Vortex One....?

I've briefly mentioned where the name of the "label", Vortex Afternoon, comes from, but actually, the whole era of electronic music I made in the late 90's, I labelled as "Vortex One". Why "Vortex One"? I couldn't think of a cooler name, or something like that, I suppose. I was 17 when I started.

My brother came home from university one holiday, and on his kick-butt 486 (pre-Pentium days) machine with a Genius sound-card, was a program called "Impulse Tracker";  a mod-tracking programme in the vein of Mod Tracker and later, Windows versions like "Fast Tracker" etc. Some who are in the know might remember "Future Crew", "Enigma" (my brother's name) and a bunch of others, who featured in this underground music scene. You can read about the software, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_Tracker. Come to think of it, he first arrived with Scream Tracker, and I very well might've written and composed my first songs ever, on Scream Tracker. In time - probably a couple of months, we ended up doing our thing on Impulse Tracker, due to it's superior workflow. I still wish modern tracking programs, or midi, could be this easy.

Herewith a screen-shot of Impulse Tracker:

 

And the pre-cursor of Impulse Tracker, Scream Tracker.

 

As you can see, it was like staring at The Matrix. However, it's actually deceptively simple, intuitive and quite powerful, once you understand the basics. It's pretty much a drum machine, with more sounds. Some of the music composed then still rivals any of today's uber-electro-compositions in terms of complexity and quality.

Tracking consisted of using sound and instrument samples and programming the notes and effects into a scrolling tab. A bit like midi. The samples in our case were ripped from other peoples .IT files, the native file format in which these compositions were saved. It opened as a project, and you had access to all the bits and bobs in it.

In my case, most of the samples were 8-bit, but some guys were next level and was doing 16-bit. Because of the lack of guitar samples and way to use it, this music gravitated towards dance, and post-rock type styles, highly progressive in some cases. I did manage to record some guitar on a pc-mic and integrated bits into the music, as in "Serious News". That line I was playing around with on my 12-string President, and I ended up recording a single middle-C note from the guitar, and used the program to program the arpeggio I have been playing on the guitar. The quality, understandably, is not fantastic. Nowadays people use effects-pedals to get a guitar sounding that bad, mind you.

But enough about the intricacies of the software we used. Let's talk songs.

Next time.