I've been making music for a while now and no matter how often i practice, composing in a tracker seems to elude me. Usually if I want to compose, i pull up FL Studio and use the piano roll to get my notes and then transcribe it to the tracker (which takes forever but that's the sacrifice i suppose).
Does anyone else have this problem? More visual interfaces like piano rolls and the nanoloop interface tend to be a lot easier for me to get notes down in. I feel like trackers just hinder my ability to get down my melodies clearly.
Thoughts?
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Texas
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I generally hate piano rolls because I always turn my head sideways, but that's just me. I usually play something on the piano or guitar and then track it!
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/dev/sda2
I have a hard time composing at all. Interestingly enough, however, I find writing with trackers to be easier than any other method I've tried.
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Alabama
I tend to solidify tunes in my head, and I simply input them into the tracker. Sort if like how when I write for real instruments, I don't compose in my notation software. But my approach may be different from yours. I just tend to isolate then develop an idea in my head, then transcribe it then WHAM the song is done.
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IL, US
for me, it depends on the tracker. i usually find piggy to be pretty fast/easy for me, less so with other trackers. that could be because ive written maybe 95% of my tracks in the last 4 years in piggy though
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It can be difficult to start from scratch in a tracker and try to improvise your way into a tune. Like some others have responded, I usually have something prepared before I begin tracking it. I think the difficulty arises from the fact that the latency of many trackers is unacceptable for jamming parts out live.
One tracker without that limitation is Renoise. It will allow you to play in real time like any standard DAW. I have had much more success with improvising in Renoise than say, Milky Tracker or Famitracker.
Use whatever works for you though, no sense in forcing yourself to track when you could do it in FL Studio with much less effort.
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California
Like others, for me piano rolls are great for sitting down and jamming until something comes, and trackers are better when I have a concrete idea in mind beforehand. I personally like trackers more because it feels like you can fit a lot more information in less space.
Maybe you're just a visual info person? Since you mentioned those interfaces work better for you. Nothing wrong with making chiptune in FL Studio though!
Last edited by VCMG (Mar 1, 2014 2:45 am)
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TSSBAY01
do you find yourself commiting the hotkeys, effects commands, all the various screens to memory? part of learning a tracker and making it easy on yourself, i guess you could say, is rooted in this...if you dont know the effects commands, and part of that is knowing how these things function at different speeds and tempos, then suffice to say you arent going to get the most out of a tracker.
the big benefit there is you can articulate notes, phrases, passages, or conversely the samples and even manipulating them inside the tracker if youre using instruments. so id say unless you've written like 20-25 songs, and maybe even having em all suck in your opinion but really getting comfortable with everything that comes with it, shotcuts, hotkeys, whatever you have to do to keep your hand off the mouse really, then you're simply approaching it in the wrong way. of course theres no right way or wrong way, but thats what works for me and its the difference in coming up with nothing or getting an idea of a good song out there and having it be organic. concentrating on the programming to the point that theres really no gaps in thinking something up and getting it out into the tracker. hopefully that'll help, also use schismtracker! 
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Joliette, QC, Canada
At first I wasn't into trackers at all but now I can't deal without these !
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Oklahoma City, OK
It took me a good deal of time for me to get to the point where I understand trackers, or really just LSDJ. I started writing music with good old staff paper in addition to sitting at a piano and trying different things, being classically trained and all, so I understand trackers being difficult to write in. After a lot of experimentation and trial/error with the program itself, my skills have improved quite a bit. Practice makes perfect, after all 
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Boise, ID
XyNo wrote:
At first I wasn't into trackers at all but now I can't deal without these !
aye.
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Dallas, Texas
I definitely don't really like trackers at all. I'm most comfortable in a piano roll. But if I need to use a tracker in order to play on the real chips, I will first compose in a DAW to choose my note selection and phrasing, and then I transfer it to whatever medium that will allow me to run it on the real hardware. For example, I use ppMCK to make nsfs, but before I go punching notes into an MML text editor, I will have already composed it in ableton using Midines.
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UK, Leicester
My writing process tends to go guitar/bass/keyboard -> fl studio -> tracker. I tend to find it easier to get stuff down in fl because of the piano roll, having a visual representation of the keys up, especially when it started out on keyboard really helps a lot. I do sometimes skip out fl if I'm already pretty sure of what I want to be doing. I also start with the tracker, then go to x instrument if I can't write the entire thing in tracker. I think its that whole visualizing of the notes and music and junk.
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England
i find it difficult to use piano rolls. just use whatever you prefer!
the latency of goattracker is stupid but im used to it now.
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Sweden
In trackers I tend to think of the tracks as individual parts that need to fit together, so I'm more prone to counterpoint than laying out chords, while piano rolls seem to evoke a more uniform approach (chords are more clearly visualized etc.) to the individual sound channels. They're different, but I don't think that one is harder than the other when you get used to them.