This is what made me worship MOD files. I listened to PC speaker, then Ad Lib. But when someone first hit "play" on this song my entire musical world exploded. Studio quality (well, pretty close) tracks were possible with 4 channels and an Amiga 500. Complete game changer, this one.
Commodore's SID chip was revolutionary. Just amazing. I feel privileged to have discovered it as it came to be. This song "cheats" in that the synth chords have been sampled in both major and minor chords before being coded into the Mod. As well as other parts of the melody. look at the third channel. Still, a great track!
Somehow the limited tracks, the limited bits, the way samples had to be positioned and limited in number and position to not overplay another sample created an amazing art-form that is really its on genre. It sounded amazing, clean, and somehow inspiring. I miss it
OMG, one of my favorite MODs ever... loved it so much when I was 13 that I actually listed it in my middle school yearbook as my favorite song! What a dork I was (and still am).
My WWIV BBS PC had a TSR running in the background, and my Gravis Ultrasound would wake me up each day with a random file - this was one of them! NowWhat3 is also a good one to check out.
@@jasonhelton980 Technically, I still have the modem and an old drive laying around somewhere with it still installed / ready to rumble! Wanna play some Food Fight or Trade Wars 2000?
Wow how this brings back the memories from being a computer junkie in my teens and now after 30 years in computer now I still think about the good old days of logging in at 1200 modem to download still like this..
I do not know, how it worked, but my father used to have a radio receiver somehow hooked up via LPT port to our 286 PC to output MODs in this quality. Space Debris was one of them and the music gives me shivers even today.
@@HNN_CBEPXCNCTEM_CCCP_NM._COBbl Три раза уже писал коммент и ютуб их трет. Я уже выложил свою музыку, найти её можно по моему нику в вк или саундклоуб.
Seriously huge thanks for pointing that out... not only is it amazing but Captain himself has commented on the video recently... I never ever thought I would actually have a chance to communicate directly with him. This has all seriously just made my day.
Captain's Beyond Music is still the single best piece of tracked music, however this is coming in a close second. I never owned an Amiga, but I loved listening to mods on my PC back in the day.
Oh Shit!!! Oh Damn!!! THIS IS IT! This was the one a friend played for me WAY BACK in like late 80s... on an ATARI! (130XE) It got me writing and I have loved this soooooo much for so long. Yeah, Ookay... call me Geekasaurus Rex... I LOVE this kinda stuff but this was THE ONE that just blew me away in a time of Midis that never sounded right or the same on different computers or different sound cards. MODs ALWAYS sounded (pretty much) the same and I was hooked! When I lost the ability to run FastTracker on newer NON-DOS Windows I fell out of making MOD music. I have rediscovered it I love it. And this will always be the best MOD ever in my life. Others have certainly blown my mind. But this has a special place always!
@@Sh-hg8kf Some atari 16 bit machines like the ST/e and TT could play MOD files just like an Amiga, because they could do PCM sampling too. PC expansion cards like some soundblasters and the Gravis UltraSound could also play MOD files.
@@LumaControl Ah i see! Sounds interesting ! But didnt the ST have a beepy sound chip somewhat like the AY-3-8910 or whatever its called? So how does it sample stuff?
@@Sh-hg8kf there's the ST, and the ST/e. I am a proud owner of an ST myself and can confirm it does nothing but beeps and boops... The ST/e and TT have another soundchip on board which does support sampling.
This made me buy again, after 23 years, the Gravis Ultrasound classic, just to be able to hear the exact sound and to play with gusmod.exe as I did when I was a kid. Some memories are just... priceless.
Well, in my case it brings me back to late 80s - early 90s lol :) for some reason I remembered my first PC, 286 CPU, DOS and games like Tetris, Digger, CD-Man, Alley Cat, Ranger, LHX and so on... no even sound cards at that time :)
I showed this to someone who'd never heard of trackers before, he asked what all the Matrix stuff scrolling up was, he said "It looks kinda like when a player piano scrolls up the music sheet"
My first exposure to this MOD (and, in fact, this artist) was the remix on the Rochard OST. Dude's got serious skills. Hard to believe he did all that with four channels. Really clever rapid voice switching makes it sound like so much more.
I have! Someone linked to it below... and thanks to the pinball effect of the internet I now have all of the Poets of the Fall albums. That guy seriously helped inspire me to start tracking myself, and now I've been doing it for 15 years and still keep the tradition going strong today.
I do not know exactly how he made it, but my father used to have a radio tuner somehow hooked up via LPT port on our 286 PC back then, being able to reproduce this track beautifully long before the sound cards were even a thing. These old hacking days of computing...
I think he's saying the version he grew up sounded incomplete while this one doesn't. I'm not an expert on early PC mod players but if the file size is 335K and the entire thing needed to be loaded into sound card memory at once then that would have overwhelmed the GUS' 256K sample bank.
In 95 I had a sound blaster AWE 32 which could resynthesize MIDI tunes in hardware. And even change sample banks. The quality was higher than this soft. These kind of trackers are made to work in software, in real time, on 80's hardware. This was already particularly retro in the 90's.
This or "Beyond Music" also by Captain / Image? Mmmm... Tough choice. :-) I love all of them! :) Skaven and Future Crew, all the other finnish geniuses, Necros, FM, oh God... They are all my heroes.
Have you heard the remade version of it used in the soundtrack to the game "Rochard"? If not, you should look it up. It's not just some fan remake... no, Captain was actually the composer for that game's soundtrack, and decided to remake his own song to use in it. And WOW, what an outstanding remake it is!
Tracker music's biggest flaw was always the crazy pans. Melody and bass panned hard left. Drums hard right and shit like that. Was never done after like the 60s anywhere else because it doesn't make any sense.
thats the reason I keep my 486 in order by all means with several soundcards -- the mod players. Especially the executable musicdiscs (Nothingon.exe, epidemic, dee2 and so on) and demoscene run best under the native DOS. Gravis Ultrasound MAX, Ace, Soundblaster AWE64, Roland RAP-10, ESS Audiodrive, Covox... 32MB RAM, 100Mhz CPU and 40GB HDD, 100Mbit ethernet and DOS7.2 Just now that machine configuration for music which I have for modules seems like what I dreamed about back on 1995...
