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Comment by pierrec | Hacker News Reader

Trackers are underrated. In a way, I'm a bit sad that most of the time I see them mentioned, it seems to be in a historical context.

Modern production tools have mostly settled on the combination of pianoroll, automation curves, and visual placement of samples on the project timeline. That's great for some types of music, but becomes really awkward in other cases. As a basic example, making a breakbeat sequence makes pretty much no sense with the above interface, but is perfectly represented by the "series of commands" approach of a tracker. I frequently go back to Buzz for that kind of thing (and was happy to see it mentioned in the video).

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I find Buzz a joy to use as a programmable / repeatable mixer, too. I love the tracker's ability to record knob/slider positions and play it back faithfully. Quantized recordings of parameters just make so much sense to me.

I think about my Buzz files as the "source code" that will eventually be mixed-down to PCM audio. I can always go back to the "source" if I want to make modifications and re-render. I think of it a little like non-destructive editing layers in a bitmap editor, or like editing graphics in a vector format and rendering-down to raster for presentation.

What I missed in buzz was a way to apply tracker commands (shift, reverse, transpose and so on) to patterns, because I always toyed with the synths, hardly ever using samples at all (where tracker commands are traditionally applied to).

I eventually dropped out of my music dabbling phase endlessly failing at building a parser/interpreter/editor for a text-based notation syntax (as an alternative to the spreadsheet of trackers) that would do away with the spreadsheed format of trackers and add multiple levels of "notation controlling notation" for a deliberately quirky macro language (all variables were stacks and those stacks eventually degenerate into ringbuffers when pushed more than popped). It would have existed on peer ctrl level (or as a midi source if pivoted to standalone) which I believe would have been quite unique, because even CucK seems to be more focused on synthesis than on notation.

> add multiple levels of "notation controlling notation" for a deliberately quirky macro language

Would something like Supercollider fit the deal there?

Quite possible that all or at least most of those are in there somewhere as a tiny little feature subset, I've never used it.

But at least example screenshots seem to be quite eager to dive down to the synthesis level. I'm sure that you could use it to just output midi events but the same could be said about e.g. Python or Java or Rust and I wouldn't call those notation syntax either. It would have been an attempt to retain as much of established tracker ergonomics as possible while abandoning the spreadsheet-lines-as-time metaphor.

I got myself a Polyend tracker last year, and love it (https://polyend.com/tracker/). Great for the above reasons as a tracker, but also great to get away from the computer.

If your in the niche though where a tracker makes sense, they're a god send.

I actually really wanted to use anything but a tracker, specifically Ableton, and kept trying to force myself to like it, even going so far as buying the full version of Ableton (the day before I got made redundant as well, not my finest purchase). The main reason is that I prefer synthesis to samples, though I think both the VST market and the sample market are a bit broken at the moment (VST's have become like node modules, and its getting harder to find samples of individual instrument notes rather than just loops).

That all being said, I kept coming back to Renoise as a DAW that just made sense in a way the piano roll never did.

Not taking anything away from trackers but DAWs are a lot easier to grok for the average musician.

Take your breakbeat example, most DAWs also have a drum machine style layout which allows you to arrange samples in a more intuitive way than with a piano roll while still offering a visual layout that means something to the average musician.

In fact ironically both the piano roll and drum machine layouts are older than trackers. But their birth is from hardware instruments rather than software. Thus really emphasising how familiar they are to your average musician.

The piano roll is not really "intuitive to the average musician", though. Most musicians would rather use ordinary sheet music notation, which was also supported in some trackers (like OctaMED Pro).

While that's true for some, I think you're overestimating the number of musicians that can read sheet music or underestimating the number of genres out there made up of self-taught musicians.

Quite frankly, if the piano roll was really that counter-intuitive as you make out, then it wouldn't be the norm in DAWs because the creative folk would naturally prefer to use Trackers or sheet music.

I remember using Buzz back when I was in university around the turn of the century. Lots of great memories with that one.

I came across an excellent modern alternative when my kids started getting into electronic music. It’s called SunVox [0]. Still under active development and runs on just about anything! Lots of fun!

[0] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

Same here. I wish I still had some of the tracks I wrote in Buzz 20 years ago. I had a way better creative ear for music back then. I tried SunVox but I can't quite get the same inspiration that I had.

I'm using Elektron instruments these days. They're very similar to trackers, but swap the column view for fixed, hardware step and track select buttons. Really tactile, very fast and fun.

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