Sample Trackers: The often overlooked history of a computer music tool.

When I was 16 years old I saved up to buy my first drum machine. It was a Roland TR-626 which was a big deal back then. (1986-7) I had a job as a cashier at a grocery store that I did after school and some on the weekends. The 626 was pretty easy to program and after a while I bought a memory card for it that could save a whole set of songs. This combined with a Peavey KB100 amp became the drummer for my first band. It was limited but amazing for the time.

After a few years I eventually moved on to bands that had a real drummer and my interest in drum machines faded for a while. Around 1993 I was still in bands with drummers but my interest in music technology and computers came back into play. I looked at drum machines again but my long time friend John Anderson introduced me to something that was far more superior. A computer sound program called a "Sample Tracker" Computers where still very limited at the time as far as multimedia was concerned but the Commodore Amiga had a sound chip in it that could handle four 8-bit samples at once. This was unique at the time and most people that used PC's or Mac's still used external midi gear to write most electronic music.

Octamed 5 was the first Sample tracker I used.

The interface of a sample tracker was very daunting to the new user. It had a very minimal graphic interface that was made up of mostly numbers and symbols. The concept was not that far off from a drum machine though. Instead of a left to right concept it had a top to bottom interface. It had more in common with an old time player piano but, instead of notches on a paper roll triggering piano notes it was numbers on a screen triggering sound samples. It could also drive external midi gear as well so you could build a whole studio setup around it if you wanted. This blew me a way at the time. With a sampler I could capture any sound I wanted and import it into this program.

The later Octamed Soundstudio had many more features.

The Commodore Amiga and sample trackers never really caught on in the US. The big use for the Amiga at the time was for broadcast television with the Video Toaster system. The majority of people who used sample trackers in the US were independent video game developers who used it as a cheaper way to write music for their games. Still to this day I've never met anyone else in the US who ever used sample trackers to write music. Here is a quick a dirty video I did of the Amiga Octamed tracker running under an emulator on my laptop:

John and I set out to write more quirky independent rock sounding stuff with this technology instead of electronic music. We would gather up samples from various sources and albums we had at the time and drop them into the tracker to make our own songs. We would then record it onto a standard cassette based 4-track recorder so we could add "live" instruments and vocals. Sometimes if more tracks were needed we would just sample our vocals and guitars and put them directly into the tracker to free up more space on the the final 4-track recording. We ended up writing two albums worth of songs but we never did anything with them but hand them out to friends. We toyed around with the idea but never played a live show either.

Through the years I would go back back to sample trackers from time to time to lay down simple beats and bass lines here and there for projects I was doing but, eventually more modern audio programs for creating and recording came to light. Many of them were straight loop based and were much easier to use and grasp then Sample trackers. Even a tracker veteran like myself found them impossible to ignore. There are some sample trackers still being developed to this day. The most notable being Renoise. It features all the modern things you would expect like plug-in support but it still uses the same old school tracker interface for it's main writing window. If you would like to try out a more simple and free modern tracker then you can download Milky tracker here: Milky Tracker
It's available for most platforms.

Milky Tracker interface

The day before I was going to publish this I was made aware of a brand new hardware version of a sample tracker for 2020 called the Polyend Tracker Link that will be coming out. Trackers making a come back?

Stylophone: Monotron's big brother?

I've been using the Korg Monotron Delay & Duo for a while now. I've used them a little bit in my band Kattalax. I've used them a lot in my other project Gordon Gallant Most people consider these to be mostly toys but, I've found if you play them carefully and add the right effects they can sound more interesting then any $1000+ synth you could buy.  (Send in the synth nerds with pitch forks).

Monotron & Teenage Engineering Robot.

In their defense, these are very limited sound wise. It's basically one sound that you can tweak many different ways with the slide keyboard and the various knobs. I've just loved that you can get so much out of so little with these. They are a blast to improvise with but lately I've been looking around for something that may be a step up from these. Maybe something with the same tweak-ability but with perhaps a few more built in sounds to play with.

After a bit of searching it seems that it might be something that only I'm looking for. There is not much in between the $50 monotron and the $100-$150 synths that are more like full fledged bargain sythns with built in midi and step sequencers. These are nice but they are overkill for what I want to do. I do all my sequencing in my DAW and I don't really do that sort of thing in a live setup.

After a bit of searching I eventually was led to the Stylophone. Specifically the Gen X-1 The Stylophone is similar to the Korg Monotron's with the addition of added tweak-ability, built in effects, and the ability to go over several octaves. This is especially great if you want a gritty synth sound that can be tweaked on the fly go really low at the same time.

