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4. Techniques
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   One of the key points about producing a quality tune that I've found is
the amount of preparation you put in, before you even begin to start. This is
especially important if you intend to produce in a style unfamiliar to you.
Take the time to get good samples, and see how they could be made to fit
together. Listen to the style, you don't have to buy tons of new music, just
see what friends have lying around, and the radio can be a good source. Play
around with various ideas in your tracker, you needn't save them. Get hold of
a few MODs and see how they work.
   We're not talking about a few hours here, not even a few days. It may take
a few weeks or even months before everything's ready. But when it is you
should find that you're able to produce, fairly quickly, a quality piece.

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   - Spicing up your percussion
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   (Taken from CU Amiga May 1994 - Slightly edited to be more generic)

   Fat Beats
  ~~~~~~~~~~~
   There are a number of things you can do to add a Bit of life to your
percussion. One of the best ways to beef up a drum sample is to mix it with
another sample. You've probably already experimented with this, mixing kick,
snare and hi-hat samples, in order to fit your entire rhythm into one track.
However, to get a really kickin' sound, try mixing your percussion samples
with samples of tuned instruments. For instance, mixing a really deep
analogue-type bass sound with a kick drum produces a really heavy, squelchy,
dance floor sound. Similarly, try mixing snare and guitar sounds, for an
unusual and funky effect try adding Laser-type pulse sounds to 808 style
snares for an authentic Sheffield clunk and bleep sound.

   Echomania
  ~~~~~~~~~~~
   Another way to add a Bit of life to a rhythm track made up of individual
samples, is to echo the entire track. This is a quick way of funking up your
percussion, and you'll find you can create a great track with only kick,
snare, and open hi-hat when you use echo in this way.

   Bring Out Your Dead
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   You've probably got quite a collection of hackneyed breakbeats, which are
instantly recognisable, and therefore pretty much unusable. One way round
this is to sample some more, but it theory at least, you always have to be
careful of the copyright laws when sampling other peoples material
   You could always buy a sample-compilation CD, but most of these are a tad
expensive for the casual user. On the other hand, it's quite possible to
breathe new life into a dead breakbeat.
   One method, is to apply some sort of sound effect to the sample,
preferably in stereo. Most sampling software nowadays has a range of effects
built in with which you can process you sample, but most of these produce
fairly unsubtle results when applied to percussion samples.
   So what's the alternative, if you can spare the memory and two tracks (a
stereo pair is what we're looking for here), is to use the tracker itself
to produce a real-time phasing effect.
   To do this, load the same breakbeat sample into two different sample
locations. For best results, pick a breakbeat that stretches over two bars
(32 lines of a standard 64 line pattern). Play the first instance of the
sample (at a reasonable rate!) on line 0 and line 32 of a 64 line pattern, on
one track. Do the same thing on track 2, but this time with the second
version of the sample. Now for the clever Bit.
   Fine tune the second version of the sample up or down one or two points.
Now when you play the pattern, you'll get a phasing effect, with the rhythms
moving in and out of the stereo field - great for trance techno type
extravaganzas. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, try playing one of
the samples an octave down from the other.
   If you can't spare the memory or two tracks for the rhythm, you can get a
similar effect in mono as follows. Load up the first and second breakbeat as
before, and resample or pitch shift the second by a few points, then mix them
together. The effect is a lot less subtle than the stereo version, but can be
just as effective in the right circumstances.

   On A Ragga Tip
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   Another way to squeeze the last Bit of life out of a dying rhythm is to
change the playing length and sample trigger positions from the normal start
of the bar. This is a technique much favoured by breakbeat and jungle techno
groups like SL2 and The Prodigy, and works best at fairly fast BPMs. Play
your breakbeat on lines 0 and 32, and adjust the tempo so that the rhythms
trigger in time, with no glitches. Now trigger the sample on the following
lines: 0,6,16,26,32,42,48 and 54. When you play this back, you'll have a
rhythm track that sort of rolls around the beat - perfect for just adding a
bassline and calling it your finished song!
   For a brutal stereo version of this, try playing the same sample on a
different track (on the opposite stereo channel) on the following lines: 0,
10,16,22,32,38,48 and 58. You might even go the whole hog and combine this
with the stereo phasing effect.

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   - The Zen of Tracking Advanced Tips and Tricks
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   (Slightly edited for formatting)

   o Indian food for thought

   (Greets to Graham the Happy Scum for this idea in TW#86 "Wrecking Samples
with Impulse Tracker"... despite a few technical glitches.)

