Making a Simple Music Sequencer Using CSV Spreadsheets | Hacker News Reader

Making a Simple Music Sequencer Using CSV Spreadsheets

pointersgonewild.com

68 pointsmpweiher17 comments

If anyone is particularly attuned with making music in DAWs and has never experienced vertically scrolling trackers, I highly recommend checking out any of the Fast Tracker/Pro Tracker derivatives that have popped up for modern hardware, namely Milkytracker or OpenMPT, or Renoise for a more modern DAW-like tracker.

Renoise is amazing. As someone who came from the Impulse Tracker / Scream Tracker 3 days, it blows my mind that we now have trackers with full support for VST effects (including Waves plugins) and VSTi instruments. It's the kind of stuff I dreamed about as a kid in the late 90s.

If you've ever heard music by Celldweller, Blue Stahli or Venetian Snares, they've all used Renoise for some of their music.

I'd like to add Sunvox[0]. It has a tracker for sequencing but has a modular synthesizer, not limited to samples (unlike old trackers) nor a full fledged DAW (unlike Renoise). Also, free (as in beer) and runs in Android/iOS.

[0] http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

+1 for milkytracker.

I'm too young to have experienced the MOD scene firsthand, but I discovered it while investigating the demoscene. Some of the music I found was just spectacular, both because of the technical limitations of the time AND because it was really good per se.

Also, you can fit a huge library (tens of thousands of songs) in a gigabyte. Awesome.

I spent hours upon hours of watching trackers play music. I was lucky to discover 600+ MOD and XM files on one of those 'freeware game' CD roms. It was used as 'menu music' for the game browser. The true gold was the music, not the freeware!

Redux is a the VST version of Renoise and its really good. They don't really update it as much as they should but you just reminded me to start using it again.

As a hobby I have been working on an online tracker, you can fin dit here: https://www.music-tracker-online.com/tracker.html?song=XfK&p...

Someone has done a 1:1 (pretty much) clone of FT2 for modern operating systems, such nostalgia! https://16-bits.org/ft2.php

See also "Using LibreOffice as a Tracker/Sequencer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfaDp2ouiKs

If this is fun for you, try live coding https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding

Are there some good tutorials/walktrhoughs on how to build a synthesizer?

There are some good resources available:

http://www.softsynth.com/links/programming.php

http://sonicbloom.net/en/63-in-depth-synthesis-tutorials-by-...

http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/acoustics_info/sound_synt...

It's actually fairly easy to program a virtual analog synth.

There are also packages like Sonic Pi and supercollider which are designed to enable music live coding.

You should also check out puredata. It allows you to code both sequencers and syhths visually instead of writing code. You can then embed it in your program.

thanks!

There is an excellent series of articles called "Synth Secrets" by Sound on Sound: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/synthesis/synth-secr...

http://www.martin-finke.de/blog/tags/making_audio_plugins.ht...

Check out csounds.com , csound runs everywhere and can do forms of synthesis that no hardware synth can match

This is pretty great, it's like the old tracker style sequencer!

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