It also has two different kinds of input methods. The main keyboard is played with a built in stylus that you can tap and drag along the keys. There is also a sliding keyboard right above it where you can get the nice sliding and tapping effect. When plugged into a sound source the stylophone sounds much more rich and thick compared to the sound of the Monotrons. It sounds much closer to a real synth. It's going to sit in the mix in a different place which I'm going to have to adjust to. I've always used the Monotron as a back round filler in many songs but the Stylophone stands more in the middle or front. The bottom end is much more defined and could easily be used as a bass machine. I think with some effects I will be able to find a spot for it in places the Monotron just can't go but a full synth may not be tweak-able enough to get the sound I want.

I was going to make a video of the Stylophone but there are already many examples on line. These two video's are a good start:  Here and Here

Overall I'm glad I have all three of these mini synths. Each one fills a unique void for me and all of them are very inexpensive.

Gordon Gallant: An audio/visual collaboration.

For years now I have been thinking about starting a new side project that would be more about just the music I was writing. My current band Kattalax https://kattalax.bandcamp.com/ is a project that I do with my long time friend Wayne Leechford Wayne's web site.  where he writes most of the music and I handle most of the vocals. We have put out one album and are about to put out a second but the project moves at a very slow pace due to Wayne's work schedule. This has always been understood so over time I thought a second project would be good to fill out the rest of my time. ( and this blog :) )

I had not really had the chance to do much of my own writing of electronic music in Kattalax so I sought out to make my own sound in this project. I knew it would be mostly instrumental since I spent most of my vocal ideas with Kattalax. I always liked the way upright bass sounded with sampled beats so I decided to use that as the main instrument to start out with. (See my post about my U-Bass) U-Bass blog. I also knew that I would be using my baritone guitar as well (see that blog post) Baritone Guitar blog.

My wife Ann does a lot of paintings. I mean a lot of paintings. Below is just a picture of one wall in our house. Our whole place is covered.

She has a PhD in art history and teaches for UNC-Greensboro. She has painted her whole life. She does lectures and writes articles and books covering disabilities in the arts. She has posed for photographer Joel Peter-Witkin on two occasions. Joel Peter-Witkin on Artnet.. you can see one of the photographs Here. Ann had done several painting of me and some of my instruments so I thought it would be fun to have her paint visuals for Gordon Gallant.

Ann in her studio

when I started this project I actually made a list of possible instruments and sounds I would use for this. Upright bass and Baritone guitar were the first two. There were two plugin companies I had in mind who make unusual effects and instruments that I knew I would use:.Puremagnetik & Sample Science. I own a Korg Microkorg and a Novation Mininova but I wanted a synth that I could really improvise on and make a lot of controlled noise. I looked around a bit and discovered the Korg Monotron mini synths. These things are gritty as hell and have the perfect knobs for tweaking many parameters. Small video I did below:

A theme for each album was also something I was toying around with. After a few songs in I noticed that these tracks were starting to sound like decent driving music. They also made me think of music you would have in the back round while you work. I decided to make the theme "Musak for Mundane tasks" with the term "Musak" being a slight different spelling then the sound associated with canned back round music from the past. So far my favorite track from the first album is "Part 7" It also is the most listened to track on the Bandcamp page. Not sure what sets this one apart but listen below:

Music and art for the second album is already under way. This time the theme is: "Simple Machine sounds" with the first two songs being "The Pulley Part 1&2" Ann will be doing more collage based art this time around but it won't be constrained to just that. We will see!

Baritone Telecaster: Maximum guitar?

I first started playing guitar when I was 14 years old. I have know idea where I got money from back then but I manged to save up and by a black Kramer.  This was a relatively new guitar brand at the time (mid 1980's) that was sort of leaning toward the metal crowd. (I think?) Kramer wiki This was the guitar I played for the first 5 years or so. It wasn't a bad first guitar. I wish I still had it but from what I remember it was pretty beat up by the time it disappeared out of my life.

I've never really considered my self  a "guitarist" It was always just an instrument I played. I was never really that good at it but I always learned just enough to pull off certain styles. I've never been a guitar expert and I've never collected them. I played and owned many different ones over the years but I never owned more then one or two at a time. I never had any interest in getting an expensive one like a Paul Reed Smith but, those have their place for certain people and certain styles.

