As we were having our long friday coffee break at work, the discussion turned into music, which really is not that uncommon. Only this time we talked about tracker / mod music (nerds as we are), among other things, which lead me to do some googling. And what did I find? A song created by me in 1996!
To those of you who don’t know about tracking, it’s a form of computer music which was quite common especially in the amiga times and nineties. It is usually tightly coupled with demoscene. I never tracked with amiga, but I used PC and a great software called Scream Tracker (ok, I used Fast Tracker too, but all my releases were with Scream Tracker). Oh, those were good times 
Anyway, tracker or mod-music is composed using samples and originally only four channels (later, when I did it, it was something like 16 or more depending on your cpu). Using samples you created patterns, which put together, made the song.
You can find my song and others from The Mod Archive (where you can play it online) or from Come As You are for example. It seems that even Winamp can play mods nowadays. The song is called Breed (S3M) and it’s a Nirvana cover. Listening to it now, over ten years later, it sounds kind of crappy but I have to say I’m very delighted for finding out, that something I created as a teenager, has survived this long. Damn, maybe I should continue with music, my next song could be Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle…
Breed wasn’t the only song I did (it was the only cover though), but it looks like the rest are lost in time (they probably never were on the web, back in the days we used mostly phone-based BBS systems). It’s a shame I didn’t keep copies. It would’ve been fun to listen to them now (or embarrassing at least).
There were some documentation attached to the S3M file, which among other things, listed my equipment. I still have the same Ibanez guitar (well, it’s broken but it hangs on my wall) and the same guitar amp (Marshall Valvestate) I used to record the riffs. Hmm.. it’s about time for a new amp!
If you want to listen to some great mod music, try googling or searching the mod archive for songs by Purple Motion and Skaven. They were from the demoscene group Future Crew, and were one of my favorites. There were other great artists too, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten their names. Long live tracker music!
EDIT: I actually found another song by me, though this wasn’t on internet: The Outsider. That one is 100% original and includes some vocal samples from Blur and Scorpions. The first part is pretty boring but if you forward to 2:00 there’s some nice acoustic outro, which actually sound pretty good. Check it out.
