Hello! I worked for the magazine @Caustic’s link comes from! (Fantastic year of my life. I really need to get back into writing…)
Anyway, there’s trackers available on the Spectrum as well. Soundtracker has a learning curve like a brick wall; loads of demo scene guys were incredible with it, meanwhile the rest of us struggled to get anything even vaguely tuneful out of it.
I used to mess around with a homebrew app on PSP called Rhythm8 on the way to college.
but i never did get it working on the PS Vita, even though it can run PSP games and homebrew using Adrenaline.vpk (I guess its a file structure thing)
The PSP was always a great little device to carry about (well if it was modded). it can run all kinds of emulators… it can even struggle along with a few N64 games though it is glitchy as all hell haha XD
i liked using LSDJ.gb on the Vita using a GB emulator.
i wonder if there’s a way to make the PSP ‘Synthable’ =)
There are legends that some of the earliest grime and dubstep was produced using a Playstation 1 game called ‘Music 2000’, which was like Mario paint on steroids. Benga and Skream both used it, and it was used to make this track:
Indeed - this was 386 DOS machine with whatever the most budget Soundblaster there was at the time. The processor ran at blistering 8Mhz, unless you pushed the turbo button for a blazing 16!
Most studios in the 80’s with an Atari ST ran Steinberg pro 12 which required a dongle. If you were cheaper you used composer.
ST magazine often featured trackers but I’m afraid none stand out in my memory.
As for music, if you prefer piano roll/tracker you can rotate a score 90°
As someone who also prefers piano rolls, the distinctions which turn me off to it are more complex than this. I can read music perfectly fine, but it’s just easier to read for me. Note duration, as well as intervals are just more intuitive, and require less conversion.
Traditional note notation has it’s place of course.
It was an attempt at humour but your point is well made. I used piano roll a great deal in the early days of midi. (Mostly on the Atari ST). I have also traced my finger over a score slowly and tapped out rhythm, piano roll style as I’m very dyslexic and a page of dots can intimate and confuse.
A famous musician ( blues, I forget who) was asked how to create music if you don’t read music. He pointed at a tape machine and asked “can you hum?”
The advantage of music notation is that it is a highly developed shorthand for capturing music. Everything from tempo, key, note length and volume can be noted down in a single line.
I used to play evenings at a dance studio and discovered that classical ballet has a similar long established notation to record choreography.
In Venice there are is an ancient series of notation for glass making. My grandfather was a textile designer and his notebooks are full of shorthand notes about weft, warp, tension, colour bands and tension.
To sum up. Nobody nowadays NEEDS to learn to read music but it’s a very useful tool if you want to work with other musicians. Many classicly trained musicians I’ve worked with are poor at improv by ear so I’ve had to scribble some dots.
Enough waffle from me. Again, happy to field any music theory or notation queries from the forum.
