So this is a "tracker" ala old commodore 64's! Do you all know much about trackers and how to compose with them? The new iPad app seems to somehow sound exactly like that holy grail of a chip that made that video game sound (and so much deeper edits). Any one into this stuff?

You can hate chip tunes(I hate a lot) but the synth chip while retro and whatever is deep and unique sounding.

Check this out:http://sidtracker64.com its kinda big in the iOS world but trackers with sid style chip emulation are on mac and pc for sure. Now if you have a commodore 64 or atari you can get trackers on those suckers of course...

Thoughts, ideas, or warnings like "trackers are a beast to work with"

thanks

Ok, so this appears to be the ace commander synth.....

live looping and real time rec so its not a technical nightmare like trackers seemed to be.

I've been a tracker musician for over 20 years. Back when the only instrument I played was drums, I learned all about harmony and melody by spending hours upon hours every day in Schism Tracker, and later Impulse Tracker.

Trackers aren't difficult. They just look weird. Some of them have shitty, unintuitive UI's.

Since tracking is a keyboard (as in QWERTY)-based way to make music, I think using one on a touch screen could be insanity-inducing. Then again, I've used SunVox on an iPad and while it was a pain, it did work.

If you want to get started with trackers, grab MilkyTracker or Renoise and just get used to making patterns--don't worry about effect commands. After you're comfortable with the basics, experiment with the various sample playback effect commands. There are also a few tracker tutorials out there, and there was an ezine with tutorials and interviews with tracker musicians, but I can't remember the name of it.

Finally, listen to Tangerine Radio for inspiration, and go to the mod archives and listen to anything by Purple Motion, who was--and is--a musical genius.

One note: most of the famous C64 game music by guys like Rob Hubbard was written in assembly, not using trackers. So if you want to be hardcore...

I used to program the Commodore 64's sound chip using peek/poke (not technically assembler), and the Commodore 128 had a high-level Basic "PLAY" operation which made low-level programming unnecessary.

You can grab the Vice emulator and play with the programming manuals: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vice-emu/

I can still hear the "Commando" theme in my head