Four columns that changed music

Karsten Obarski was born in 1965 and started programming in 1981, on a Commodore PET, before moving on to the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. In early 1987 he bought an Amiga 1000 with 256 KB of memory and began composing music for games, starting with Amegas, which a friend asked him for ^[3]. The tool he wrote for it was called Ultimate Soundtracker, and it was the first program in a family now known as trackers ^[1].

The idea is simple: the music is written in a grid that runs from top to bottom, with four columns, one for each of the Amiga's sound channels, which the Paula chip mixes in hardware. Each row says which note to play and with which instrument, and the instruments are digitised sound samples, up to 15 per song in the first version ^[1]. Obarski recorded his sounds from a Yamaha DX21 synthesiser ^[3]. The timeline reconstructed by Claudio Matsuoka, author of module players, puts the first version in August 1987 ^[2]; the commercial release, by the German firm EAS Computer Technik, came out at the end of that year ^[1].

A four-column grid, written in 1987 for an Amiga 1000, ended up giving music to PC games and to a worldwide dance-floor hit.

The reviews were not kind. Magazines called it "illogical", "difficult" and "temperamental", and at the time Aegis's Sonix and the Deluxe Music Construction Set looked like more serious choices ^[1]. But the program fell into the hands of the cracking and demo groups, who took it apart and improved it on their own. By the time Obarski released version 2, in November 1988, the scene's versions were already ahead ^[1].

The names of those versions tell the story. The D.O.C. Soundtracker by Michael Kleps, known as Unknown, fixed the term "module" for the file that holds everything, the score and the sounds themselves, and in December 1988 it went up to 31 instruments ^[2]. Then came NoiseTracker, by Mahoney and Kaktus, in 1989, and ProTracker, in 1991, which solved the stability problems with AmigaOS 2.0 ^[1]. In Amiga games, the tracker interface became the normal way of making sound ^[1].

The idea then jumped to the PC. Impulse Tracker, by Jeffrey Lim, came out in 1995 as freeware for DOS, and its .IT format was used by Epic Games for the music of Unreal and Unreal Tournament, stored inside UMX files ^[4]. According to the same source, musicians such as C418, the composer of the Minecraft music, and deadmau5 started out composing in Impulse Tracker ^[4].

And there was a tracker at the top of the charts. The Finn Ville Virtanen, known to the world as Darude, learned to make electronic music in FastTracker 2 while studying telecommunications at Turku Polytechnic, and that is where he started Sandstorm, released in 1999. The project then moved to Cubase, where the main riff gained the distortion that made it famous, and the track reached the top 10 in 11 countries ^[5]. It all descends from the four-column grid Obarski wrote for his Amiga 1000 ^[1].