   You can get a very Indian-sounding "24-tone" scale in Impulse Tracker by
using this technique: (FT2 users will have to accomplish the same thing via
the "tone" setting)

   Load your sample twice. Look at the second one, and write down the
samplerate. Multiply that number by 1.0304 (NOT 1.0293, as in TW86) and put
the result in the "playback rate" field of the first sample. Now you have a
consonant tone in the second sample and a semitone above that in the first.
By playing the second at C-5 then the first at C-5 then the second at C#5
then the first at C#5... (and so on), you get a semi-tone chromatic, which is
pretty weird. : ) If you're really bold, you might get some cool Indian
sounding stuff going out of it. Good luck tracking it, though. It's a whole
new set of musical theory. : P

   o The Amigascene and you

   If you either release or listen to .MODs (not .XMs, .ITs or .S3Ms, etc),
then you're probably aware of the Amiga scene, which still uses the .MOD
format today. If so, keep this in mind: the Amiga plays music 1bpm faster
than PCs. For example, at speed '6' in a .MOD, a PC is playing it at 120 bpm
(I would assume, anyway), and an Amiga is playing it at 121 bpm.

   What this means to you, the listener, is that certain drum loops and riff
samples will sound off-kilter, rhythmically. So be a little more forgiving in
such circumstances. If you want to hear it as it was originally written on
the Amiga, put it in FastTracker (or whatever your favorite tracker is), save
it as an .XM (likewise with the favorites), and change all the tempos in the
song to their appropriate Fine-tempos (bpm), plus one.
   (Remember to do the reverse if you're producing a MOD on the PC that'll
probably get played on an Amiga. When the tune is finished convert all the
primary tempos to 1 less - Cools)

   There are also some other effects that don't convert well from Amiga to
PC, which are apparent in chip tunes. For the best reproduction (though still
not perfect), look for a player called "Midas Player", since it handles
things a little better than most with .MODs.

   Radix has a few things to add:

   well.. In protracker the EFx command is used a lot... it actually changes
the waveform in the sample (only in the beginning), so in chiptunes,
chipsounds can get somekind of wavesequence sound, "weeeeeeeeoooong" ... that
does not work on any prog on PC I have seen anyway... and arpeggio on PC is
not that fun either :/ don't know really, but chip sounds sound better on
Amiga...
    another thing is that PC with a GUS can sound really awful while playing
a high and a low tone of the same sample at once... this is really lame..
like a C-3 and a C-7 (same sample) sound really untuned

   o Very Cool Reverb

   Sure, you have an echoed lead. But do you have a reverberated lead? This
sounds very cool indeed:

   Load the lead in your favorite sample editor (mine's CoolEdit), reverb it
however you like (I use a straight reverb, on the "last row seats" setting),
so that it's REAL deep.

   Now load the tracker. Create the echo track as usual (copy the lead,
offset it by a few rows, and change the volume to less than 50% of the lead)
.. Much nicer, eh?

   If you want a reverb that's not-as-deep to use somewhere else, you can
widen it for the echo track, creating this weird echoed attack kind of thing,
like this(FT2 Format, 1 is the lead, 2 is the reverb):

          01  C-5 01 40 000    C-5 02 08 840
          02  --- -- -- 000    C-5 02 10 8A0
          03  --- -- -- 000    C-5 02 20 880
          04  --- -- -- 000    --- -- -- 000
          05  F-5 01 34 000    F-5 02 08 8C0
          06  --- -- -- 000    F-5 02 10 860
          07  --- -- -- 000    F-5 02 20 880
          08  D#5 01 3C 000    D#5 02 08 840
          09  --- -- -- 000    D#5 02 10 8A0
          0A  D-5 01 30 000    D-5 02 08 8C0
          ..  ... .. .. ...    ... .. .. ...

   Of course, you don't need to keep retriggering the note. I just thought it
sounded cool with bouncing pan. In any case, I think a reverb-ed lead sounds
even better than an echoed version... Try it and see for yourself.

   o 'Phased' Leads

   A very cool effect for writing leads, which is commonly used by advanced
trackers is a phased synth string. (In fact, it's almost hard to call this an
'advanced' trick.) You can find samples that work for this is a lot of
different places (any good 'sweep' string sample will do), but the way that
they're used is the important aspect...

   It's quite simple, really. You just create an instrument with a volume
envelope typical of a lead... Something with a sharp attack, a moderate
length sustain, and an expontentially quieter decay (my ANSI art is
miserable, but I'll try):

           .  <-- Full volume here
           |\______
          /        \
          |<-- 60%  \_
              volume  \__
               here      \____
                              \________
                                       \ <-- 10% volume here (or less), and a
                                              moderate (300ish) fadeout.

   The total length of the envelope should be about twice as long as the
average length of the note (ie: an average length of a quarter-note should
have an envelope that lasts about as long as a half-note). Now, as you write
your lead, keep the notes in the same channel, and slide to them at a very
fast rate ('F', generally), like this:

          01  C-5 01 40 000   <-- This starts off the sweep
          02  --- -- -- 000
          03  --- -- -- 000
          04  --- -- -- 000
          05  F-5 01 34 3F0   <-- You slide to the note here
          06  --- -- -- 000
          07  --- -- -- 000
          08  D#5 01 3C 3F0   <-- And here...  See the effect?
          09  --- -- -- 000
          0A  D-5 01 30 3F0   <-- Etc.  Retrigger the note
          ..  ... .. .. ...       to 'start over' the phase.

   It's important, however, that you echo this lead in another channel, since
it will sound fairly flat otherwise.
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