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?