value) has been reached. It will then usually restart at position 0, but this can be changed to another position, or to no restart at all. 1.4 HOW TO USE THIS MANUAL -------------------------- Chapter one and two are introductory, whereas detailed informa- tion about all the features is primarily found in chapter three. There are also four appendices. Appendix A "Glossary of terms" explains some frequently used terms in this manual, both musical and other. Moreover, there is an index at the back which should make it easier to find what you're looking for. Leafing through the table of contents may also be of help. The best way to learn how to use ProTracker ST is to read through the manual once, and thereafter experiment with this manual close at hand. 2. GETTING STARTED ================== 2.1 THE PACKAGE --------------- The package should contain: The main disk, with the trackers and replay programs. One disk with music examples. Two disks with instruments ('SAMPLE01' and 'SAMPLE02') The manual you're hopefully reading now. First of all you should make a backup of the disks. Do this as outlined in your ST's Owner's Manual. Later, you should always use the backup disks. Store the original ones in a safe place. If you have a harddisk, you can just copy the files into a suitable directory. 2.2 STARTING THE PROGRAM ------------------------ To start the program, double-click on either PT_ST.PRG or PT_STE.PRG, depending on which machine you're using. The PT_ST.PRG will run on any ST, but does not take advantage of the better sound capabilities of the STE. Running PT_STE.PRG on an ST makes no sense, and you will be informed of this upon trying to do so. 2.3 YOUR FIRST SESSION ---------------------- In this first session of tracking, we will begin from the very beginning. So, if you for some reason are rather familiar with trackers, you could skip chapter 2 and only pay attention to chapter 3. However, we will recommend even experienced tracker musicians to read briefly through chapter 2 to be sure not to miss anything. The aim of this chapter is to give you a glimpse into some of the huge capabilities that this music tool offers. You will learn how to load a soundtrack from disk, how you easily make small changes to a song, how you play the music and how you make use of other basic but necessary features and commands. You will need an estimated 30 to 60 minutes for these exercises, depending on how familiar you are with trackers. The initial screen will later be referred to as the Main screen. To remove the info window telling you who wrote this program, just press the left mouse button anywhere on the screen. To get back the info window, click the INF button positioned a bit to the right in the middle of the screen. However, learning the authors' names and staring at the ProTracker ST logo isn't very funny in the long run, so go on! We won't spend much time explaining everything thoroughly at this point. Just follow the instructions carefully, and you'll manage perfectly. The first thing you should do, is to find the DISK button and click it. The DISK menu pops up at the top of the screen. Insert the disk with music examples and click the LOAD MODULE button. When the file selector appears, choose the file "TESTSONG.MOD" and click OK. MODULES/SOUNDTRACKS You've now loaded a Module. A module is a disk file that contains all necessary data to make it possible for your computer to play the song. That means that the file both holds the sample data (the digitized instruments) and the song data (the notes and information about what samples the song uses). To avoid misunderstandings, we have chosen to distinguish between these data stored on disk, and the same data stored in the computer's memory. When stored in memory, we refer to the data as a Soundtrack. It's actually possible for the ProTracker ST to keep several soundtracks in memory simultaneously, making it easy to copy song data from one soundtrack to another. However, we will come back to this in chapter 3. To leave the disk menu, click the EXIT button, or just press the Escape key. SONGNAME If you've done everything right, the Songname should have changed to "TEST SONG UNEDITED". As you've probably observed already, the songname is longer than the file name. Actually, the songname is independent of the file name and vice versa. The songname can be up to 19 characters long, whilst the file name has its normal limitations. To edit the songname, just click it and write whatever you like. Press Return when you're satisfied. POSITION TABLE In the upper left of the main screen, you find the position table. Here you decide in what order the patterns should be played. You also define the length of the song and where to restart when the patterns have been played through once. Don't change any of these values before you are told to! SAMPLE INFO TABLE The sample info table is positioned under the position table. Right now, the table contains the VOLUME, LENGTH, REPSTRT, REPLEN and FINETUNE values of sample 1. Don't worry if you can't spot the finetune value. Clicking the VOLUME box will exchange the VOLUME box with the FINETUNE box. To retrieve the VOLUME box, click the FINETUNE box. When sample 1 is displayed, we refer to sample 1 as the current sample. The name of the current sample is positioned under the songname. To change the current sample, click the up and down arrows to the right of the sample number. You could also click on the sample number and reenter/edit it. However, the easiest way of changing sample, is to use the key pad. The upper row refers to sample 1-4, the second from the top to sample 5-8 and so on. ["(" is sample 1, ")" is sample 2, etc. ] You shouldn't change any of the values in the sample info table yet. OSCILLOSCOPE To the right of the sample info table, you see an oscilloscope. The oscilloscope