Mods, and other like formats of the era, was just the coolest format in music ever. Not only could you play and enjoy the song (which is all you were limited to for all music to date), but you got all the individual samples that made the entirety of the song, the notation and could see/study the techniques used. Nothing else gave you that, and likely won't ever again. I never would have gotten into digital music creation and sound design without them.
...and the samples being included also made sure that mods sounded more or less the same no matter where you played them, whereas MIDI files (the alternative at the time) sounded wildly different depending on the capabilities of the sound card.
Sometimes you can, because the music was composed for a specific synthesizer. One notable example is the Roland MT-32, which was used for the soundtracks of many early PC games.
They don't include everything needed to recreate the song within the format. All of the plugins and fx dont transfer with the daw file - just the data used in them. You have to have them already installed in your system. They're also not distributed to the public, generally.
Space Debris is peak nostalgia for me. I've been transferring my little library of amiga mods from one computer to the next since 1991 and Space Debris is one of the best tracks of the format. I remember even trying to use Space Debris as the music theme for a roller coaster I was making using a toy called Spacewarp.
Back in the pre-internet day it was hard to find out more about the artists, as they were just aliases embedded in mods or at the end of demoscene releases. I always wondered who they were, and turns out they were most often teens from somewhere around Finland or Scandinavia, who went on to game companies as composers working on things like Eve Online.
Remember getting this mod from my cousin I think on a set of floppies, and a bunch of other mods like the legendary Guitar Slinger by Jogeir Liljedalh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foAUeLcssmU
Listening to these on a 386SX/25Mhz machine with Soundblaster 2.0 (or Pro, not sure) I think, with those soapbox speakers that required batteries in a dark cellar room has embedded itself in my memory permanently, just entering a new world through the music and being awestruck as a pre-teen learning computers.
The Gravis Ultrasound’s main strength was that you could load samples into the card’s memory. In theory, this meant you could play tracked music that utilized its 32 hardware audio channels instead of mixing in software on the CPU.
In practice, the loop ‘click’ (as referenced in the article) was much more prominent. One of the first GUS mod players, MikMod, had to implement its own volume ramping to work around this. Tracked files with MikMod sounded great, despite the inaccuracies in reproducing the idiosyncratic differences between all the different tracked audio formats.
When the SB AWE32 and Pentium processors showed up, the advantage diminished greatly.
I share your fond memories of the Gravis Ultrasound. It was expensive and fiddly to setup, but when it worked, it just sounded so awesome. Nothing else really came close until the AWE32 came out a few years later.
I still have some old PCs somewhere with various GUS soundcards in; including some rare ones like the GUS MAX and GUS Ace. I was surprised to see that GUS hardware in good condition is selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. I guess I should dig them out and see if they still work.
Yeah, it was not the best for games overall. But yeah, no other soundcard hardware could really replicate that sound of the circuitry built into the GUS, it had a special tone to it.
AWE32 and later cards were more perfect in technical and quality sense when playing back tracker music, but what was lost was the specific kind of tonal quality that GUS had when playing back.
I first heard mods on a PC speaker. A bit noisy, but having only ever heard mono tones before, it was like black magic hearing some software vibrate that clunky thing to such effect.
Artists like Markus really give credence to the Orson Welles quote: "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." It's incredible the creative ways people work around limitations of their medium, creating something beyond and pushing the state of the art.
I love the way Brian Eno phrased not exactly this idea, but something tangential, which follows in full:
> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
One of the best MODs ever. Right up there with Enigma, Stardust Memories, Elysium, and others.
From a technical perspective, the level of musicality that some artists could derive within the limitations is truly crazy. 100k or so, 8-bit samples, four channels, and composed (basically) from a Norton Commander-style interface. Not to mention a majority of these songs were composed when the musicians were teenagers!
Would be happy to set up a playlist for those who would like an introduction to the scene!
I stayed within the Amiga scene, which means a lot of the picks are demo soundtracks that have that Italo/synthpop kind of style. But there's lots of classics in there, from Jester/Sanity (Germany) to Firefox & Mantronix/Phenomena (Sweden) to Dr. Awesome/Crusaders (Norway) and on. Captain, is of course, Finnish.
