Numbers, alues and Tracker basics
The history of trackers6 goes back to the late 80’s when some people developed a new way of
creating music by inserting music scores in a different way. It is mostly recognized by people as a
way to program music instead of composing, because of the input of the music data. This is actually
not really the case, once you know some of the basics it is composing all the way!
Trackers are often used to play samples (in a note scale) on different tracks as well as to control the
soundchips of old homecomputers directly. The workflow is different from other score based or
maybe piano roll based sequencing.
With most of the trackers the workflow goes from up to down, the sequencing running from the top
to the bottom. There you will find different columns and rows. Each row shows a step in the
sequence and the main columns are dedicated to the tracks and subcolumns to different commands.
Each track consists mostly the same kind of sub columns. (Modern trackers allow different kind of
tracks and sub-columns). Getting to the subcolumns there is often a subcolumn for the music note,
one for the volume and sometimes one for a special command. Sometimes they are additional
columns, depending on what tracker it is. Music notes are mostly filled in with their real note,
followed by the octave. or example:
“C-3” means Note C on octave 3.
“ -5” means Note on octave 5.
“D#2” is the note D sharp on octave 2 (half tone higher than D-2)
The exact look of the notes can differ between the trackers. With the NerdSEQ the notes are filled in
like in the example.
Other values of the subcolumns like the volume are often shown as a hexadecimal numeral value7.
I will explain only the very basics of it. Refer to the footnotes for detailed information.
We count and calculate usually in a base 10 system. We count like this
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18…….On every 10th number (10 overflow) the left
digit increases. On every 100th number the left and the second left digit increases..etc.
In a hexadecimal system the base is 16 and so with every 16th number the left digit will increase.
The numbers itself are also represented differently. A hexadecimal count goes like this:
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E, ,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,1A,1B…….
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal
Nerdseq – a tracker based Eurorack sequencer Page 8
User Manual Revision V0.9.9 for irmware V1.13 27 ebruary 2018
