by drannex | 2025-07-09 17:12:10+00:00
Ableton Live lives close to my heart, but I am not a fan of their inventory system for project assets (name is blanking on me, not the samples, but the... -- INSTRUMENT RACK!), it's not conducive to natural flow, hard to see, and even harder to tell minute differences in melodies and variations, and gets confusing the more layers you go. Logic Pro being the same.

FL Studios handles this far differently for better and infinitely far worse, but it gets closer to the 'tracker' feel.

Ableton (and the similar) all suffer from a minimalist point of view, while on the effect side Ableton (and Bitwig) reign supreme and can get incredibly complex in its sound design stage with stacking effects, its still minimal in the linear fashion that you just 'stack' effects on each other, the instrument rack and the melody system forces you to streamline and keep your project minimal in assets, doesn't allow for incredible variation, changes, etc, keeping your assets smaller and smaller to make it manageable.

Trackers on the other hand force you to always want to expand, to try new things, not usually on effects, but on advanced melodies, tighter control, and always adding just one more thing, to cut and mix and get funky and experimental with it. It's just the way the system is designed, its made to be controlled and expanded.

Ableton is made to be minimal, streamlined, a philosophy in their design and UX forces you to keep everything just... smaller, because if you grow to big, too experimental, make too many changes, have too many samples, too many melodies, sounds, variations, then it becomes impossible to do _anything_ without a cognitive overhead of 'fuck... where is that?' and 'damn, it sounds better, but if i do that I will have to rework _everything_ to make it fit, and i've already done that three times and I didn't even like it at the end last time' as your project assets grows in size.

Trackers are just easier to understand all the moving parts, and this is where FL Studios loop system for instruments is better and more akin to trackers, they bind multiple instruments to one 'loop' or melody.

Ableton (and the similar): Instruments are the primary grouping, melodies are bound to the instrument. You can only have 'one' instrument on any melody, if you want multiple instruments to take part in a melody, you have to manually align them in your composition, and duplicate. If you make any changes to that melody on an instrument, then you might need to rework the other 10 instruments that are supposed to work together, and then rework all those parts together in your composition.

FL Studios / Trackers: Loops are a primary grouping. Instruments are secondary. Every 'loop melody' contains a self-contained instrument rack, so you can have 15 instruments, 15 sounds _be_ your melody. Instead of melodies being from a single instrument by default, melodies (or loops) can be made up from 15 different instruments. Then, when you get to the composition, you can place that grouping together, and if you make changes, it affects all of the usage. You can then have multiple melodies (or loops) that are stacked on top of each other, adding variation.

Now where FL Studios diverges from trackers is 1) horizontal loop creation and 2) less control and organization. FL can get messy with the _amount_ of loops you have, duplication, etc. If you're not careful it can get confusing (but less so compared to Ableton with the same amount of melodies/loops/instruments).

Trackers, are, well trackers, meaning they are controlled, they are tracked. If you make a core loop (multiple instruments, sounds, in tandem as a 'set'), and then you need to create a variation, most of the popular ones, most used ones, ReNoise for example, will automatically create a sort of 5D Dimensional Chess kind of layout to help you easily see where the variations and changes occurred. It's kind of a tree-like structure of historical confirmed changes, what you deemed 'good enough' with a full collection of ancestral and descendant transformations 'that lived' long enought o be of note.

FL can get unwieldy with so many loops and variations, since they don't do that, its mostly just a list, and grouping being secondary. So, this philosophy forces you to experiment (duplicate an existing melody loop, try something new, don't like it? delete it). Whereas with trackers, you tend to experiment, have it always available, become a scratchpad of a million variations, always saved.

Sure, you could 'save' your project a thousand times with 'PROJECT 1 (2) - BETTER MELODY - SHORT BASS - TRIPPLETE VARIATION THING (SECOND VERSION) - WONKY TIMESCALE (3) (4) (481562342).ext' and import, but then you get lost, and ideas are lost forever, so its easier to try something for a split second, don't like it? delete it, losing that knowledge or attempt that could be worth something.

So, Trackers are great for experimentation, it's how you get things like Breakcore, or other highly experimental music types, sounds that have never existed before, songs that break convention, experimental sounds that are _yours_, that reward creativity and trying new things. Plus, real-estate wise, you can see (and use, and edit) a lot more of your instruments and melodies on the screen in a linear state, especially if you don't use a piano roll type system and just use the note labels (A, B, C#, D, etcetra etc &c). They're great to _synchronize_ sounds and sequences together. This is great for MIDI melodies, less so stellar for _sound samples_ that rely on waveforms for visuals since its not easy to align them (and see them) and how they fit against such a tight control system, and this is where composition layering is important.

Aside: Ableton for example is wonderful at dealing with _sound waveform_ samples/files, because you can visually see the waveform in line with the MIDI instruments, and you can use the automation guides and visually modify the sound itself with them, helping make them fit against a piano roll style system. But again, have a sample but want to experiment? need 20 different variations? have fun with that and the reworking...

But, trackers take their concept of tight spreadsheet-like control too far and extend it to the composition layering, where the composition is _sequenced_ just like a loop, so a loop in a loop, where the loops are the instruments with play/stop commands, and the actual placing and design of the different loops and melodies (and tracks) together. They require _a lot_ of work to create deep compositions, as stacking and modulating existing loops together is harder, and since most don't feature a composition timeline with 'track channels' like Ableton, or FL, or Reaper, etc, you end up looping... a lot, and where your loops could be experimental and fresh and interesting, the actual composition becomes focused on the individual loops, and not on the layering and actual composition of the song itself.

So, trackers: groups by sequenced loops (multiple, sounds, instruments in one), and then for composition they sequence the loops

Example: Loop 1 plays 5 times, Loop 2 starts playing on second repeat, Loop 1 begins fade out on the fourth repeat, Loop 3 fades in for for one play, Loop 4 takes over at full volume for 16 repeats, Loop 3 returns for 4 cycles on the 12th repeat of Loop 4, Loop 2 continues looping until END.

|>>> Of course, not written like that, they are sequenced, and it makes it hard to keep track and layer loops on each other. <<<|

But DAWs (Ableton/FL/BitWig/Reaper/Logic): group by 'lanes' in a visual format, drag and drop, layer 15 deep, or 1 deep, select all sounds playing on four lanes, and move them an inch over, automation guides as an overlay on the lanes, or under the lanes. This makes composition incredibly easy to experiment, to move things around, combine sounds.

So combining the two? Close to perfection. For melody design: extremely experimental and inspired creativity through tight control and automatic history/management on loops from tracker style loops. For composition - a relaxed sound design playground, a place to combine, shift, change, and easily modify sounds through effects and modulation. It's visual, its less rigid, it's playdoh, its malleable. It's a mosaic, or a collage of sounds. You cut the defined designs from magazines, and you warp and change them, not to change the core of the sound, but to make it into something new, to add effect variations or filters on defined sounds.

This became a bit more long winded than I had intended, but I hope it helps to understand, especially considering you mentioned coming from a sequencer background.