actually shows the waveforms of the samples being played. Nothing's being played right now, and the scope doesn't show any waveform. PATTERN In the bottom of the screen, Pattern 00 is displayed. (That is, if you haven't changed anything). This means that pattern 00 is the current pattern. The pattern is divided into four main columns. Each column is referred to as a Channel or a Track (the term "track" will probably be used more frequently than "channel"). The pattern consists of 64 lines called Steps, and the small column to the left shows the step number of each line. It's possible to choose to play only a certain amount of the steps in each pattern. This test song for instance, uses only 48 of the 64 steps available. To move the cursor around in the pattern, you use the cursor keys. You can also move the cursor with the mouse by clicking on the desired point in the pattern. Go ahead, experiment! Note that the cursor always will be positioned on the edit line in the middle of the pattern window. To change pattern, click on the pattern number box and enter another number. An easier way of changing patterns, is to press the left or right cursor key while holding down the Shift key. BUTTONS Above the oscilloscope, there are four columns, each with four buttons. At this point, we will only pay attention to the PLAY, PATTERN, EDIT and STOP buttons in the first column, and to the SLST and DISK buttons in the third row. Pressing the SLST button will pop up the Sample list. The sample list is a list containing all your samples. You'll learn how to update this list later. You already know what action the DISK button causes, and we won't tell you more about the DISK menu in this chapter anyway. PLAYING There are two modes of playing music. Clicking the PLAY button will start playing the song from the current position in the position table. Clicking the PATTERN button will play only the current pattern. The program will always start from the top of each pattern when using PLAY or PATTERN. It's actually possible to play a pattern from e.g. step 16, and you'll get to learn that later. Now, you should click the PLAY button. When you've heard through the two patterns currently being the song, click the STOP button. It should be obvious that the test song is far from finished. Therefore, it will be your job to complete it under guidance by this manual. SAMPLE LIST The song lacked a bass line. In other terms, we need a bass. We are going to load the bass into sample 3. To do that, you have to select sample 3. Then you should click the SLST button. Use the cursor keys to move up and down in the sample list. Search the list until you find the sample called "BASS11.SPL" and click it. Now, a requester will pop up, asking you whether you're sure you want to load the sample or not. Click the YES button or press the "Y" key to confirm your choice. Then you are told to insert disk SAMPLE02. Well, just do it! When loading a new instrument into sample 3, all previous sample 3 data in memory will be lost. If you for some reason didn't load the right sample, repeat the above procedure until "BASS11.SPL" is loaded into sample 3. THE KEYBOARD We will use the second track for the bass line. When you've moved the cursor to track two, try to press e.g. the Q, W, E, R and T keys. If you have done everything right, you should hear some notes being played. You see, the keyboard is organized like the keys on a synth. Actually, there are two rows of note keys. Upper note keys: 2 3 5 6 7 9 0 = Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ] Corresponding notes: C# D# F# G# A# C# D# F# C D E F G A B C D E F G Lower note keys: S D G H J L ; Z X C V B N M , . / The ProTracker ST has got three octaves. When the OCTS switch is in L(ower) mode, you can play the notes from C-1 to G-3 on the keyboard. When the switch is in U(pper) mode, you can play the notes from C-2 to B-3. To toggle between Lower and Upper mode, click on OCTS or press the Help key for Lower mode and the Undo key for upper mode. EDITING Make sure that the cursor is placed in the second track in pattern 00. Click the EDIT button. By now, the pointer should have turned blue. This is to indicate that you're in edit mode. If you now try to play some more notes, the notes will be written into track two in the pattern. Please note that it's possible to edit even when playing a song or a pattern. To prevent destroying data when playing the music, always remember to turn off the edit mode if you don't intend to edit during play. The information in the track/pattern is given as follows: 16 F-2 13 C35 / \_/ |/ \_/ / / | \ Step Note Sample Effect command The F-2 is the note being played at step 16. $13 (19 decimal) is the sample number, and the three last digits represent the effect command. In this case, it sets the volume to $35 (53 decimal). C is the command, $35 is the value. All values in the pattern are hexadecimal, except the step number. Usually, only the note and the sample part of the information will be stored automatically. Additional information is found as an effect command and has to be written separately. The effect commands is one of the strengths of ProTracker ST. You may change the volume of a sample during play, you can slide the pitch of a note (portamento), vibratos and arpeggios (chords) are easily produced, and altering the speed of the song is no big deal. Other useful options are also available. Each time you enter a note, the cursor will move one step down. If you for some reason want to correct a note, place the cursor on the desired note and reenter it. To delete the note without reentering it, just press the Backspace key. SOLOING A CHANNEL/TRACK You have probably noticed that the other tracks are also being played when you play notes in track two. If this annoys you, hold down Ctrl and press '-' on the