That just links to Space Debris, not whatever playlist you created. I was going to poke through and see if I could recommend any additions, but, well... here we are.
I would recommend bitjam podcast in general, but episode 20[0] is a great introduction to some hits of the scene from over the years. Highly recommended for the nostalgia hit, and just great tunes!
Onward by Jugi is easily my all time favourite mod (extended format with huge channel count!)
An amazing MOD and a really nice write up which brings back memories. I was mucking around with MODs at the same time but never managed to make anything sound as good as what is linked here. In my defense, I didn't have access to pro-level synth, a sampler, or any kind of musical talent.
It really was a time of endless experimentation, everyone had the same basic hardware so anyone who managed to push the limits was regarded with awe.
You can hear my one surviving MOD here[0] if you want to know what the average 16yo on the street could do with a stock Amiga and mediocre grades in school cert music. It really is on the other end of the spectrum from Space Debris in terms of quality.
So weird to see this on the front page of HackerNews this week. I was browsing The Mod Archive just a few days ago and enjoyed this exact mod and noted how familiar it sounded. I added it to my 'favourite tunes' Youtube playlist too. My cynical mind thinks maybe there's some connection between my search history and stories that appear on my HN frontpage. However, it's likely just a coincidence.
I find myself really enjoying HN around this time of year when there's less traffic to the site and articles like this get a a much bigger chance to make it to the front page.
If there is a connection it is more likely that a series of marketing campaigns is promoting content like this in broader strokes that lead to your search history existing via subliminal influence.
IIRC the designers liked mods and recruited a bunch of demoscene musicians through a contest to write songs based on loose descriptions of the various species and situations.
Also makes me wonder how different the world would be if the dominant PC sound card in the 90's were something like the GUS rather than Adlib/Soundblaster.
Are those mods? Cool, didn't know that! I'll definitely have to check it out. I remember that Death Rally had very cool mod tracks too (by Purple Motion if I'm not mistaken).
It's really saying something that within the first five seconds I knew exactly which MOD this was. It's one of those tunes that you absolutely had to listen to back in the day along with Stardust Memories, Comic Bakery, and a handful of others. It definitely deserves a remake... second only to Comic Bakery (which if you haven't seen the video of the boyband remix... go watch it).
Before I even played the video, I suddenly remembered the opening chord. I think I haven't listened to that track in 25 years.
Memory is weird.
It was part of my favorites in the mid-90s, but I've lost track of mods towards the late 90s as MP3s took hold. I've long wished to have modern reworks of many of those tracks, so very happy to have this one.
Perhaps Karsten Koch will be inspired to remake Blue Valley ;)
Edit: actually I listened to Space Debris much later! It just so happened that many of my favorites overlapped with Introversion Software's taste and were included in the soundtrack for the excellent hacker-game Uplink.
Totally OT, but these old school stuff (I was part of the demoscene) just gives me a lot of nostalgia. It was so much fun, so much creativity, so much freedom.
How do you old guys cope with these memories ? Personally I miss that a lot, mostly the freedom aspect of it. How do you go with your life in a way that nostalgia is not that bad ?
I find, in my fourties’ how nostalgic I am for those moments of discoveries I made in my late teens. I found mods very early in both my college life and internet exposure (~’94). Space Debris was one that stuck with me the hardest (along with Unreal ][ by Purple Motion which is really an s3m, not a mod). I was pleasantly surprised to find Kaarlonen’s blog about his experience composing the track.
S3M is just a MODule in a different format, reflecting the hardware capabilities of the PC-bucket sound cards. It‘s a technical necessity since mechanically, the way this type of music is composed and played is tied to the hardware.
S3M could do a lot more than the old MOD format though. Mainly the support for more channels and instruments made a world of difference. It's the same basic principle, but creating a track was far less of a priority puzzle in Scream Tracker.
The first digital music files I'd had contact with were mods downloaded from a BBS. (Or did they come in those computer magazines? Can't remember now.) Space Debris was among them. Listening to it now immediately brings me flashbacks of 13-year-old me with the same hundred mods on repeat on MOD4WIN, creating levels for Duke Nukem 3D and feeling quite da h4x0r on IRC. These were good times, and mods were just the perfect soundtrack for that. Thank you Markus!
