Anybody have any tips for composing on goattracker? I still never got a full song out of goattracker yet. Seems like everything I do is kinda lame and I feel kinda lost composing in there 
Offline
United States
Offline
England
make songs at x16 speed!
but being serious is there anything in particular you don't get? yes goattracker is confusing at first
Offline
philly
make a cheat sheet of all the parameters etc - i could NEVER write music in goat tracker if i hadn't done that first
Offline
United States
Jellica wrote:
make songs at x16 speed!
but being serious is there anything in particular you don't get? yes goattracker is confusing at first
Haha, well I don't get the speedtable.
alex_mauer wrote:
make a cheat sheet of all the parameters etc - i could NEVER write music in goat tracker if i hadn't done that first
I have a pdf guide and some basic sounds I just feel like I suck at composing on goattracker. Only 2 drum sounds is kinda sucky too
Edit: I have 2 short clips of stuff I can link but I just don't feel all that great about them...
Last edited by IceWolf (Aug 7, 2014 6:48 pm)
Offline
England
pm me yr email, i can send you a zip full of instruments (mostly kicks n snrs) and songs that you can use as templates/steal :P
i still find drums to be the most annoying thing on C64 :)
the speed table is for setting grooves and the speeds of vibratos and slides and pitch bends - just set some bends or vibratos on your track effects, bung some random notes in, to go to the speedtable and bung random numbers in and observe the effects. unlike the other tables you can only have one line in in your speed tables.
also if you have jumps/loops on your instrument tables, pitchbends wont work
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic. … 1cc7ad27cf
explain that quite well
Last edited by Jellica (Aug 7, 2014 7:14 pm)
Offline
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Just like most PSG chips the key to getting any interesting sounds is with the use of tables. Goattracker is a pretty basic wrapper for the playback routine and therefore the way that tables work might be a bit awkward for a musician to get used to.
There are four types of table in goattracker, most function sort of like an assembly routine - the speed table is a little different - but each is designed for a different purpose, to keep the interface a little cleaner. Each of the four tables will just be a long string of operators and arguments - commands and values for those commands to use - and your instruments will contain parameters to jump to these routines that you create. If you think of these tables as little programs that you write to alter values of the SID register you wouldn't be wrong.
To make it easy on yourself, you might want to keep track of the various things you've put into your tables and their beginning address. For example, if you create a wavetable for a bass drum you can make a note somewhere that it starts at 0E, and that there's a that wavetable at 1F is a pulse instrument, etc. Of course, you'll do the same for each table. Perhaps you have a fast pwm at pulsetable 03 and a slow one at 2A, etc.
If you'd like it might even help to write down the entire contents of your tables. Of course you can always save your sounds and import them into new songs but then you're likely to forget how you created a particular sound and you may fall into the trap of using them like presets. Moreover, typing them in each time will help refresh your memory about how a sound is actually made and invite you more to tweak values to suit your need.
Offline
United States
Jellica wrote:
pm me yr email, i can send you a zip full of instruments (mostly kicks n snrs) and songs that you can use as templates/steal
i still find drums to be the most annoying thing on C64
the speed table is for setting grooves and the speeds of vibratos and slides and pitch bends - just set some bends or vibratos on your track effects, bung some random notes in, to go to the speedtable and bung random numbers in and observe the effects. unlike the other tables you can only have one line in in your speed tables.
also if you have jumps/loops on your instrument tables, pitchbends wont work
http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic. … 1cc7ad27cf
explain that quite well
ok 
Oh didn't realize the speed table only took one value per table.
jefftheworld wrote:
Just like most PSG chips the key to getting any interesting sounds is with the use of tables. Goattracker is a pretty basic wrapper for the playback routine and therefore the way that tables work might be a bit awkward for a musician to get used to.
There are four types of table in goattracker, most function sort of like an assembly routine - the speed table is a little different - but each is designed for a different purpose, to keep the interface a little cleaner. Each of the four tables will just be a long string of operators and arguments - commands and values for those commands to use - and your instruments will contain parameters to jump to these routines that you create. If you think of these tables as little programs that you write to alter values of the SID register you wouldn't be wrong.
To make it easy on yourself, you might want to keep track of the various things you've put into your tables and their beginning address. For example, if you create a wavetable for a bass drum you can make a note somewhere that it starts at 0E, and that there's a that wavetable at 1F is a pulse instrument, etc. Of course, you'll do the same for each table. Perhaps you have a fast pwm at pulsetable 03 and a slow one at 2A, etc.
If you'd like it might even help to write down the entire contents of your tables. Of course you can always save your sounds and import them into new songs but then you're likely to forget how you created a particular sound and you may fall into the trap of using them like presets. Moreover, typing them in each time will help refresh your memory about how a sound is actually made and invite you more to tweak values to suit your need.
Good point on the note creation.
Offline
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
You might also want to look at a reference chart showing the various registers of the SID chip. There are 29 registers in the SID chip and while goattracker abstracts some of these - you won't have to manually input the frequencies for each channel, you can simply write musical note values - it might help you in understanding how the chip makes sounds.
Offline
Wow.. is that zip of drum sounds still floating around? would greatly appreciate it 
Offline
mk wrote:
Wow.. is that zip of drum sounds still floating around? would greatly appreciate it
i second that. i can only make crappy drums in goat tracker.
Offline
United States
Necro-update: since practicing with lsdj and maybe when I used klystrack, the goattrack manual I have makes a hell of a lot more sense. Now I can begin the experimentation phase
What do you do to insert though if your only machine is a laptop with a numpad insert key and goattracker refuses to see your insert key?
Offline
Seattle, WA
This program could only make less sense to me if it were literally in japanese.
Offline
If you've used another tracker (like Protracker / Famitracker) the composition side should be fairly easy to get into. I can understand people getting a bit confused with the table side, personally I prefer the 1.x series of GoatTracker though 2.x is a lot more flexible. With 1.x you have waveforms/pitch/arpeggio within the same table structure which makes things more readable.
Failing that I'd recommend John Player as another tracker with a familiar interface, though that only runs on the machine itself.
Ice Wolf : which version are you using? there was a keycode fix in 2.71 though it doesn't say what it fixed. For some tools I've had to change Windows to a different keyset (eg: in FastTracker2 under Dosbox I'm using a US keyboard to get the ALT Gr key to work) though I wouldn't think that'll help in this case.
Offline
United States
Yeah I think it was mostly the table end of the program that was hard to understand for a while. I'm using goattracker version 2.73.
Offline
United States
Well now I always have the numpad 0 to act as an actual insert key. https://sharpkeys.codeplex.com/
Offline
United States
I still don't get the speed table and how to use it to change the tempo.