This blog first appeared in 2008 as a guest article for a friend’s (long since removed) website. To consolidate some of my previous writing in the one place, it has been re-posted with permission, with some edits and lots of additional media added. Think of it like the HD remaster of an old videogame, except it’s a videogame no-one played because it wasn’t very good.
I was a failed teenage game developer.
The story so far In order to explore the origins and prevalence of a personally-beloved drum loop sample named BRBEATLP.958, I fingerprinted and catalogued every sample of every MOD/S3M/XM/IT file in the Mod Archive so that I could hunt it down amidst tens of thousands of different songs. Now that we’ve solved that mystery, let’s wrap this up with an excursion through that data!
Disclaimer: I’ve done the best I can to clean the data I gathered and ensure its accuracy, but I’m not going to stake any rigorous claims of perfection against it.
The story so far In order to explore the origins and prevalence of a personally-beloved drum loop sample named BRBEATLP.958, I’ve fingerprinted and catalogued every sample of every MOD/S3M/XM/IT file in the Mod Archive so that I can hunt it down amidst tens of thousands of different songs. Now it’s time to see where this takes us.
Part one Part two Part three How many songs used BRBEATLP.958? I found fifty-four different songs which all used (or at least included) BRBEATLP.
The story so far Obsessed with the muffled, 8KHz mono perfection of a drum-loop used in an old ScreamTracker III module, I aim to seek out how many other modules may have used the same sample.. but not before some hard nostalgia-blast reminiscing over the tracking subculture as a whole.
Part one Part two Forming the battle plan First thing’s first: if I was to figure out how many other songs might’ve used BRBEATLP.
The big four One of the fascinating aspects of tracker music is the way in which it has evolved over the last three decades. A whole ecosystem of music creation tools grew from the homebrew efforts of talented programmers and musicians. Composition programs were born, forked, cloned, abandoned and reborn. File formats, too, were devised and revised - and sometimes even documented. Composers migrated from tool to tool as successive programs presented them with more sophisticated abilities to realize the music in their head.
Preamble In my small amounts of spare time these past few lockdown-fueled months, I’ve been casually poking at a dumb idea. Like so many dumb ideas, it didn’t really amount to much itself, but it did spawn some other successively dumber ideas. And, well, those didn’t amount to much either. But! It sure was a fun, nostalgic and educational ride.. and I guess there’s a bit of entertaining trivia to be gained along the way.
