The Metrics Editor
Ready to meet the Mod Tracker software? For the course of this article we'll be using Mad Tracker; I suggest that you download and install the program so you can follow along with the examples.
Once the installation process is over and you've closed all the various news and Helpful Tips! windows, Mad Tracker will have loaded an example song for you to view and listen to. If the song is not already playing, you can start it by clicking on the green "play" arrow located in the upper left hand portion of the program, near the file menu. Go ahead and listen for a bit, it's interesting to watch the program process the rows of data into music. Have you identified the pattern, tracks, rows, and cells yet?
You may have noticed by now that the cells in Mad Tracker have more parts to them than the ones I talked about in the last tutorial. The makers of Mad Tracker, like those who made every other tracking program before it, thought that they could make a better mod file. Unfortunatly, this means that Mad Tracker (.mt2) files don't work in a lot of situations, like in the FMOD library which BYOND uses. Fortunatly, Mad Tracker provides an alternate pattern editor which works with the Extended Module (.xm) file format, which is widely supported. To access this alternate mode, just pull down the "Module" menu, hover over "Mode", and select "FastTracker module". We'll be working in this mode throughout this series of tutorials, and you should work in this mode if you want to make mod files for BYOND.
Now we're ready to start tracking. Let's clear that example song out of our way; just go to the "File" menu, hover over "New", and select "FastTracker module" (this will automatically change the editor mode for you). Your pattern editor should now be uniformly empty, save for a bunch of zeros in the effects column. Mad Tracker automatically sets up twelve tracks for your use, but let's get rid of all of those except four to start with, to keep things simple. Find the input control labeled "Tracks"; it's in the lower right corner of the area I call the Metrics Editor, which is pictured at right. Use the arrows to lower the number of tracks to four; you'll be able to see the tracks disappear from the pattern editor below. Directly to the left of the "Tracks" input control, there is another control labeled "Lng", which is short for "length". The Extended Module (.xm) formate (FastTracker modules) allows for an arbitrary number of rows (the "length" of the pattern) instead of limiting the row length to 64 like in older mod formats. You may want to lower this to something really small, just to start with so we're not dealing with hundreds of numbers everywhere. I've got it set to nine, just so I can see all the lines in the space provided, but nine lines wouldn't make a very good song. Ready to start filling those cells with commands?
Before we can play a note in our module, we need to load an instrument. Find the Instrument Editor area, pictured at right. Click the new instrument button, which looks like a blank white piece of paper. This will create an instrument labeled "01 - New Instrument" in the black area above. This black area holds a list of all the instruments we've loaded for use in our mod. Right click the instrument and choose "Load Sample(s)". Browse to the sample you wish to use; Leads/Piano_multi/Piano_c4.wav is a good place to start. Name this instrument "Piano" using the white box at the top of the Instrument Editor.
We're finally ready to start making some sounds! Click anywhere in the pattern editor (the lower half of the program, with all those confusing numbers and spaces). Sadly, the designers of Mad Tracker didn't realize that people like to click to highlight things, so we'll have to use the arrow keys to move around our pattern. You'll notice that pressing the up or down arrow keys causes the bar in the middle of the pattern editor to scroll through the pattern, and that the left and right keys are used to select different parts of the cells can tracks. Select the very first part of the cell in track 00, row 00. Now, press the Z key. If you have your sound on (what are you doing editing music with your speakers muted?) then you probably just heard a piano playing the note C. However, you probably didn't see the note get placed into the cell. If nothing changed in the cell, then you'll need to toggle the red Record circle (near the top left of the program, in the same area as the play button). Now try entering the note C (using the Z key, this will make sense later) in the pattern editor. If the cell looks like the text below, you've succeeded.
|____|_____Track_00_____| | 00 | C-3 01 -- 000 |
Try making a simple melody using the first track and the piano. Just place a note, move down to the next row (Mad Tracker does this for you by default; I'll show you later how to modify this behavior as you go), place a different note, and repeat. It doesn't matter if it sounds good, right now we just want to get comfortable with the pattern editor. The notes are arranged on the keyboard like they are on a piano: Z is C, X is D, C is E, and S is C-Sharp, etc.. It takes some getting used to, especially if you've never played piano before. Once you're comfortable placing notes in a single track, try putting notes into the other tracks, using different instruments. Just create a new instrument, load a different sample (such as one of the bass samples), and place notes into a different track. It should be noted that different samples don't have to be played in different tracks: Row 4 of Track00 can play a C using the piano, and then row 5 can play a C using the bass.
|____|_____Track_00_____| | 04 | C-3 01 -- 000 | | 05 | C-3 02 -- 000 |