Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 5: Herb Song

It's fifth track already! I continue to remaster/remix the Flackworks EP and this is the opening track, Herb Song. The delayed pad hit sound and family show melodies are back! The beat is quite gross and a little over distorted, but I let it be like it was, because of the contrast to otherwise soft and happy-happy-joy-joy atmosphere.

I started this project by using XMPlay + FL Studio combo and I have find it to be good. One problem is the lack of power in my few years old laptop when processing almost 20 stereo tracks same time. I need more memory and faster hard drive! Another problem is that XMPlay does not replay all my modules 100% correctly. Usually it is a minor thing, but sometimes the amount of misplaying is so overwhelming, that e.g. We Slay You With Our Orders, which uses a lot of Impulse Tracker's tricks, filters and bugs, does not work (yes, your read right: bugs - trackers used to have many programming errors and many musicians put to use those bugs to create interesting sounds).

I think I will try to run Impulse Tracker in Dosbox or something and exporting the song there. Someday when I have too much time.

Back to today's track: You can download it from here (or the original module from here).

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 4: Deaf & Blind

The fourth recycled track is Deaf & Blind from the same album as the previous song in RRR series: Flackworks EP. This is a sibling to my maybe most known track Bubblemaster 19100 (download mp3 version from here). A slower and less chaotic, but the same modulated drum sounds and NES-esque leads are present. I like the tremolos, vibratos and arpeggios heavily used on those lead sounds.

You can download the new version from here and the original Impulse Tracker module from here.

Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster Part 1: Melonapplet Beautiful / Bottleneckmelon

When I started making music over a decade ago, I used so called trackers. For those unfamiliar with concept, trackers are a piece of software, which can be thought as a combined sampler and sequencer. Effects were limited to most basic ones like bending the pitch. I started with Scream Tracker 3, followed by FastTracker 2 and then Impulse Tracker. I stopped using trackers as my main tool somewhere in year 2001. A big pile of songs from that era is lost forever or buried in various places in Internet and BBS boxes.

Some of my tracker songs are available in scene.org. Some of them are a little embarassing, some of them are quite good even today. If you want to listen to them, I recommend to try a player like XMPlay to play those songs, because they are not MP3s but native tracker project files (also known as modules)!

I've been thinking of going through these songs, exporting the best songs and remastering/remixing them. I call this project "Resurrect, Recycle and Remaster". As a proof of concept I exported tonight a melodic IDM song with two names: Melonapplet Beautiful / Bottleneckmelon. It is from 2000 and participated in Assembly music competition. I used XMPlay to export each instrument separately to a wav file, imported each track to FL Studio, added some reverb and compression and exported a MP3 file.

It was easy and fun! I will continue tomorrow with some other tracks.

You can download the song from here and the original module from here.