A couple of months ago I bought a synth, and have spent some time trying to learn to play it. I can tell you: the whole process is much more efficient if you have fun and the right motivation — pick a music genre you like, something (preferably not too difficult) you’d like to hear yourself playing, and… play it. I chose old Amiga tracker music.
Protracker modules have a special place in my memories, from the countless hours debugging a player that was the first application I wrote for Linux and Unix. Recent work with Takashi Iwai, who I met back in the mod player days, prompted me to publish this story. Distant Call by Ronny Nordeide (a.k.a. Mr. Man/Andromeda) was one of my favorite four-channel mods back then, and now I found it’s also an easy and enjoyable piece to play — don’t be fooled, the somewhat uninspired and unrehearsed video above doesn’t make justice to its beautiful, evocative atmosphere.
The patch I used is a modified “Nice Piano” from Roland’s XV Collection, with a higher cutoff frequency for brightness, increased release to work around the lack of a sustain pedal and transposed down one octave. It is built around a bright, chorused JD-style piano sound similar to the one used on the original track (which is possibly from a JV-80). Not a flawless performance — any modplayer does better — but overall I’m satisfied with the result. What should I try to play next?
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July 16th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Very good piece of music !
August 13th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
[...] some fun with “live” mod playing, Ademar asking me about mod playing and Paul Wise offering to maintain the project, I decided to do [...]
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Heh, yes, yes!
I have also spent COUNTLESS hours learning to play this song.
I cheated, however; I ran it through Protracker 3, changing all the instruments to midi, and then saving it to my keyboard’s internal flash memory :3
There, I simply learned to play along with it.
GREAT song, and I have my Amiga hooked up to our tv, JUST to be able to listen to that song!
Thanks for sharing your love for this song. *thumbs up*
September 2nd, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Hi, I first listened to the mod a few times and got the main note structure and transcribed it to a Lilypond score, then I got some “fine detail” reading the events using a tracker and compared the main line to what I transcribed. The notes aren’t a perfect match. there are some passages in the original that were a bit strange to play (you must have noticed that) so I adapted my version a bit. Distant Call was also the first module I played after porting my modplayer to Sparc :)
December 16th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
A lovely piece, probably one of Mr. Man’s best tunes. :)
Very well done. Although some small “jazzy” parts are missing.