By the way, it's still possible to listen to plenty of mods online on https://modarchive.org/
I used to love listening to mods and demos on my Amiga.
One of my school projects was making an adjustable 2 channel mixer out of a couple of op-amps and a handful of resistors and a 2 pot variable resistor (plus power), even etched the PCB myself. This allowed me to mix the sound output from my A1200 to give a better stereo effect (rather than sound coming out of either the left or right), which made listening on Hi-Fi separates (my dad gave me his old broken Rotel amp which turned out to only need new internal fuse replacing to work ) much easier on the ears.
There's an iconic musical trope in 80s/90s dance music, which I always wondered if came from the limitations of the Amiga. You drop the bass and drums, and pan the chords and lead.
Since the Amiga has four channels, two hard left and two hard right, assuming you use one channel each for drums, bass, chords and lead, you "have" to drop the drum and bass for a few measures to get that spacey panning effect (of course there are ways around it, but it's a very natural thing to do, and it sounds good too).
I first heard Space Debris in an MS-DOS MOD player that didn't support the portamento command. I played the heck out of it (and a ton of other MODs) on that platform (even going so far as to make cassette tapes of MODs that I listened to on my portable cassette player). To this day, hearing it in a MOD player that properly handles portamento still sounds vaguely odd to me.
For all the Go programmers out there: the good old Amiga MOD files are the reason why some file managers identify go.mod files as "music files"...
Also: nice info page, nice YouTube videos, but how about providing the MOD files (or whatever format it actually used - sounds like more than 4 channels to me, but maybe that's just because of the remaster) for download?
I'm aware of those (especially ModArchive) and I tried finding it there, but when searching for "space debris", it only found a different song (XM format). But then I took the hint to search for "space_debris" from the screenshot on the info page, and with that I was able to find it:
This music really traveled. I'm in the US, and instantly the song started playing in my head when I saw the title. This song, and others like it, downloaded from BBSes when I was like 10-12 years old, introduced me to a much vaster world of music than I had ever experienced in my rural US environment.
As someone who got into trackers after the "golden age", I wanted to comment with my perspective (focused on DSP, workflow, and chiptune):
I noticed the video in the page is a remaster. To my ears, it sounds like it's being played with non-Amiga interpolation with less spectral imaging/replication (often mistakenly called aliasing), altered panning (the Amiga has an infamously rigid hard-panning setup), and possibly eq/reverb mastering on top of that. Compared to a video with aliasing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thnXzUFJnfQ, no clue if the Amiga low-pass filtering is accurate), I like how the remaster has less high-pitched whine, but I feel it's missing out on the spectral replicas which influence the original's sound.
> I could try “hiding” the loop point by adding fades in the beginning and end of the sample, and then overlapping the fade areas.
I've heard people saying that crossfading is effective at looping, but in my experience it's difficult to pick good crossfade regions which don't result in altered timbre or audible discontinuities. Good crossfades are still slightly visible in a spectrogram, and bad crossfades are visibly and audibly discontinuous.
I'm probably 30 years too late, but I implemented a more sophisticated (but more situational) algorithm which analyzes a sample as a spectrum, then resynthesizes it using a variation of the existing padsynth algorithm. This produces a perfectly looped sound with no discontinuities at the loop point (unlike crossfading), with built-in chorusing (not suitable for solo instruments), no attack phase (not suitable for staccatos or plucked/percussive instruments), unfortunately with a bit of metallic artifacting. A year ago I implemented a prototype at https://github.com/nyanpasu64/padsynth which could shorten choirs and create chorded samples, but I never fleshed it out into a user-friendly product.
Another idea I had was to resynthesize the "loop end" of a sample, altering the amplitudes and phases of the harmonics to line up with the neighborhood of the "loop begin" (I'm undecided on exactly how to tweak the pitch and amplitude, whether to use phasors on a plane without pitch shifting, or shift pitch, or what), or crossfade while preserving the amplitudes of each harmonic, etc. This would preserve the majority of the original sample, making it useful for soloed instruments (though more difficult to use for chording samples). Sadly I haven't actually implemented this.
