Tapping into Electronic Music History with OpenMPT & the Modland FTP Server

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https://github.com/OpenMPT

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Before the advent of modern digital audio workstations like Ableton and Logic, people used music trackers to create music. These were very rudimentary music sequencers, which displayed notes, effects and other parameter changes as numbers on a vertical timeline.

Music Trackers had first been released on the Amiga platform in 1987, but have since been re-made to work on modern operating systems. Since they have such a long history behind them, communities have been built around them where music tracker source files were shared freely with the world. Simply put, thanks to these communities you can basically view tracker music source files that are +10 years old. Giving you the ability to see how ancient tracker music was made.

Today, we will take a closer look at one of these communities that still exists, the Modland FTP server. We'll see how we can view these tracker source files in detail with OpenMPT.

This article is intended for people who have never heard of music trackers before. After you've read this, you should be able to open and apply basic modification of the music tracker files located on the Modland FTP server.

Why use OpenMPT?

OpenMPT is one of many music trackers available, but I've chosen this particular music tracker because it's compatible with most older tracker formats. You have a great commercial, non open-source alternative called Renoise, but that one isn't free to use.

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OpenMPT's user interface is definitely less visually appeasing than Renoise's interface, but it comes with the advantage that tracker files load a lot faster. It also provides you with a lot more options than Renoise does, but I won't go into those since this article is intended for people who don't have any experience with music trackers.

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Opening Tracker Files from Modland

Go to the Modland FTP Server and navigate to Pub >> Modules. Here you can see directories for just about any music tracker in existence, these directories will contain the music tracker source files, which are submitted by members of the Modland community.

OpenMPT has excellent compatibility with Impulse Tracker, Scream Tracker 3, Fasttracker 2 and ProTracker. We'll focus on Fasttracker 2 files here, since there's a lot of content available for this music tracker.

You can just open any folder in the Fasttracker 2 directory and download one of the .xm files. These are basically music tracks that you can open with OpenMPT and you're able to see how these tracks were made. It's possible to fully modify these songs and you're able to mute any channel you want.

So you've found a song, but you don't really like the bassline? Just mute the channel or modify the bassline so you do enjoy it. Below you'll see the file chipstuff.xm opened in OpenMPT, a file which I found in the 4-Mat folder in the Fasttracker 2 directory on the Modland FTP Server.

This particular song only has 4 channels, so it's perfect for learning how OpenMPT works. In the video you can see that channels are easily muted by right-clicking and you have access to all the samples included in the song.

The numbers you see scrolling down on your screen are basically the pattern sequences. Each row in the channel columns displays multiple values which represent: notes, instruments, volume and effects.

OpenMPT Wiki - CC-BY-SA

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Song Comments

The tracker files found on the Modland FTP server usually contain snippets of text that were added to the names of the audio samples. OpenMPT allows you to directly view those comments in a separate tab. This is really interesting since these act as a small time-capsule, where you can sometimes learn bit more about the author of the song.

Some people also added the creation date to those comments, so you'll know what year the song was released. I've personally found tracker files that were created in the very early 90's.

I've made a video where I go through some of the text that was included on songs found on the Modland FTP server. Some of these comments are pretty interesting, since they seem to include some commentary towards other members of the music tracker community.

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Accessing & Modifying Samples

On the left hand side of the OpenMPT UI, you'll see a sample folder(1) where you can access every sample that's included in the song. These samples can be viewed and edited with the built-in sample editor(2) that's included in OpenMPT.

You're able to easily export those samples to your own songs or you can replace them with other samples to improve upon the songs you find on the Modland FTP Server. When you're playing around with the sample editor, you can just use your regular keyboard to play the samples.

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Conclusion

I've written this article with the intent to spread awareness about the existence of the Modland FTP server, which hosts thousands of open-source music tracker files. This, in my opinion, is a vital part of electronic music history and should be enjoyed by as many people as possible.

While the Modland FTP Server might not be considered an open-source project, its definitely built and maintained in the same spirit as open-source software.

It's only logical that I've written this guide using OpenMPT, which is an amazing open-source music tracker that's still actively being developed. It's amazing to see this piece of software being built around music production technology that's been around since the late eighties. It is my hope that guides like this one keep it alive, by showcasing it to people who might have never heard of the term 'music tracker'.

I sincerely hope that I've succeeded in doing just that!

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Additional Video Showcase of Modland Content Played in OpenMPT

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Sources

Music showcased in video - https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Modland (CC-BY-SA)
Images are screenshots of OpenMPT - https://openmpt.org/