Now that I'm in my later 40's I own three guitars. Each one has a specific purpose for what sound I may need. First, I have an Epiphone acoustic guitar. This is a middle of the road type of acoustic guitar. It's not cheap but it's not a "pro" model. It's sounds good so that's what matters to me. My second guitar is a G&L Legacy classic. The same applies to this guitar as the Epiphone. I bought it over a Fender Stratocaster because I liked the sound a bit better. It's a really good "all around" electric.

Around 2011 I found myself researching baritone guitars. I was looking for an instrument that could sit in the area of the mix between regular tuned guitars and bass. Something that I could double with the bass or guitar line without having to use effects. It would also serve as something to deliver jazzy sounding chords that were lower than a regular guitar. I found that many baritones at the time seemed to be either aimed at metal or rockabilly.  I was leaning more toward rockabilly models since it was closer to what I might be doing.

It seems that fate would have it that I was looking for this at the perfect point in time. Fender had just released a baritone Telecaster in a very limited run and my local store had one. A Telecaster was the perfect medium for what I was looking for. Soon as I played it I knew it was the one. It came with 2 single coil pickups and a double coil on the bridge and a 5 way selector switch. It had an amazing lush sound with certain combinations of the pickups. I bought it on the spot. I think this may be the first guitar that I had ever bought new.

I've ended up using this guitar a lot since then on many different recordings and projects. The nice thing about baritones is you can alternate between lower tuning depending on what you are doing.
The tuning I use most of the time is the "B" tuning which is a tuning of: B,E,A,D,F#,B which is a forth lower than a regular guitar tuning. I also use the "A" tuning with is a fifth lower. I only use this tuning when I'm doing something that is less chords and more individual notes. The sound can become more muddy when strumming in the A tuning if it's not equalized correctly.

These days in my current project "Gordon Gallant" Website  I use my baritone along with my U-Bass (See my other blog post about this instrument) U-Bass blog post to create the sound on many of the tracks. Below is one of the songs where this combination can be heard:

I can't say that I would recommend a baritone to anyone who plays guitar. If you are someone who already owns and plays guitar or bass and likes to experiment then this may be the guitar for you.

The U-Bass: an accidental fascination.

I had always wanted an upright bass. It was one instrument that was always out of reach for me. It is one of the most versatile bass instruments that can be used in many forms of music. I found it sounded particularly good played along with drum machines and sampled beats.  As I reached my 30's I started making a little more money so began the search for one of these elusive instruments to call my own.

The search lasted for a few years but I eventually found one for sale in the mountains of Virginia that really caught my eye. It was the back up bass for a recently passed local jazz musician who I had not heard of. A friend of his was selling it for his surviving family members. It was a 1959 "Schuster" There is very little information about these basses online (and there still isn't) but it looked and played really nice and had a built in pickup. I ended up buying it and I still have it to this day.

Ann's painting of the Schuster

 I've used it on many recordings including a few songs I did for a soundtrack for a local independent film called Basilisk Link to Basilisk trailer

These days the pickup on the bass is starting to show it's age. It's giving a lot of static and the signal is starting to get weak on it. It needs a trip to Bob's bass shop in Greensboro: https://bassviolinshop.com/
I'm dreading how much time it may take and how much it might cost to get the pickup replaced so I've been putting it off for a long time.

Eventually the dread lead me to start seeking an alternative to messing with this classic instrument. I had always been seeking out something that had that upright bass sound but was much more portable and affordable. I looked at some fretless electric basses but they just don't have the same sound as an upright. Acoustic fretless basses were another option but they don't really have the same sound either. I eventually put it on the back burner but one day I stumbled on something that was a bit of anomaly.

I read a post by an upright bass player who played bluegrass who was getting too old to haul his upright bass around. He wrote a glowing review about using a "Ukulele Bass" or "U-Bass" as an alternative to an upright. I was skeptical at first since these are such tiny instruments but after listening to some of them in YouTube video's I was hooked.

They are tuned just like a regular bass and they use these special "rubber" like strings to get to get that upright sound. I listened and shopped around for a while and decided to get a cheaper knock off brand for $129. I choose this one: Hadean fretless Ukulele bass I was going to be running it through several plugins so I didn't see any point in buying a more expensive authentic model.

The rubber strings take some time to get used to but this thing sounds great. I haven't touched my upright since I got it. Sometimes you can get a "groan" sound when sliding on the strings if your fingers are dry. It's not a problem for me but I could see wearing gloves if I was going to gig with this thing. Over all it's a nice alternative to an upright that is light and cheap.