Trying to get that classic Amiga (Protracker) sound?

Hey guys,

I was listening to some old Protracker tracks on Youtube and I was wondering how to get that Amiga sound. Renoise is obviously a different beast than Protracker and the technology is much better but I figured the sound is fairly simple to reproduce given the similar tracker interface. Now I’ve never personally used Protracker, but from what I can tell, there are 4 seperate tracks that can play samples with varying pitch, volume, and panning. How did Protracker users make their songs? Did they draw samples or record synths? What kinds of limitations gave the tracks that signature sound? What kinds of tricks did people use? I’d love to hear from some prior Protracker users.

Thanks in advance! :wink:

Yes only 4 tracks of 8bit mono samples and you are almost here… u should look for protracker fx commands list, I think all of them have been translated in renoise… U could go to the Mod Archive page, download some music and look how thez were made… renoise do not fully support MOD playing, but u can use milkytracker for exemple…

You can maybe also use the bit reducer on master and set it to 8 bit, 28 kHz (was the specs of the amiga sound chip paula). But Amiga also has an lowpass filter (stronger on Amiga 500, less on A1200/4000) for filtering out the ugly parts of the high frequency aliasing. You could also disable the lowpass filter.

EDIT:
For more exact info about the Amiga audio output / paula chip, read here (very interesting, was quite a good chip):
https://bel.fi/alankila/modguide/interpolate.txt

Maximum sample rate per voice (4 voices):28867 Hz, 8 Bit
Master filter 1 (fixed): low-pass 6 dB/oct RC filter at ~5 kHz
Master filter 2 (optional “power-led-filter”):low-pass 12 dB/oct Butterworth filter at ~3.2 kHz

Why no try protracker himself?

http://16-bits.org/pt.php

What kind of “signature” are you trying to reproduce? Yes, those trackers were pretty limited, in case of amiga the 4 channel limit came from the soundchip being able to mix 4 samples in hardware, and no more. I guess the cpu was too weak to really let software mixing be viable, let alone those mods were often used as background music for a game, where the cpu was busy doing other things.

The samples used were…samples, recorded, or whatever. Yes it popular to hand-draw samples even nowaday, but mostly for single cycle chipsound stuff, I want to see a guy able of drawing something like a simple decent bassdrum in the time it’d take to find and load some sampled bassdrum. K samples (the means to sample something yourself) were rare for many people back then, so hobbyists often used samples from other mods. Some tricks include mixing bass with bassdrum, interleaving drums in one channel thus cutting each other off, or mixing drum samples together and then using proper combinations. To get echo, you’d have to mirror a track in another, this became more popular when trackers with 8/16/32 channels became available. No envelopes, no multisample instruments. Volume fx via fade-in or fade-out, use arpeggios with proper tpl like mad. Use those vibrato and portamento fx. Shuffle the instruments between channels like mad, interleave instruments in channels like channels are very rare. Use samples with low quality, and very little of them spacewise (I dunno the space limitations of the amiga soundfiles, but very little space). Disable any interpolating resampler, filter clever…or find some software with good amiga chip resampling emulator, there were some, I think milkytracker has amiga500 resampler modes designed to sound close, other progs or playback libs probably sport such filters, too.

Study old mods to find out about that art yourself, try to reproduce that sound in another software.

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Why no try protracker himself?

http://16-bits.org/pt.php

Haha crazy :slight_smile:

Really, they never drew samples. Some elite few kids had synths to sample and the rest stole thier samples. Mostly, they programmed the shit out of their modules. They made music and were not wasting time being producers. Also, do really fucked up panning like an early 60s record but worse. Is only an opinion, i wouldn’t know.

My approach: hard pan every 2nd track to the extreme left or right. Actually, I believe the 4 channels on the Amiga was L-L-R-R ?

Then go into each sample and disable interpolation - because that is more authentic than just slamming a bit reducer on the master track. Unless you use plugins, in which case you are disqualified :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, don’t forget the ST disks. They were the closest things we had to a currency back then.

The whole set can be found here: https://archive.org/details/AmigaSoundtrackerSamplePacksst-xx

Really, they never drew samples. Some elite few kids had synths to sample and the rest stole thier samples.

And the not-so-elite-but-still-doing-ok had access to a sampler. Blew my mind when I got mine :wub:

Amiga sound chip was LRRL (or the opposite way round)

I’ve been playing with the amiga sound chip emulation in Plogue Chipsounds… Very authentic amiga sound (much better than it’s possible to achieve in the renoise sampler) and the results can also be a bit like Sonix as well as the tracker programs I used to use on the amiga (well, OctaMED). I believe you can import samples to Plogue as well but i’ve still to figure that out (might have dreamt that).

The biggest issue with Plogue is you have to use standard midi or Plugin controllers instead of the direct control you get over renoise instruments. Changes the way you have to work, but the results are definitely worth it imo

Amiga sound chip was LRRL (or the opposite way round)

Right, I couldn’t remember.

On a sidenote: even today, with a gazillion virtual tracks and whatnot, focus on having only four “major sonic elements” in a song at any time is a good thing, can be applied to many types of music.

Just think of four-track recording.

Or the classic rock band: Bass+guitar+drums+vocal.

Techno: Bass+mid+treble+hmm… factor X?

I don’t like Wagner for the same reason. He is excessive, has no qualms about adding a church organ on top of a symphonic orchestra.

Limitations can breed creativity for sure.

Hard panning 4 tracks, emulating sample rate and sample interpolation might get you closer, but playing back mods on a pc never sounds the same as on the Commodore imo. Maybe placebo effect, but I recently got an Amiga back in the studio and I think there’s some magic going on in the digital to analog converters :slight_smile: .

Salvaging old work I recently recorded the Amiga out’s straight to a cd-recorder;

http://soundcloud.com/plugexpert/richard-jonas-rico-gabber-1

I wonder about the difference in sound if I’d playback the mod on a pc, unfortunately no way to get the disk opened.

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