File | Tracker | Instrument Editor | Sample Editor | Module Info
Click on "File". If you have any Module files (songs made with Soundtracker) handy, you can click into their directory and open one by clicking on its name. You can find free modules at www.modarchive.org, for instance. Anything ending in .mod or .xm will open in Soundtracker. See the chapter "Editing" below for instructions on modifying them. You can play the module by clicking on the gree arrow button or by pressing the right Ctrl key on your keyboard. The red square or the Space key will stop playback.
But let's assume you want to start from scratch. First, we need some sounds to use as instruments. Click on Load Sample on the left. Any .wav file on your computer will work here. I used the Gnome environment's bleep, click and signal sounds for my first experiments. Just type
locate .wavon a command prompt and you'll find plenty of sounds that will do for now. Later on, we'll record and edit our own sounds in the "The Sample Editor" chapter below.
Just above the tab line, there is a box labeled "Instr". Once you've clicked on a sound file, you'll see its name in the "Instr" and "Sample" boxes. Shift the number on the "Instr" box before you load the next sound file, so we'll have several instruments to play with. Load a handful of funny sounds. You can check how they sound by tapping at the character keys on your keyboard. Change the "Octave" to 3 and tap the "," key to hear the sound unaltered. Soundtracker will truncate stereo wavs into mono. Just choose a channel or mix them.
1 2 3 4 <- Channels
--- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 |
--- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 |
--- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 |
Click on the "Editing" box above the tab line or tap on the Space button to
switch into editing mode. Press a character key, like "m" to enter your first
note:
H-3 01 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 |
Press "Play Song" or right Ctrl to play it. The 'H' is your note, '3' is the octave, '01' is the instrument used.
The next two parts are for volume and effects. Move your arrow key to the volume column. 10 is silent and 50 is maximum volume:
H-3 01 20 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 | --- 00 00 000 |Now it will be much quieter.
Use the arrow keys and the tabulator key to move around between lines and channels and add more sounds. Whee, (dis)harmony!
Add more channels in the "Number of Channels" box to get even more (dis)harmony.
Speed of playback is controlled with the "Tempo" and "BPM" boxes. "Tempo" is large scale and "BPM" for finer control. (I often use "Tempo" 1 and "BPM" 190 or 200, but then I'm a hyperactive maniac.)
Overall volume of playback is controlled by a slider in the upper right corner, the inner one that says "Global Amplification" when you leave your mouse pointer on it.
Once you're happy with that pattern, we can move on to the next. A pattern has a maximum length of 256 lines, so don't try to build a single pattern song. It would be a mess to navigate in.
The upper left corner shows the track list (playlist), which so far only has one track with your one pattern in it.
Click on "Add + Cpy" or "Add Free" in the upper left corner to add a new track (playlist entry) with a new pattern. With "Add + Cpy" you get a copy of your previous pattern that you can modify, while "Add Free" lets you start from scratch. If you want to repeat your first pattern a few times, you can just increment the "Len" box (Length) underneath the pattern list box (right above the "Editing" box). Once you have several patterns, you can switch their order by changing the pattern number of the current track (playlist entry).
|--------Track number | |-----Pattern number | | 000 000 001 001 002 1 <----current track 2 and current pattern 1 003 002 004 002Just play around with it. You'll get the hang of it.
Most commands act on selected regions of the file. Use your mouse buttons to select the parts you want to work on. The left button marks the start of the selection and the right the end. You can also just drag the mouse across the part you want.
The "Set as loop" button makes the sound loop through your selection as soon as it reaches that part.
You can record your own samples by clicking on the "Monitor" button. Click "Start sampling" to record and "OK" to stop recording. Mark the useless parts and Cut or Remove them. If it's too quiet, mark the whole thing with the "All" button and click on "Volume Ramp". Raise (or lower) the percentages in the "Left [%]" and "Right [%]" boxes and click on "Execute". "Normalize" will cut off volumes at the upper limits and thus lessen distortion.
Here you can add effects to your sounds and save them as instrument files for use in other modules. Click on the "Volume envelope" box to control how the volume of the sound develops along its length. Add volume points with your mouse into the chart and move them to desired levels.
The "Panning envelope" does the same for the location of your sound between left and right speaker (speaking of which: Buy good headphones/speakers or your basses will sound gross on other folks' hifi equipment. El cheapo headphones just don't do bass, so you get tempted to turn low sounds way up in your modules to hear them at all. BRRRRRRRap BRRRRRRRRap BRRRRRRRRRRRRRap will be all you'll hear of your song on good speakers.). Choose "Loop" and "Start"/"End" points to make your sound go back and forth according to those points. Go psychedelic, mon!
You can also assign several sound files to different note ranges of a single instrument, which can be good, as your wav file goes mighty weird a few octaves above/below normal. I like that weirdness, so I don't know how this part works.
That's about it. Save your module with "Save Module" in the "File" tab or with "Save as" in the "File" menu Then you can turn your module into a wav file with "Render WAV" in the in the "File" tab or with "Save Module as WAV" in the "File" menu. Play back the module first and adjust the "Global Amplification" slider so that it only occasionally touches red to avoid distortion - unless you're Merzbows kid brother, of course. Now it's ready for burning onto CD or rendering into ogg files for distribution on the net.