Okay, here goes.
.MOD was a format that began on Commodore computers. I believe the Amiga was the first. Basically, a .MOD file includes samples, and instructions for how to manipulate those samples. The format became popular because it allowed people to create extremely high quality music, while keeping file sizes very small (none of my examples are more than a megabyte uncompressed, and all sound very professional).
A link: MOD Love, at Salon.com
MIDI has since moved in this direction, but remember that the MOD format was accomplishing these things upwards of fifteen years ago. Plus, the MOD format is hardware-independent, unlike MIDI. Amiga? Sound Blaster? PC SPEAKER? No problem, it'll play. And it'll sound the same on your machine as it does on mine. A sound card was even created for "trackers", as .MOD composers are called - the Gravis Ultrasound. The Gravis could play each .MOD instrument track (at the time, I believe the max was 8 or 12) through a seperate digital sound channel, making the music crystal-clear and not eating a lot of CPU cyles. The Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro, on the other hand, had to play everything through one or two channels. You could get the same sound quality with the Sound Blaster Pro, but CPU speed suffered.
And that was important, because .MODs were often used as music for demos. What's a demo? Well, my friend Trixter explains it better than I can
here.
Keep in mind, we're talking about the time before we had hardware to accomplish amazing audio and visual feats for us. The purpose of a demo, basically, was to show off the amazing capabilities of the PC by doing things that most programmers thought were "impossible" - for instance, stretching the abilities of VGA. VGA could display a maximum of 16 simultaneous colors in 640x480, or 256 colors in 320x240. Or so everybody thought, until demo coders proved them wrong.
If you'd like an example, I've uploaded Second Reality, possibly the most famous classic demo ever. Download it
here (2.04MB).
Some scenes from Second Reality still look absolutely incredible today. And remember, it was designed to run well on a
386. And on a 486, you'd get a perfect 60 frames per second. To run the demo you'll have to have Windows '95 or '98, because it only runs in DOS. Sorry. You'll need to add the following lines to your CONFIG.SYS, then boot into DOS mode:
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
You need to tell DOS to use your modern XMS memory to emulate EMS memory. The file is a self-extractring ZIP, and you'll need to put it somewhere in it's own directory, for instance C:\REAL.
You may also need to initialize your soundcard from DOS. I do this by running the Creative Plug and Play Manager,
CTCM.EXE. To hear music, your soundcard needs to be fully Sound Blaster or Gravis Ultrasound compatible. I don't know if the Sound Blaster Live or Audigy cards fall into this category - I have an AVE64Gold.
You're always flipping a coin when it comes to running DOS software on a modern PC. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Second Reality runs perfectly on my computer.
If you can't get it to run, but you're still curious, the friend that I mentioned earlier has taken it upon himself to preserve the history of these amazing programs on DVD. You can check that out
here.
Now, some examples of .MODs. All of these will play in Winamp. They're lots of fun to play in trackers too, such as Impluse Tracker of Fast Tracker, because you can literally "watch" the song - you can see exactly how it was done. The Salon.com article called it "open-source music", and that's a good way of stating it.
The files range from about 300k-600k, and they're compressed as .ZIPs.
If any of you are interested in the history of computer, or synthesized, music at all, I strongly encourage you to listen to these songs. The .MOD format was a
profound influence on me as a musician - not only because they sounded incredible and were easy to take around, but because they combine melody and structure in a way that most current techno music still does not approach. As Trixter says, we call it "European". Europeans call it "cool".
Not that it's all techno. .MODs can be any genre at all.
I'll start with possibly the most famous .MOD, "Unreal 2". The original "Unreal 2" was used as the background music for Second Reality, and here it's presented remixed, and in full CD-quality. The composer is also relatively famous - he went on to do the soundtrack for Unreal Tournament. Many of these people went on to score "real" jobs with their music - another excellent reason for us home musicians to take notice. This piece is probably my favorite instrumental dance track, ever.
DOWNLOAD
"Close To God" is an excellent ambient ballad.
DOWNLOAD
"Catch That Goblin" is totally unique - it's a frantic chase song that sounds straight out of a cartoon, or maybe a Tim Burton movie.
DOWNLOAD
"Daria" is a combination of hard rock and balladry - both the chorused and distorted guitars are very well done.
DOWNLOAD
"Feats Of Valor" is another catchy dance track, which shows off the great melodies and verse/chorus structure that are a hallmark of the best .MODs.
DOWNLOAD
"Guitar Slinger" had a lot of notoriety, because its acoustic guitars sound just inches away from being totally real. And with only four channels!
DOWNLOAD
"Michelle" is another example of what can be done when you think outside of the techno box. It's a beautiful ballad for jazz guitar and saxaphone - and again, sounds
so close to being totally real. With only four channels, and only 892KB uncompressed. The jazz guitar is flawlessly done, and you can actually hear the sax's keys being pressed down. The samples are perfect.
DOWNLOAD
Also very unique is "Moors Of Ireland", as it manages to combine traditional Irish music with New Age and a bit of electronica. A lovely piece of music.
DOWNLOAD
And last, another epic dance-pop tune called "Jaunt". This one's full of excitement and forward motion.
DOWNLOAD
Because of its flexability and cross-platform compatibility, .MOD, not MIDI, was thought of as the future of electronic music. One reason why it didn't turn out that way, I suppose, is that .MOD is a programming language of sorts. As I mentioned earlier, I never learned how to do it. And, you know, there's nothing more user-friendly than a keyboard to play on.
Trackers are still very active though, and there are lots of .MOD archives on the Internet such as, shockingly enough,
The MOD Archive.
Let me know if I messed up typing any of these links, and I'll fix them. and
please, do listen to these songs, anybody who sees this post. I think it's extremely important for us, as computer musicians (Which almost all of us here are, if we use any kind of software to produce any part of our music) to remember where we came from.
I'll keep the files in my webspace until this thread drops off the BBS and into the archive.
