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[declassified]

Hi everyone!

I'm new to tracking, but I have been making music with Ableton Live, Tracktion and energyXT since 2004. Since the endless possibilities and thousands of VST plugins out there annoy me, I now want to do it "the hard way" and try out something like SchismTracker, ChibiTracker or Milkytracker, but I don't know if trackers are suitable for the music I make. For example, I sometimes make very long pads without rhythm or quantization, and they slowly transform. From what I (as a newbie) think, this would be hard with tracker's pattern/step system, right?

And more importantly, I heard that you can use everything in a tracker (i think it was impulse tracker) without using a mouse. Is that right?

Thank you!

[fingersoup]

Yes, the pads can be difficult.  Some trackers have long sample support, but samples that cross multiple patterns usually mean that for testing, you have to play your song from the point at which your sample was triggered, not from the point you were actually working on.

Also, if you're good with loop points, offsets, etc... and you have several transitional pad samples, you can do it piece by piece, or by using volume fades.... This is tricky and messy, thus you have to be experienced to pull it off convincingly. 

Many newer trackers have VST support, so if you make long pads with VST, you may be able to get the best of both worlds - the quantized and controllable tracker interface along with dynamic VST instruments and effects.

As for keyboards - This used to be true, however in most modern GUI environments you will need to use a mouse once in a while.  Impulse tracker's Preferred method of input was keyboard - thus everything was capable of being controlled from keyboard. Mouse support was added in later versions for many tasks though... 

[declassified]

Thank you for your response!! 

I think I will try a tracker..I'll try to split the pad in pieces etc. as you said.

Does ImpulseTracker (would be Schism Tracker for me) have a decent sample editor? (maybe I should just try myself)

How about other trackers like MilkyTracker? I read somewhere that FT2 was criticised for its mouse-based interface. I want to work with the keyboard 90% of the time (that's one reason for switching from normal sequencers), could I do that in MilkyTracker? In all the videos I saw, the user used the mouse an awful lot...

[Din]

I don't know about Schism, but the sample editor in Impulse Tracker is one of my major complaints with it.  It's not actually very good, since all you've got is a very small, very pixelated visual marked by your loop points.  The only way to crop or trim is to turn the looping on, set your loop points to contain everything you want to keep, and use the Ctrl+B and Ctrl+L commands to cut the sample before the loop and after, respectively...icky.

Most of the modern trackers I've looked at feature much better sample editing interfaces (at the very least they give you a much larger visual of your waveform).  Strong examples would be MadTracker, ModPlug (I hate what they did to the keyboard layout in Open ModPlug), and Renoise.

My personal favorite 'tracker' is Buzz, followed very closely by Impulse Tracker 2.14 (all time best tracker ever ), but Buzz is a beast to learn and there's not much in the way of sample editing and a 50/50 keyboard and mouse interface.  Most newer trackers will unfortunately make greater use of the mouse than the pre-Win32 ones, but I'm pretty sure all of them at the very least have keyboard shortcuts for the most important commands.  Both MadTracker and Renoise have the keyboard shortcuts listed in their respective help files.  Just use a cheat-sheet

Old dogs like me just have more trouble learning the new tricks, cheat-sheet or no