Techno and ST-mods
I’m wondering how much of the format of modern dance/techno music is derivitave of the format of soundtracker modules.
ST-mods had, by default, a 64 line frame, and they liked to reuse patterns – ‘songs’ were built up by tying these 64 line frames togeather. By definition, you only had 4 channels of transmit to work with, and generally you were best off sampling a entire drum loop. The format begged to have modern dance music made out of it..
February 20th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I know I’ve seen .mod files with more than 4 channels. They may have been out of spec, however.
November 5th, 2007 at 9:26 am
There were tons of different tracker formats, many of which had different # of channels. I really thought .mod was limited to 4, but its’ been awhile! It may have been mis-named .mod if it had more than 8, and some players would still play it even if misnamed because they are inspecting the file contents to determine it’s type, rather than the filename.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
I remember when OctaMED and PT and whatnot came out and how mind-blowingly cool it was to be able to listen to 8 tracks of ST mod at once. Since I was on the Amiga side of the fence, anything more than 8 tracks required a accelerator card, which I didn’t have. (If you’ll recall, ROTDS ran on a 4.77Mhz bridgeboard.. I think I was the slowest BBS in the history of slow BBSes for a while there – the PC couldn’t keep up with the modem! ;-))