keypad. This will "solo" track two. That means that the other tracks are muted (turned off). To turn all channels/tracks on, hold down Shift and press '0' on the keypad. ENTERING NOTES If you feel ready to start entering the bass line, go to the top of the pattern and press the F1 key. This will clear the whole track. Choose the lower octaves. Make sure that you're in edit mode. Start with a F-1 at step 0 (press 'V' for the F-1). Step 0 should look like this: F-1 3000. Place another F-1 at step 4, before you enter a F-2 at step 6 (press 'R' for the F-2). Continue entering notes in the track as outlined below: Step Note Step Note Step Note ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- 0 F-1 18 F-2 36 A-1 4 F-1 22 G-1 40 A-1 6 F-2 24 A-1 42 A-2 10 F-1 28 A-1 44 G-1 12 F-1 30 A-2 46 A-1 16 F-1 34 A-1 When you have (hopefully successfully) reproduced the track, it's time to listen to pattern 00. Click the PATTERN button. If it sounds very fishy, you've probably done a mistake. Make sure that you've done everything as instructed and correct possible mistakes. If you still think it sounds dreadful, you might have too big expectations to a TEST song! COPYING A TRACK When you're tired of listening to pattern 00, click STOP and go to pattern 01. (Click on the pattern number box, and enter 01.) Observe that the pattern both lacks a bass line and drums (channel four is empty). Before editing the bass line like in pattern 00, we're going to copy the drums from pattern 00 to pattern 01. To do that, return to pattern 00, move the cursor to channel four and press F2. This will copy the track into the paste buffer. Go to channel four in pattern 01 and press F3 to paste the drums into the track. Now both patterns have drums, without you having to write anything in pattern 01! Now, you should write a bass line like in pattern 00, using the notes in the table below: Step Note Step Note Step Note ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- 0 A#1 18 A#2 34 B-1 4 A#1 20 A-1 36 B-1 6 A#2 22 A#1 40 B-1 10 A#1 24 B-1 42 B-2 12 A#1 28 B-1 46 B-1 16 A#1 30 B-2 VOLUME If you feel like it, click the PLAY button to hear the song this far. Remember to turn all channels back on, otherwise the song will not sound very impressive. The volume of the melody voice (sample 5, PANMALL.SPL) is perhaps a bit low, especially compared to the bass. Try setting it to 61 (hexadecimal $3D). (Select sample 5 and change the volume value in the sample info table.) Do also change the volume of the bass from 64 (hex $40) to 48 (hex $30). It should sound better after you've done these changes. LENGTH For your convenience, we've written some more patterns of music data for you. Alter the LENGTH of the song. Now, it should be set to eight. Unfortunately, we forgot to make drum tracks in patterns 02 to 07. Copy the old drum track from pattern 00 or 01 to track four in patterns 02 to 07. When you've done this properly, go to position 0 in the position table. To do this, use the up and down arrows to the right of the position number. You can also click on the number and reenter it. Click PLAY to listen to the song. SPEED It's getting better! Nevertheless, there are still a few things left to improve. First of all you should try to speed up the song a bit. Move the cursor to track one in pattern 00 and change the F06 effect command to F05. Play the pattern. The new tempo seems to suit the song far better. DRUM FILL-IN Moreover, you should make a small drum 'fill in' (a small variation at the end of the pattern) in patterns 03 and 07. Go to track four in pattern 03. Do the following changes: Step Note Sample ---- ---- ------ 42 B-2 7 44 G-3 8 46 G-3 8 Copy the edited track to track four in pattern 07, and listen to the changes. EDITING POSITION TABLE Actually, you're almost finished with your first session. We hope you've enjoyed it, and you've probably learned a lot. But before we look upon the song as finished, you should learn a bit about the position table. Set LENGTH to 20 (hex $14) and RESTART to 8. As you might already have guessed, we've prewritten some more patterns. Now, you should place them in the position table. You do this by selecting the desired position and entering the corresponding pattern value. The list below contains the necessary values. Position Pattern value Position Pattern value -------- ------------- -------- ------------- 8 0 14 10 9 1 15 11 10 2 16 12 11 3 17 13 12 8 18 14 13 9 19 15 FINISHED? Then you should lean back and enjoy your first piece of music written with the ProTracker ST! If you're not sure whether you got everything right or not, you should load the "TEST2.MOD" module from the music example disk. That module contains a finished version of the test song. But remember to save your own edited module first. To do that, just go to to the DISK menu and click the SAVE MODULE button. Confirm your choice, and insert a formatted disk in your disk drive. Pick a suitable file name, and save the soundtrack to disk. Honestly, the test song isn't at all any masterpiece of sound tracking. Therefore, to avoid you getting an incorrect first impression of the ProTracker ST's music capabilities, you should load and play the "KLISJE.MOD" module which also is to be found on the music example disk. This superb soundtrack was originally written on the Amiga by the very talented Norwegian musician Tor Gausen. All in all, we have included four songs by famous Amiga musicians. These are: Klisje_paa_klisje (KLISJE.MOD) by Tor Gausen (Walkman of CRB) Madness2-PartB (MADNESSB.MOD) by Matthew Simmons (4-MAT of Anarchy) So what... (SO_WHAT.MOD) by Hans Arild Runde (Gladiator of CRB) A lot can be learned by looking at the techniques used in these modules. And who knows, with the ProTracker ST in your possession, you might reach their level in some weeks or months. Keep practising!