> A common trick to emulate a rhythmic delay effect was to use a short staccato instrument, play a melody with it, then manually go through every empty row on the same channel, copy & paste the note from a few rows above with a reduced volume, and repeat this until all rows were used.
0CC-FamiTracker and forks partly automate this process using an echo buffer command, which acts like a note with the same pitch as 1-4 notes above.
I believe trackers need more innovation, better commands (duration-target pitch/volume slides, graphical editing), better ways of managing state (eg. effects ringing on for longer than you want, or the wrong effects being active when a song loops), and better support for non-grid-aligned notes. I don't have all the answers yet, sadly. I've been working on https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp but it's stuck in development hell.
> A simple and restricted composing environment like a four channel tracker with a limited amount of samples guarantees you can’t spend half a day tuning a kick drum sound.
I think that partly separates sample-based trackers and General MIDI formats (primarily based around prerecorded sounds, MIDI has practically no customization at all) from chiptune trackers (full-on synthesis, and FM chips can have nearly as many parameters as a modern VST, but less flexibility and harder to achieve a sound you want).
If this is 30 years too late then so am I – Belated thanks. Your work is certainly appreciated.
Indeed I came to check if someone had mentioned this already – and if not, post exactly that video of the properly crunchy Amiga-sounding recording. I love the kind of “etched” sound of that time. Spectral treasure.
Earlier in the 21st century us kids were using Propellerheads’ Reason a bit. Then I felt increasingly dissatisfied with the sound. There seemed to be this particular sou d to Reason’s virtual instruments. Plasticky? Since then I’ve come across mentions of aliasing; I wonder if that’s… part of the reason? (heeeh :sweat_smile:)
- In "Compared to a video with aliasing", I meant "compared to a video with spectral replication".
- I'm surprised that this song's "synth female choir" sounds practically identical to the choir samples I've heard in SNES games. Though it makes sense, considering SNES music comes from the same era and had similar size restrictions, requiring cutting down samples and reusing them across wide pitch ranges.
And a question to the composer: When I downloaded the .mod, looped the sample 3 times in Audacity (joining the seams), and switched the track to spectrogram mode, I saw spectral discontinuities (more energy than expected in between harmonics, at multiple frequencies, both low and high) at ~19084 samples (the loop point) and ~14501 samples. Is this second discontinuity the point you began the crossfade?
(When I opened the .mod in OpenMPT, it said the loop point was at sample 2. I tried looping the sample from Sample 2 in Audacity, but this resulted in a far more prominent spectral discontinuity and an audible click upon looping. Oddly OpenMPT wouldn't let me set the loop start to any position below 58.)
Oh man, that song brings back memories (and my own attempts to create music with the trackers in the 90's). Thanks for sharing your thought process and context around how you created that song!
>Around the time when I made the original Space Debris, I listened to a lot of italo disco - artists like Koto and Laserdance were some of my favourites.
I first listened to Koto not long ago, and my first reaction was that it sounded like demoscene music. Interesting to hear that there was a direct influence. I think people who like demoscene music will probably also like Italo Disco, and more specifically the mostly instrumental "Spacesynth" subgenre.
Man does that brings back memories! Back in the 90s, french magazine PC Team offered a CDROM with game demos and tons of random goodies including mods. I listen to them with Cubic Player on MS-DOS which had some cool visual effects. I still have my favourite mods on my HDD, including SPACEDEB.MOD!
Does "remastered" mean the channels were rebalanced? I remember poking around the demoscene archives a few years back, and a lot of the golden oldies have that distinct instrument-per-channel thing going on. Especially pronounced with headphones.
Everything about the remastered recording sounds “better.” The samples are cleaned up significantly…probably 16 bit or better. It was probably re-programmed for a newer tracker or maybe some other newish audio software though the arrangement seems to be unchanged.
Space Debris is cool. I still have it in my car's playlist (converted to MP3, though, as my car's entertainment system sadly doesn't know how to handle tracked music formats... which is a real shame IMHO ;-)
I made mods in the 90s too, some of them were pretty ok even. Sadly, I didn't manage to upload any of them before succumbing to random happenstances of data loss :/
