History

You may be wondering, "what is a music mod"?

Well, music modules, or mods as they are more commonly referred to, are pieces of music created on a computer.

Their origins stem back to a computer called the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga had computer chips inside it that excelled any other computer at the time, although the Atari ST was a fierce rival.

One of these chips, the sound chip, was capable of playing 4 channels of sound, or samples, simultaneously, without impacting on the computer's CPU. This power meant that quality music could be produced with ease on a home computer for the first time.

In order to create music, computer programs known as Trackers were born. SoundTracker, ProTracker and MED are all examples of these. Sound samples were loaded into memory, and placed at various points within 4 columns, and when the sequence of samples was played, music was produced.

It wasn't long before amateur musicians started creating their own music, and although they may sound primitive by today's standards, the music was enjoyed by many fans of the genre.

New technology arrived, and the PC became the computer of choice within the home. But tracking didn't die. New Trackers were born, such as FastTracker and ScreamTracker, which enabled musicians to use not 4, but 16 channels or more simultaneously. There was more memory inside the new computers too, so the quality of the sound samples that the musicians used also increased. The musical creations became more elaborate and the tracking scene grew.



More advanced trackers such as
FastTracker II (pictured) became popular.


Musicians that had started out writing 4 channel mods moved on to these new trackers and became more accomplished in their output.

I admire a great many such composers, Hunz, Necros, Basehead, Mellow-D and Radix to name but few. The Hornet Archive came to the fore around this time, and it became THE place where musicians released their latest and greatest songs. Music groups also formed, such as the Kosmic Free Music Foundation (KFMF) and Five Musicians (FM) and the scene thrived. I often eagerly logged onto the Hornet Archive to see if my favourite musicians had released new songs.

Time moved on however, and the composers had less and less time to pursue their hobby of creating music. Many of them started creating music commercially for computer games companies, some become DJ's and others chose to pursue other fields of work, such as software coding.

And so the Scene as it was known slowed down, the greatest composers no longer released music mods, and mp3s became the de-facto standard of music playback. To mirror this, some mod composers started releasing mp3s instead, with sound quality and complexity far exceeding their humble roots, but their energies were mostly diverted towards other pursuits by this time.